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
The swineherd
They are all love stories. Some are subversive,
notably the one of the prince who pretended
to be a swineherd, and of the covetous girl
with a passion for music, toys and cunning
instruments. He named and exacted his price
and rejected her utterly. But, the consequences!
Later, still bored, he went away on a crusade.
The lady followed disguised as a young esquire.
They took the wrong turning for the Holy Land
and came to a stop somewhere in Asia Minor,
guests of a community of heretics
whose pastor, white beard yellow about the mouth,
quickly unstitched all the articles of belief
they had ever entertained, especially those
touching upon the possession of property,
dignities, distinctions, orders of precedence,
decorum and protocol, showing them to be both
untrue and of a mischievous tendency.
The mechanical bird flew off to the oleanders
and refused to sing any more. The prince
wound himself up like a toy and delivered
quite excellent music. She listened entranced
until she could no longer hold it all in her heart
and switched him off in mid-cadence.
Behind his great beard the pastor of the heretics
smiled to himself, a yellow wintry smile,
rehearsing another sermon on the celibate state.
She reckoned he would, in his turn, sing sweetly enough.