Mythology of Place - Homage to James K Baxter - © 1993-94 - Lloyd Godman - Lawrence Jones

THE MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE:

JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS

Lawrence Jones

'What happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology'1
 

- this much-quoted statement of James K.Baxter's is a starting place for a discussion of his uses of Otago places in his work, for it takes us into the heart of the Romantic poetic which determines those uses. To Baxter, 'Poetry is not magical but mythical', presenting 'the crises, violations and reconciliations of the spiritual life in mythical form because this is the only way in which the conscious mind can assimilate them'.2
Myth is central to poetry because it 'is the form the poet uses to crystallise experience'.3 That crystallisation is in the form of symbols, which 'cannot be explained' but rather 'must be regarded as a door opening upon the dark - upon a world of intuitions and associations of which the poet himself is hardly conscious'.4 The symbols in turn are drawn from concrete sense experiences in the immediate environment. This process is most fully described in 'the tenets of the Horse religion' in Baxter's posthumously published autobiographical novel Horse: 

Surrounding Horse, not made by him, existed the sky,  the earth, the sea, and other less clearly defined creatures, serenely melancholy, neither glad nor sorry that Horse existed. Yet Horse's happiness depended on an intimate contact with this world of substance. . . . By contact with the world of substance Horse had access to a sacred power. . . . This power adhered to particular places and particular people. In his childhood Horse had experienced its manifestation on certain cliff-faces and on the banks of creeks, especially where flax or toe-toe bushes grew freely. His father conveyed it strongly, by the capable strength of his hands, and by the smell of burnt gum-leaves he often carried on his person. As the primitive paradise of childhood fell apart, Horse had been led by meditation and example to look for the signs of this power in women.5

These sense experiences become symbolic by a process of 'natural contemplation'  upon 'the testament of sand and the parables of rock - those very  humble, very obscure communications from nature'.6   As he wrote in an  early poem to his parents, 'For me all earth is symbol'.7 These symbols coalesce into myth as the poet intuitively discovers 'a sacred pattern in natural events', a  'pattern which lies, unknown, like the bones of St Peter under the surface rubble of events'.8  The artist in his 'double vision . . . expresses through an artistic medium, at one and the same time, selected portions of objective reality and a subjective pattern which these are able to signify'.9 This  subjective 'animistic pattern which underlies civilised activity' the poet attempts to 'lay . . . bare, and draw upon its strength without being submerged by it'.10 Since the pattern is animistic, 'Animism is an essential factor in the artist's view of the world', a factor available to 'the child and the savage', but lost in 'a materialist technological civilisation', its 'generative power' to be gained only through 'the rediscovery and revaluation of childhood experience'. 11 'The Dark Side' vividly presents the child's animistic vision, built 'Upon the grave of savage animism' as experienced by his tribal forebears. 12  Such animism involves the 'passionate sympathy with natural objects'  that Baxter admired in Alistair Campbell's poetry, and it provides the 'peculiar power' of Denis Glover's landscape poetry, as 'mountain, river, bushland and sea assume . . .  the proportions of animistic powers'. 13

This Romantic poetic  clearly underlies Baxter's poetry and is an apologia for it.  In that poetry he uses a  store of natural images drawn from childhood experience, using 'local places or events as a focus for legend', 14 to form an animistic pattern that coalesces into myth.  In a crucial passage he relates that formation of natural myth in childhood to literary myth, both forming part of his education as poet: 

Waves, rocks, beaches, flax bushes, rivers, cattle flats, hawks, rabbits, eels, old man manuka trees . . .  provided me with a great store of images that could later enter my   poems.  Among the books at home were one or two of Norse and Greek mythology. I   became the companion of Odin and Thor and Jason and Ulysses.  That was an indispensable education. 15

