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
Rumpelstiltskin
I am the gnome who stamped. And disappeared.
Once up to my knees. Twice up to my crutch.
Three times up to my heart. And four over my head.
Strength, sex, feeling, thought, it might be.
I cannot recall the cause of all this anger.
Nothing to do with the girl.
It has been dark since and clammy;
company and food in short supply,
a handful of exiles and a root or so;
once in a while some tiny shreds of music
filtering down, a march, a waltz, a hymn –
the band at the rotunda on Sunday?
Still, that girl spinning away is worse off.
Straw into gold! Ruling class rhetoric!
They'll keep her at it. I'd have let her off
like any anarchist. Even the one of two decent
liberals would know enough for that.
There are spies everywhere. I'd have taught her
that straw is straw and better for being mucky.
She might have discovered herself. But none
of that accounts for my rage, that sudden panic
at hearing my name, which in fact is Melchior.
It was an act of despair. But authentic.
Not that down here it's so bad. After all
I'm a dwarf and the earth is my airy mansion.