Reference Points
Stranger within • Generation gap • Midwinter spring • Silent revolution • Trees, travelling • Under the wave • Magnolia • Augury • Four elements • Peacocks • Old house • Rainbird • Apocalypse
Histories
Historian • Portraits • The janitor • Ancestors • Yesterday's loss • Counter-revolution • Prayer of an elder • Robert Lowell • Social control • Waitomo • Parihaka • Rongopai
Myths and Emblems
Counter talk • The empty chair • The candle • Wave and shell • Increase and multiply • November 1978 • Rumpelstiltskin • Thumbelina • The swineherd • A Japanese tale • Solstice
Source: Out of Season: Poems. Wellington; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
Electronic source: Out of Season: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
Portraits
I
The prodigious poet in his drinking days
swept Wellington like a shower of broken glass
blown from the stricken south. Rigid with puritan grief
he gripped the bar like a limpet clamped to a rock
high and dry at the ebb, awaiting a tide
of drink and words and faiths to rise about him.
He longed for a dark peace and to be lulled
till the next low water. No-one remembers a word
said in the shadow of these improbable feats.
I think now not of St Hemi under his river stone
nor the golden whine of his voice, its menacing whimper,
but of that piteous boy who put his words on a page
like a hundred days of high summer rushing towards
the bitter season when the rain of ice would fall.
II
He wrote, a man at odds with his times, of Virgilian
vines in Otago wastes. In measured tones
he praised civility. That coin rang false
on a colonial counter. How few they were,
how scattered, the ones he summoned to people
the map's empty spaces, improbable task force
facing a wilderness. One by one their low voices
went whispering into silence. His own rang true
of grief, bright flowers, friendship, age and death,
for one man more than enough. But the peasants'
children had an inheritance, their own and not
at all informed by the classics, a bondage
their fathers escaped from. Still, that dignity
they shared, of a man alone with his death.
III
Young and extreme, he was brown on the golden
sands of Oriental Bay, unduly solemn
and that other rare thing Polynesian
though that had not started to matter
as more than a grace note. It counted
for less than a knowledge of Latin
and a competence with women neither
common achievements. And these were less
than an eloquence so true it made him
a natural victim. It was rare to be simply
happy, hurt, desolate and joyous
without taking too much thought, not trying
to be clever. He has kept to that. His
reticence is a reproach we still merit.
IV
In cassock and surplice at song in the little choir:
it was a way not too closely defined of being religious,
of casting a light maybe admirable in the darkness
where too alone he walked towards the bright sea.
Paradise he described at one time as being sexless;
at another as listening to Benny Goodman in the sun.
He was one of the wholly innocent. He valued
light on water, girls with bright names, a clarinet
bubbling with joy, Blake's entire absolution,
and the emptiness after he had left closing the door
and the sun streaming in set the motes dancing
and the books no longer clamoured for attention
and a tiny music started up in the dusty
corners of silence and he stole back to listen.
V
Such a clumsy swimmer, such a deep diver.
It was always an open question whether the pearls
he brought up were worth all that shortness of breath.
(Poets, he said, in his experience had to be told
that their latest poem was either their best or their worst;
the problem was how to guess right.) Perhaps
he suffered from a kind of decompression
rising too rapidly from the littered floors
of Europe's oceans to antipodean shallows
there to lie beached, ungainly and in some pain
where few had noticed and fewer thought to heed
Catullus, Sartre, Camus, where no-one listened.
They were genuine pearls, small and exact, with the glow
of ardours too ancient, too alien, to be allowed.
VI
The critics were less than fair. True, in prose
your sentences revealed great gaping wounds
bandaged by verse. And you wrote much too much.
More, there was something in the calumny
that the state had given you a printing press
to fabricate pound notes for appalling poets.
Handicapped out of a country town you came,
anarchy's officer, with less than the usual luck
if it was luck to have shed all the outward signs
of stint and slight. No-one else preserved
bright tears behind the eyes, splinters of grief
shed for the losers, parents, children, women.
It was well that you went roughshod as country horses
trampling the lilies of authority.