Celebration and Elegy in New Zealand Verse

New Zealand is a navigator’s country: a group of mountainous islands across the world, found by luck.  You need to mean to go there; and once there, you wonder why – or so I understand from Mr. Allen Curnow’s introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, the book within whose limits I shall make my exploration.  But a stranger is looked at narrowly and I shall make my exploration.  But a stranger is looked at narrowly and I should offer credentials.  A Canadian born, I am taken for an Englishman in my own country, and for an Irishman in England.  I have never been in New Zealand, and my knowledge of New Zealand poetry is not extensive: but he is an unadventurous traveller who visits only countries already familiar, and some navigational principles were needed.  For literary criticism, I think, there are no instruments of navigation more precise than those used by the Canada geese in their migrations.  I recall that Joshua Slocum sailed alone around the world in a small boat of his own design, using (after his goat had eaten his charts) a map of the world on Mercator’s projection torn from an atlas, and a cheap alarm clock for chronometer.  (I am also aware that he was eventually lost at sea.)  If I was to come to a critical anchorage off this unknown coast, I needed some bearings; and found them in the double notion of celebration and elegy.  For an azimuth of the moon can in some circumstances provide a comforting half-certitude, and a lunar distance is better than no attempt at a fix.

New Zealand was discovered in 1642 (if we discount Maoris, as we ought not to), was visited by the first missionary in 1714, became self-governing in 1852, and was declared a dominion in 1907; the earliest recordable verse was written in about the middle of the 19th century.  Allen Curnow has said that until the 1930s there is very little distinctive or substantial New Zealand poetry, and it appears that the few early items of archaeological interest present less occasion for praise than pretext for witty comment from the privileged of the present.  “A handful of poems – not poets – survive, in which imagination glimmers across the obscurity which otherwise hides from us, as it hid from our forebears the meaning of the colonial experience.”

There were two kinds of poets: the traditionalists who admired uncritically the nineteenth century English manner and uncritically followed it; and the modernists who, by the early 30s, showed signs of European or world affiliation and had some firsthand knowledge of twentieth century life and verse outside the islands and so were able for the first time to see poetically straight.  The story, as Mr. Curnow tells it, is a sad one: there was a late start, unpromising authorities to follow, a troublesome national habit of paying more attention to Mammon than to luteplaying.  Nevertheless, there is for theme the sad courage of the dislocated and disinherited, and the betrayal of the aboriginal peoples; and there is the matter of those who stay at home and desiccate for it, and those who leave home in search of another home and are traitors or escapists unless, like Katherine Mansfield, they stumble upon a world reputation.  Home is a recurrent theme: a place to live, a place to return to, a distant place of origin – though perhaps more the Victorian father, than Eve or Magna Mater.  Over and over we seem to catch the echo of Chaucer’s words: “Her nis non Hoom; / Her nis but wildernesse.”

Thinking, as who could not in the circumstances, of the Canadian parallel, I noticed that home is less prominent a Canadian theme, for Canada stands at far less remove from its origins and from what might be taken for centres of culture.  An earlier start and an earlier political maturing: the country was discovered by Cabot in 1497 (if we discount Vikings), the French established in 1534 and were encompassed by the British in 1763; 1867 brought confederation and Canada became the first of all dominions.  And what of literary history?  A. J. M. Smith, in his introduction to the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse reports that, except for Isabella Valancy Crawford and a few primitive curiosities, there is no considerable poetic achievement before the 1930s, and that three strains may be traced in the poetry – the colonial, the national, and the cosmopolitan.

Conditions of mind and ways of feeling characteristic of each of these three stages ... can be examined with peculiar convenience in the poetry of each period, for whatever else it may be Canadian poetry is and always had been a record of life in the new circumstances of a northern transplantation.  And the record takes on significance and attains a more than local relevance as technical proficiency makes possible a more intense and accurate expression of sensibility.

For all the thousands of miles of distance and dislocation of dates then, the story for Canada as given by A. J. M. Smith is much the same as that given by Allen Curnow for New Zealand: the late start, the false values, the borrowed and tawdry plumage, a preference for Mammon, a tendency to cast too dilatory an eye upon red maple, bison, Blackfoot, and hackmatack as the New Zealander had upon kowhai, tui, bellbird, and Hinamoa.  But in the end the “search for reality” is rewarded by a fuller understanding of “the colonial experience” and the social problems of our own times.

