An Elder Sister's Songs (College Rhymes: Canterbury College, 1873-1923).

We cultivators of The Old Clay Patch who have already garnered two harvests of rhyme, now turn with pleasure to appraise the flowers and fruits that grow by Avon's side.

It is now fifty years since Canterbury College was founded, and to commemorate her jubilee, an anthology has been published of the Verses written by her men and women students from 1873 to the present day. It will be a treasured volume—a book to smile and to sigh over, to dream over, and to love. It is a friendly book. From the frontispiece—a delicate etching of Canterbury College—to the last page t here breathes forth the spirit of Loyal comradeship; there lurks" the laughter learnt of friends"; there sparkles College quips and cranks; and over all lingers the tenderly regretful reminiscence of middle-age for "the days where youth belongs."

The Anthology is divided into two parts—the first containing topical verse, and the second verse that is "associated with Canterbury College not in theme, but merely from the circumstance that the writer received some part of his education within its walls. (I quote from Mr. Alpers' interesting introductory reminiscence.)

It naturally follows that Part I cannot be appreciated properly by an outsider. Bu1 he can chuckle at the cleverness of Gilbertian rhymes, and marvel delightedly over "The Otagiad" of W. F. Ward, with its ecstatic tags (V.U.C. can even feel some reflected glory from "W.F."), and can join heartily in the toast of "Registrar Joynt." And he probably has seen

"Sage professors, grins and stately.
With indulgence smiling down. Add her marks inaccurately
Now that Lispeth wears a gown."

That may happen in any College; and other students besides Cantuarienses have watched in a College tea-room—

"The pot-plant's verdure flee
Through over-irrigation.
With surplus saucerfuls of tea
By way of gentle stimulation."

In Part II., however, are poems of wider interest. Many well-known names are there: William Pember Reeves, Jessie Mackay, Mary Colborne-Veel, and others whom we all know from the book of "New Zealand Verse."

Part II. opens with the oft-quoted poem of Reeves, "The Passing of the Forest. "One cannot travel anywhere through these islands without having those cruel contrasts before one's eyes, and without learning that

"A bitter price to pay
Is this for progress, beauty swept a way."

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And yet one can take comfort from the fact that beauty shines even through desolation and know that "all cannot fade that glorifies the hills."

Another poem of contrast, so typical of New Zealand, this England in Maoriland, is Dora Wilcox's "Onawe." Onawe was the fortress near Akaroa which Rauparaha sacked, and whose defenders were mercilessly slain:

"All undisturbed the Pakeha herds are creeping Along the hill,
On lazy tides the Pakeha sails are sleeping, And all is still.

Here once the Haka sounded, and din of battle Shook the gray crags;
Triumphant shout and agonised death-rattle Startled the shags.

Tena koe! Pakeha! within the fortification Grows English grass;
Tena koe! subtle conqueror of a nation Doomed to pass!"

The verse of W. D. Andrews is very attractive. "The True Immortals" will appeal to all booklovers.

A poem that is singing in my memory with some of its lines is "A Time Will Come," by Arnold Wall. I showed it to a young literary-enthusiast friend of mine, and he objected to the last verse, "so inevitable," and added, "But you wouldn't call it a poem?" I felt sad for him, but he is young yet; and I would call it a poem. It seems to me to breathe the mellow calm of an English summer afternoon; it is severely wise and quiet, and who that loves cricket will not cherish the description of

"The beautiful, beautiful game
That is battle and service and sport and art."

If (to quote a very much-worked definition) "genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," then I think that the author of "Pantoum of the Plug" has some claims to the title. Its ingenuity amazes me. It is on page 86.

We all know the blase New Zealander who goes Home for perhaps a year, and "does" the Continent, and who returns to his native land super-critical. To him should be read the "Laudabunt Alii" of A. E. Currie. I quote the last verse:—

"Some day we may drop the Farewell Light, and lose the winds of home— But where shall we win to a land so bright, however far we roam? We shall long for the fields of Maoriland, to pass as we used to pass Knee-deep in the seeding tussock, and the long lush English grass; And we may travel a weary way ere we come to a sight as grand As the lingering flush of the sun's last ray on the peaks of Maoriland."

