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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 8
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The fall from the natural paradise of childhood is inevitable, a second Fall that all must experience. It is dramatised in the two versions of 'The Town Under the Sea': when the poet was eight (in the prose version) or 'At puberty / Or the first deadly sin' (in the later poem), 'the sea rose up in one / Pounding night and swallowed the land'. The original 'primitive paradise', although it 'stands high and dry in the eyes of a hundred children, peopled, ringing and abundant, like Noah's faithful ark', is 'hidden from us as we go about our deaths'. When the adult returns to it, 'the township I grew up in / has a closed, glazed face . . . either I or it / have retreated to the back of a paperweight!' Truly, 'He who comes back with different eyes must see a different land'. When he looks at the crab-apple tree in the neighbour's garden from which he stole as a child, it appears as 'A second-rate Eden / nobody expected to find themselves outside!' The poet can regain his natural paradise only in memory, and then it is the memory of Innocence coloured by Experience, so that he usually sees prefigured in it the Fall. |
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