Let me try to put out of mind for the moment the historical distractions that I find in these accounts.  Can it be that both Curnow and Smith have a purpose: that each in his own way is seeking to rally and direct the nascent poetic spirit of a people who have not yet discovered and given tongue to its own individual barbaric yawp?  Can it be that the 1930s is not really a lamentably late date for poetic maturity in default of a much earlier one?  The historian’s task is, after all, to trace history, and in a sense to make history.  What he writes will be much the product of his way of seeing things; and even if we discount the possibility of bias and subtle prejudice, we can still be certain of one thing – that what he writes will be historical, concerned with growth, change, origins, causes, trends, social settings, effects of climate, economics, publicity, policy, taste, and the like.  History, like virtue, is no doubt its own reward; but I am not sure that the rewards of history coincidence with the judgements of criticism.  Without the historian’s work we should be ill-informed and ill-provided: I doubt whether we should even have an alarm clock for chronometer.  But I should like to take a fresh look at the poetry of New Zealand – and perhaps also of Canada – not in terms of history and social pressures, but in terms of poetry.  I am encouraged the more to attempt this because of certain lines from Maori liturgy:

                        From the conception, the increase

                        from the increase the thought

                        from the thought the remembrance

                        from the remembrance the consciousness

                        from the consciousness the desire ....

                        From the nothing the begetting,

                        from the nothing the increase,

                        from the nothing the abundance,

                        the power of increasing,

                        the living breath ...

Out of the distance and the islands sundered from home by the loud sea, out of a strange land the more desolate for its luxuriance, out of the home-sickness and the contempt for home – out of these we should expect to find, as we find poetically in any set of conditions not absolutely inhuman, not weakness but strength, “the blaze of day.”  For poetry is here and now and living – sorrows, failures, indignities and all; and even our hurt, like our enemies, seems to come from outside from a distance.

Both Curnow and Smith appeal to “reality” as though anybody in his sober senses or by indolent attention knew what that was and could easily find it.  But what is the “reality” for poetry?  Coleridge was (I think) the first person who ever thought that the word thing could be the present participle of the definite article.  It is an enchanting thought: that a thing is an existence trying through the modes of our perception to become itself, to be.  A curious paradox follows: that the Latin word fact – something made – corresponds to the Greek word poem: and that a fact is a proposition about an event.  So thinking may become thinging.  What we conceive of in the abstract as a thing is existentially an event waiting to come about: it achieves reality for us by entering into our field of value, in the way that in poetry words, as in a dream mechanism, are always seeking a context that will make themselves axiomatically meaningful.  This thought, coming to me independently, might seem alien to the present discussion except that in a poem of Charles Brasch’s – Photograph of a Baby – the baby trying to see things “as clearly as though they had died, / As still and as final”

            Has the air of one looking back, by death set free,

            Who sees the strangeness of life, and what things are trying to be.

When we try to deal with verse as though it were poetry and not as phenomena for historical or social interpretation, or even for literary interpretation, we need a trick of attention that will allow us to enter the country of poems – our own country intensified by choice and arrangement, enhanced by the arrest of clarity.  Since poetry is not a describing process but a symbolizing activity that calls forth the universal through the sharply rendered particular, what we are looking for in poetry is not accuracy of observation simply but a certain quality of perception.  When interest is transformed to concern and desire to vision, our perceptions move from things to the feel of things as things become real in the austere and affectionate embrace of our regard.  Poetry is this feel rendered with a punctilious exactitude which is most stern and most delicate.

Reading the New Zealand poems repeatedly, I was struck by a dominant tone or “feel” that had emerged strongly by the 30s and continued into the present.  It was not a matter of theme, but of tone and movement – a tone which, in the strict classical sense, is elegiac.  I then noticed over against this, though not much more than vestigially in the New Zealand poems, a counter tone or enucleative principle – celebration.  It occurred to me that these two – elegy and celebration – perhaps represent in any case polar values for poetry altogether, and the best of the New Zealand verse could be considered in relation to these rather than with reference to characteristics specifically New Zealand.  A double arrangement began to suggest itself.