The homely things of life, the things of every day, have a champion in O. N. Gillespie. "Evensong" to him spells home and homeliness:—

"Sing a song of washing-up, shining clean plates,
Chattering together like a crowd of old mates;
Buxom cups and saucers and little white bowls,
Purely and demurely bright like little girl souls."

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The lyrics of Irene Wilson are shadow-soft, quiet, calm, woman poems.

Among J. H. E. Schroder's verses is a sonnet, "The Street," which contains a vivid picture of any windy day in any N.Z. city:—

"The day
Mocks in a challenging splendour blue and gold,
The humbled ugliness; and then the bold
Vagabond wind flings in its face its stray
Litter of insults; urchin dust-whirls play
Their fitful games in the gutters."

Philip Carrington is represented by "Hougomont, 1815," the noble poem, that won the Chancellor's Medal at Cambridge; by "Rangiora," with its simple truth; and by the yearning little lyric "Desire":—

"My body walks in England
By little village stiles,
But my spirit goes a journey
Of thirteen thousand miles."

In conclusion, I quote some lines from the opening poem of the volume, for I feel that it has a message, not only for Canterbury College, but for all New Zealand. Those of us who are sometimes impatient of our country's "newness" and lack of tradition, feel our impatience as an unworthy thing when we read Professor Arnold Wall's dedicatory sonnet. It teaches us to feel our "newness" but as freedom to become great:—

"I have young blood and stirrings manifold,
And soarings of the spirit, swift and bold;
Shall I not glory in my lustres, too?

So speaks Canterbury College; and so, like her, let us

"Dread not heresy, nor sloth nor greed,
But gaze into the dawn with fearless eyes."

M.L.N.

A Professor on Pegasus.

The stars will not stir in their courses at the publication of Arnold Wall's book. Nor will his name occupy a niche in the yet unpublished History of New Zealand Literature. The first thing that strikes one is a wonder why it should have been issued at all. Professor Wall has not the poetical mind. The relations between the seen and the unseen cannot penetrate the armour of his education. He outrages your sense of rhythm at every turn, and he has not even that command over language which allows of fluent, if uninspired, verse being written. His lines bump like a motor on a rocky road; he will rhyme "advice" and "fierce" cheerfully, and his verses, usually in stanza form, are in a metre which saves a man front the trouble of much thinking.

The volume falls into three parts, worthless war scribblings, humorous or semi-humorous verse, and attempts at "real poetry." The first may be dismissed, the second are worthy of more comment. Imperfectly as he has committed it to paper, I should say that the page 52 Professor possesses a genuine humorous vein. Such verses as "The Public Man and "The Song of Brer Rabbit" contain an echo, dim and distant, of the cleverness of "Bulletin" humorists. But to what depths this Professor's determination to succeed will lead him may be judged from his "Explosion" against the privileges enjoyed by the older poets:—

Lucky old dogs!
Lucky old bargees!
We limp in clogs,
They move at ease.

That's what makes me hot.
Makes me lose my wool;
Chaucer and his lot
Had the blooming pull.

There is enough and to spare of this kind of versifying in the volume. Undoubtedly, it amused Professor Wall to write it, but why let it see the light of day? Yet occasionally we chance upon good lines, like diamonds in a dustbin, as in the opening of the address to the battleship "New Zealand ":—

Whatever ocean surge your forefoot break.

The metrical difficulty mastered, you may turn out sonnets of little worth with the regularity of a machine, and the Professor has his share of them. But the only two poems of any merit in the book are in this form. One of them hears the print of that religious thought which marks a great number of the verses in "London Lost." And as there is no reason why anyone should have to buy the book to read them, we reprint them here:—

If you would see our city at her best,
Go when the winter twilight, grey and cold,
Laps her in soft fog-draperies, fold on fold,
And there dwells yet a sallow sheen in the west;
Then like a princess for a ball she's drest,
Robed in rich purples, gorgeous to behold,
Starred with ten thousand points of winking gold,
And a meat jewel brazing on her breast.

