Voyage and Discovery

Among New Zealand poets A.R.D. Fairburn is notable for the freshness of his sentiment and the vigour of his thought. His poem Dominion, here republished as the first of a trilogy, must be regarded primarily as a propagandist work, though its lyrical sections are perhaps the most effective. It gathers in a coherent pattern as no other New Zealand work has done the Leftist revolutionary attitudes of the Thirties; but the unifying factor is Mr Fairburn’s individual rebellion against the canny mores of Little Bethel. In a sense the political bias of Dominion is closer to anarchism than to Communism.

The two poems previously unpublished, The Voyage and Letter to a Friend in the Wilderness, both lately broadcast, have greater aesthetic unity with somewhat less variety. Mr Fairburn, in his own words, has concerned himself in The Voyage with what Keats defined as ‘negative capability’:

. . . We have the changing heaven
for rooftree, and for company great whales,
and birds that nest upon uncharted rocks:
the dolphins gliding and breaking at our bows
will lead us on, and the wind filling our sails
gather us into glory.

In the Letter to a Friend in the Wilderness he has discussed the tug-of-war between personal and social responsibility and the wish to escape to some earthly paradise, however imperfect. As always, personal illumination is the touchstone of ideas:

We know in the instant of joy that our warrant is sure,
our faith not vain, our being not belied by death.

Mr Fairburn has made in these poems a courageous statement of humanist values allied with personal disillusionment. And faced with the formal problem of how to contain meaningful comments on economic and social matters within a unified art form, he has cut the Gordian knot and sacrificed aesthetic unity to variety and vigour. One can only be glad that he has done so; for these three poems, though less finished than his lyrical work, have greater scope and are an invaluable contribution to the literature of our time and place.

1953 (62)