                  celebration                             elegy

                       ? lyrical                             ? reflective

   ecstasy, timelessness                             sorrow/grief, time passing

                               life                             death

               being, as a state accepted                             going out of life, thinking

                   and rejoiced in                                             one’s way out of state

                  affirmation                             comment, rationalisation

       ? fountains and flowing water                             ? mountains, islands

   the sea as life-giving                             the sea as destroyer, separater

          positive, uniting                             isolating mindless emptiness

These two values do not represent simple opposition like order and disorder, now two mutually exclusive categories, because they may in fact intermingle: for there is an ecstasy which is also grief, transcendent and transfixing; and beyond the elegy that grieves over death, there is the other elegy that is of the order of eclogue, celebrating with grave and reverent delight the ways of the unchanging and cyclic world of plants and vines, birds and insects, cowbyre and beehive so that, as in Theocritus or Vergil, if the world be not a masterwork of God for the delight of man it is at least not utterly hostile to man and offers some crevices for shelter, some fingerholds for wonder, some fine intricacies to tax and inform the mind.  This sort of elegiac naming, a liturgical act of affectionate discovery and realization, I found over and over again in the New Zealand verse, and noticed that although it was no more than a subspecies of elegy it was stronger than the persistent outcries uttered by the poets against a barbarous philistinism, and so concluded that the natural and social landscapes peculiar to the country may be less important than the darker landscapes of our inner selves, and the sundering and joining forces of love and death.

For poetry is words and the ways of words, and the way words go.  Poets learn their craft from other poems and other poets; but the energy and muscle of poetry are not derived from poetry, but from what makes poetry necessary.  We really know very little about the making and unmaking of poets.  I should prefer to think about what interests us as students of poetry is the way our sense of poetry itself grows and changes as we discover new poems worthy of sustained attention: not that we add thereby to the corpus of poetry as an accumulation of items, but as though we witnessed and welcomed the entering of a new guest to the country and company of poetry: for “everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.”

The natural world, and every single thing in it, is a way into the landscape of our inner lives, if our eye is intent enough; the more strange the world, the more sharply the eye may be held to its intent transforming (or symbolizing) purpose.  But the world itself is for the poet the way not the end.  What the poetry establishes, once we pass beyond simple delight and wonder, is the harsh and extraordinary fascination of what exists, of what simply is: that there are things “out there” which are not ourselves and are not projections of our desires and are, in fact, impervious even to our desires and to whatever our shaping purposes may be.  Few poets penetrate to that level of intensity, it’s true: but that is the centre of value I have in mind.  Some are deflected into recording as if there were virtue in record; some turn aside into nostalgia, an enervating and self-indulgent habit that dissolves the substance of the very home it longs for; some in indignation or out of pity turn to social anger and gird against the injustices of man as though man were not the inventor of injustices as Cain was the inventor of murder.  But hovering at some centre, bipolar like the earth, like the sexes or the homing instinct of the compass-needle, is the strong tension between celebration and elegy, delight and grief, the ecstasy that is momentary standing outside time and the relentless certainty that we can never escape time or the changes it works: life under the shadow of death and death as a doorway into life, and the brooks running and the rivers, nourishing and fertilizing, carrying their salt to the sea which is life-giver and destroyer.

For a limited purpose and a limited presentation, I have narrowed my field to a small number of New Zealand poets born between 1904 and 1912, their work being first published between 1923 and 1939.  The five I have chosen are, in order of their birth: A. R. D. Fairburn (1904), R. A. K. Mason (1905), Charles Brasch (1909), Allen Curnow (1911), Denis Glover (1912).  The intention is not to classify or particularly to evaluate, but to locate and reflect upon centres of poetic gravity and intensity.

The first of these to be published was Mason, in 1923.  As a second generation New Zealand and a classical scholar, he does not need to rough-hew his style or images from unfamiliar timber.  This country is his country; but a country of the grief-stricken and stoical heart.  His tone is strongly elegiac.  Here is not the terrible sense of the fragility of human life that we hear six years later in Mary Ursula Bethell’s poems: “For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive” – “Everything is for a very short time.”  In Mason the echoes of Horace and Catullus reinforce the strong perspective of memory.

                        I think I have no other home than this

                        I have forgotten much remember much

                        but I have never any memories such

                        as these make out they have of lands of bliss...