So should have shone the angels' watch-fires bright
Through the pale dusk of that tremendous even.
When Michael's millions kept their watch and ward,
Bating a breathing space in the grand fight,
Upon the steep confines of utmost heaven,
Waiting the time and coming of the Lord.

The Reformers.
Thick throng the bristling spears, slender and tall,
Bravely the wind-tossed pennons flame and float,
The sun leaps back from gilded helm and coat,
While the great host moves forward to the wall,
Fierce, yet obedient to the bugle call;
But these rush on, fanatic and devote,
And singly fling themselves across the moat,
And run upon the stones, and break, and fall.

Lives spilt and madly waste and nothing done!
No! The defenders quail and drop their boast,
Knowing that not by axe and arms alone.
But such hot spirit as these few have shown,
Glowing and throbbing hard throughout the host,
Their walls shall yet be breached, their city won.

I should like Professor MacKenzie's opinion on that word" devote."

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"Rosemary, That's for Remembrance."

"Gathered Leaves," by Marjory Nicholls.(Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd., 1922.)

Miss Marjory Nicholls, in "Gathered Leaves," gives us the fruits of experience. Her verses of a decade ago were restless, pessimistic and joyous by turns. Her new volume reveals a mind which has ranged far in the past ten years, and has brought back to our shores poetry intimate and saddened a little, but filled with resignation and quietude. The old restless days have gone for ever, the heart which held the vagrant spirit of Villon and savoured the delicacy of the Pleiades has passed with ships which trod many waters and has come home.

It cannot be said that Miss Nicholl's new volume reveals any marked increase in her technical ability, she writes as she always did, simply, directly, not seeking the ornate or resounding word, but allowing her feelings full play. For sheer simplicity one has to go to W. H. Davies or to de la Mare to find anyone to compare her with. But she is poles asunder from those poets in her view of life. Being a woman, Miss Nicholls naturally sees things in the light of her heart. It is her own personality that is reflected for her in the world's looking-glass, her own deep content that she reads into the Valley of Wainui or the thresh of rain in the roof, her own pain that she puts into a talk with a flower. Romance still hovers in the air for her as it did in the days when she wrote the most romantic of all her poems, "Red Hibiscus"; dawn and its ministering winds, rain and sun still make their magic for her. But there is turning away from her first love of nature to a pre-occupation with the things of the mind. All the world now speaks to her with the voice of her thought, and in this hook, which contains poems written as early as 1912, we can see just how far she has travelled. The old ability to give a vivid little vignette is with her still, as in the Colombo sketch:—

From my rickshaw I looked down
At a woman passing by;
With her was her baby brown.
Plump and shiny, bright of eye.

Rusty red her sari was;
He was walking naked quite;
Red hibiscus in his hand,
Vivid, impudently bright.

There is, too, the tendency to pen epigrammatic magazine trifles which marked Miss Nicholls's earlier years, and some very excellent translations from the French poets, who have always engaged her affections, and from whom she has probably learnt much in clarity of thought. But it is in the later poems that we find her at her delicate best. The mood half realised, the vision of a moment are caught in a net of words in "Silver Birches," "The Wandering Wind," and "I Scarce Believed"; while in "Two Widows" and Ms kindred poems she has attained perfection of utterance.

Why did he voice for me, speaking of another.
Thoughts I hide deep in my heart?
And I could but nod assent, and scarcely seem to heed him
Lest tears, distressing him, should start.

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Tears are sister to those thoughts, and they grow together:
All the children that I have, they.
Love was father to them—Memory friend to them.
And they dwell with me alway.

Why did he say to me, speaking of another,
"Her child is life to her? . . . I am not a mother.

Miss Nicholls has not genius, but she is a poetess delicate and sensitive. Her work is now at maturity, and she has gained full control of her medium of expression. Her next book should be a real contribution to our literature.