                                                     _________

            We are they who are doomed to raise up no monuments

                        to outlast brass:

                        for even as quickly as our bodies’ passing hence

                        our work shall pass

                        of us shall be no more memory left to any sense

                        than dew leaves upon grass ...

                                                     _________

                        At last of this our life

            you surely have gained blank earth walls my friend

            and I?  God knows what I have gained.

His sense of his pointlessness of life embraces too the fate of the primitive and dignified original people of the land (though it may also be the fate of all men, desolate “here as on a darkling plain”) –

                                                what

                        of these beleaguered victims this our race

                        betrayed alike by Fate’s gigantic plot

                        here in this far-pitched perilous hostile place

                        this solitary hard-assaulted spot

                        fixed at the friendless outer edge of space.

But the hard classical precision and dignity, caught at its best in a sure-footed colloquial use half-occasional half-glyptic, falters in the self-deprecatory Song of Allegiance –

                                                Byron Wordsworth both are gone

                                                  Coleridge Beddoes Tennyson ...

                                                    They are gone and I am here

                                                      stoutly bringing up the rear

There is hesitation and an uneasy tone also in the dramatic naturalism of Ecce Homunculus (title and all); there is some inflation in the “Footnote to John 2:4”, and in the vivacious portrait of Judas Iscariot which ascribes to him and develops a cheerful cynicism for which there is no Biblical authority.  Even the Latter-Day Geography Lesson and Vengeance of Venus elude the radical seriousness that I think they intend.  But in a love poem, Flow at Full Moon, a moment of timeless and ceremonious wonder is rendered when he celebrates his lover in the figure of the whole world so that the body of the world in all its minute exactness is her body, and the specific strange own world of New Zealand has become an axiom.

            Beloved your love is poured to enchant all the land

                        the great bull falls still the opossum turns from his chatter

                        and the thin nervous cats pause and the strong oak-trees stand

                        entranced and the gum’s restless bark-strip is still from its clatter.

The whole poem may not be wholly successfully, but it stands firmly close to that other pole of celebration.  Elsewhere, outside the strong elegies, Mason relies too much upon shock, and is often betrayed by epigram.  He handles the theme of death better than the theme of life.  His strongest vein is the dignified sharply incised manner where his speech-rhythms seldom stumble into poeticism –

                        of us shall be no more memory left to any sense

                        then dew leaves upon grass –

but his irony is not quite deep-rooted or sustained enough to bring to such incisiveness in the end his sense of man’s habit of betrayal and self-betrayal.

Fairburn’s masters, like Mason’s, are not difficult to trace: Tennyson, Housman, Hopkins sometimes, not seldom Eliot.  The movement of his verse is generally colloquial and inventive and is given more to celebration than Mason’s work.  In The Cave an ecstatic occasion of love is remembered:

                        all was transfigured, all was redeemed,

                        so that we escaped from the days

                        that had hunted us like wolves, and from ourselves,

                        in the brief eternity of the flesh.

But elsewhere the theme of self-betrayal runs deep:

                                    the embers of your old desire,

                                        remembered still will glow, and fade,

                                    and flow again and rise in fire

                                    to plague you like a debt unpaid

                                    to haunt you like a love betrayed.

                                                     _________

            Though you go a journey into the interior you will long for the

                reek of salt and the noise of gulls;...

            Though you grow wise with the sloughing of years, time will not

                forgive you for deserting your youth.

When he cries out against his own country, the tone is thinner –

                              we have prospered greatly,

                        we, the destined race, rulers of conquered isles,

                        sprouting like bulbs in warm darkness, putting out

                        white shoots under the wet sack of Empire.

What is more memorable among much that is derivative and a little over-written is this paragraph from Album Leaves:

            I cut down the tree, and made posts

            and fenced my land,

            I banished my people and turned away the traveller;

            and now I share my land with sparrows that trespass

            upon my rood of air.  The earth

            is barren, the stream is dry; the sun has blackened

            grass that was green and springing, flowers that were fair.

This is not so much elegy as prophetic and biblical self-condemnation, the inversion of celebration.

Allen Curnow, born 1911, inherits the sharp ironic manner of Auden, and the social consciousness of Auden’s political contemporaries, and imparts to their technical resources the driving and elliptical force of Yeats.

            It was something different, something

            Nobody counted on.

                                           _________

            And pilgrim dream pricked by a cold dawn died

            Among the chemical farmers, the fresh towns; among

            Miners, not husbandmen, who piercing the side

            Let the land’s life, found like all who had so long

            Bloodily or tenderly striven

            To rearrange the given

            It was something different, something

            Nobody counted on.

The bias and undertow of his Penguin introduction is clear, as it is in this poem –

            Always to islanders danger

            Is what comes over the sea;

            Over the yellow sands and the clear

            Shallows, the dull filament

            Flickers, the blood of strangers: ...

There is in his work great zest and virtuosity –

            To forget self and all, forget foremost

            This whimpering second unlicked self my country,

            To go like nobody’s fool an ungulled ghost

            By adorned midnight and the pitch of noon

            Commanding at large everywhere his entry,

            Unimaginable waterchinks, granular dark of a stone?

            Why that’d be freedom heyday, hey

            For freedom, that’d be the day

            And as good a dream as any to be damned for.

Later, the tone is modern enough and the reflective rhythms of heuristic thought flow in the approved manner –

            What it would look like if really there were only

            One point of the compass not known illusory.

            All other quarters proving nothing but quaint

            Obsolete expressions of true north (would it be?)

            And seeds, birds, children, loves and thoughts bore down

            The unwinding abiding beam from birth

            To death!  What a plan!

                                                            Or parabola.

Here the verse has become a little bookish.  And turning back and forward to the strong evidences of classical training and cultivated literary sensibility, I think: These men are not naive in any social or literary sense, they are not primitive, bucolic, or provincial; these men have travelled, lived abroad, studied in the mediaeval universities of Europe.  But it is not so.  One got away as far as Samoa, Tonga, and Australia; two reached London – one in his late twenties but was not scholarly there, the other in his thirties to work as a journalist; one served with distinction in the Navy but was not continuously in the United Kingdom.  Only one of the five took a degree in an ancient English university: the classicism and literary sense of the others was learned at home and firmly rooted there.  Yet the migratory instinct – to leave home, to return, in season – has clearly been strong in New Zealand writing.  It has been strong in Canadian writing too.  The Canada goose, migratory and with a dream-like navigational instinct, has been used as symbol of the poet and the poetic imagination.  New Zealand has its counterpart in the god-wit.  Geese and god-wits.  The evidence of these poems is that when the imagination ranges at large, the geographical migration matters less: the poems – local detail and specific feeling – are of no country.  When the themes run shallow through national self-consciousness or domestic impatience, the poems bear the ruminative marks of talented but deliberate literary application.  The difference is in what imagination makes of what is at hand, whether or not it be fertilised by migration.[1]

I wonder whether Allen Curnow’s assaults upon the defects of New Zealand life have damaged rather than enlarged his verse.  And in Denis Glover, with the classical background and the tone of Housman and the disenchantment, is there not a failure to achieve full loyalty to place and time?  The Harry poems and the poems about Arawata Bill, though by instinct I am myself strongly drawn to such themes and people, make me a little uneasy, as though I were reading an official naval history written by a yachtsman – which in the light of biographical fact is as far from the truth as could be.  And when I ask “What is celebrated?  what lamented?”  I think I find that these poems are social comment again rather than true legend or symbolic story: and I do not see a ragged crack-brained primordial figure stalk across a hostile landscape.  There is a truly Wordsworthian fascination with the grotesque and parahuman, and a truly Wordsworthian failure to discover an appropriate dialect that can fuse the plausible and the reflective.  But there are times when Glover does not sound “poetical”, and discovers something of the hard and dignified finality of Mason’s best lines – the Thermopylae touch.

                                    It would take some finding now

                                    Under the course hillside grasses,

                                    That place we buried you and meant

                                    To roll a stone to your head,

                                    Planting there the anchor most sailors swallow

                                    Which never again would follow

                                    The curl at the bow of your boat

                                    Round the bays in long summer days.....

                                                Now the hills fold over

                                                Your time-elapsed frame.

                                                The cocksfoot and clover

                                                creepingly cover even your name.

                                                You are salty dust where you lie.

                                                But quickened is the anonymous sea,

                                                And the hours lick endlessly

                                                At the stone of the sky.

(And as for the dignity of the self-contained man whose work is his life and who turns to his death as a fulfillment – a theme not common in Canadian writing – Kendrick Smithyman later made sea-poetry of it again in an elegiac manner, softened a little by laconic gaiety.

                                                Yet he did fittingly

                        More than we’d dream, and with more dignity.

                        For when he couldn’t heave any more at the net

                        When the old man snapper clung too hard, he set

                        His nose to the sea way out east of the Head

                        To give what was due from good years to the tide.)

Charles Brasch, born 1909, is neither the youngest nor the oldest of the group.  In his work we come, according to my calculus, upon a rich vein and a full flowering.  Not by rejecting what the others excel in, but by embracing; not by refining or singling out some theme or scheme, but by sustained intensity of thought and rendering; his verse moves in an ambience of its own – learned, inventive, colloquial, civilized.  The sense of suspended isolation is sharply engraved in The Islands to an elegiac tune.

                        Always, in these islands, meeting and parting

                        Shake us, making tremulous and salt-rimmed air;

                        Divided and perplexed the sea is waiting,

                        Birds and fishes visit us and disappear ....

                        Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring

                        Shadow of departure distance looks our way;

                        And none knows where he will lie down at night.

The “Forerunners” were luckier – “They had no fear of being forgotten.”  Stopping in Waianakarua in a train he moves in imagination over the country inhabited by vivid memories of a friend or lover; again the elegiac movement.

                        [I] rest in the grey untouched light, listening,

                        Hearing the fall of years

                        Soft and swift as the fall of leaves

                        One-voiced and even as over stones the stream.

The train

                        Moves on, past the landmarks, past the fallen years,

                        The passing land, the lives.

And again, among the ruins of a house, he cries:

                        Yet there is nothing here, nothing but the grasses

                        Of a level space open to the sea’s quiet.

In Autumn, Thurlby Domain, where a house lies broken, he sees

            Nothing except the plainness of stone walls

            And trunks unleafing, what has been planted and grows,

            What has been built to stand; that now fails,

            Having served its time,

            And goes back ripe to the earth from which it came.

In this poem he states what may well be the answer to the question I first raised.

                        What we have found before we shall find again,

                        No new thing; age and youth seem strange to us

                        Who can no longer relight the morning sun,

                        Bring each day to birth in that bitter stress

                        And eddying joy that mark the life of a man

                        As years ring a tree; only in loss,

                        All knowledge stripped away,

                        We stumble towards our naked identity ....

                        In celebration of death we consummate

                        Our vows to place and time,

                        In sickness and in health to live and die with them.

Turning to look at a group of Canadian poets of the same age as the New Zealanders – Earl Birney, Abraham Klein, Irving Layton, Patricia Page, Douglas Le Pan, Alfred Purdy (no school, surely) – I should not be surprised to find them more consciously and deliberately national than the New Zealanders though often more anxiously cosmopolitan, and in matters of poetry and culture often more naive.  Looking along the polarity suggested by a reading of New Zealand poetry, I think I could show how the New Zealand theme of geographical insularity is matched in Canada by a myth of personal, racial, or social alienation which has inhibited by self-justification rather than liberated by indignation: how the Canadian poetic technique, though perhaps more sophisticated and “modern”, tends to be less well assimilated and more prone to the factitious; how altogether there is less elegiac writing in the Canadian work, and more celebration – more celebration too – and how the one classical scholar among them is the least elegiac, thinking as he does of poetry as the recital of marvels.  Here, as a deviation from the polarity, we may see how the cult of the archetype has tempted some into the tautology of assertion and explanation without leading into discovery, inducing a cerebral vacuum more obscure but no less flatulent than the emotional rhetoric it seeks to avoid.

Considering home-work, it is difficult to renounce the luxury of venom and indulgence and to turn away from the case-making that tempts mountaineers and explorers to represent themselves as scientists.  This slight survey was intended as an exploratory route-traverse for a conceivable triangulation.  To have found in New Zealand poetry the double discrimination of elegy and celebration leads me to consider how candid allegiance to time and place will bring a man to work within the strict and exacting country of poetry.  This may be better than nothing, more useful even than history.

                        Knowledge ends thus with the traveller’s glimpse –

Charles Brasch has written –

                                    But there imagination wakes

                                    Vivid with an alternative creation.