When he returned to Otago in 1966 to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, he spoke of the importance of that store of local images from childhood: 
More than half of the images that recur in my poems are connected with early memories of the Brighton township, river, hills and seacoast - especially the seacoast.  Sitting down to write in a room in Wellington, again and again my mind would make an  imaginary journey over the neck of the Big Rock, across the mouth of the Brighton  River, and wander round the domain, or up to the boathouse, or along the sandhills, or out to the fishing rocks where the swells came straight in without interruption all the way from Peru. 16

As that statement implies, there were also other sources of images than Brighton: other places in Otago, India (from his 1958 journey there), such North Island places as Wanganui, Kai Iwi Beach (sounding very much like Brighton in 'At the Bay'), Akitio, Waipatiki Beach, and. towards the end,  especially Jerusalem.  But the concern here is that little world of Brighton, a fallen Eden fronting the sea,  flanked by two other Otago worlds representing those two opposing images that he considered to be 'of peculiar cogency for New Zealand poets', the City and the Wilderness.17 While in his later poetry the City became Wellington and then Auckland, in his early and middle poetry it is  Dunedin, 'a different place' from Brighton, 'the town I ventured into when I first came of age . . . . the place where (as all people have to) I broke away from my first family and began the somewhat agonising search for a tribe of my own'.18 And the Wilderness is often the mountain country of Central Otago, especially the Matukutuki Valley, 'the mirror and symbol of the power of God which cannot be contained in human thought or human society'.19  The three worlds together form a mythical structure, a spatial myth against which the temporal myth of his life in his poetry is acted out.

At the centre of this poetic universe is the Brighton township.  It was a 'usual enough' place, this 'small town of corrugated iron roofs / Between the low volcanic saddle / And offshore reef where blue cod browse', a town with  'A creek, a bridge, a beach, a sky / Over it', a town of 'gravel roads . . . School, store, and bowling green'. 20  But for the young Baxter, 'the town stood plain, huge at the world's centre'. 21  He observed his 'small stretch of coast on a large island' from a hill-top, noting 'shore, islet, reef'.22  Or from 'the macrocarpa tree, the child's look-out' he  took in 'the sea, the tide-river, chief vista of content', or looked inland to the 'gorse on ridged hill-side blown clean by the sea-wind'.23  From 'sea, hills, cattle island', the 
adolescent felt 'calmness expands; vast sanity'.24  This Wordsworthian world was primarily the child's Eden, the place which he experienced as a 'natural paradise' in growing up, loading his 'inner mind with images purloined' from it: 'the first cigarette tasted in the top branches of the macrocarpa tree, the mud-eels hooked or gaffed from the creek below the house, the limestone cave where somebody reckons the Maoris used to bury their dead, the girls undressing in the bathing sheds, seen through a crack in the wall. . . .'25   This 'natural  paradise' is of course a psychological state associated with the place, not the place itself, as his definition makes explicit:

A sense of absolute value in what is happening; a sense of being in relation to other people and to things; a sense of endless possibilities of fruitfulness; and above all, the habit of natural contemplation, the letting the mind rest upon, draw nourishment from, the images of nature perceived as an organic whole - these things  constitute, to my mind, a paradise, as far as such a condition is possible after the Fall of  Man.26

Thus the memory of smoking the wild bees out of their hive in the rotten cabbage tree 'beside the stagnant  river' becomes an image of the Fall, its treasure not the honey the child coveted but . . .  a nectar      Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.31 Many of the images from the town and the nearby farms are associated with loss and the Fall.  There is the simple loss through Time, represented by ruined farms.  One is the site of the farm of his great granduncle Duncan McColl, above Black Bridge, which bridged McColl Creek where it joins with the Otokia Stream to form the Brighton River.  The first settlers saw in the wild landscape the possibility of 'release, eventual and ancestral peace, / Building the stubborn clans again', but the poet can now see only an overgrown orchard where   . . . undergrowth     Among stunted apple-trees coiling Trips the foot.  Sods grass-buried like antique faith. 32

Returning to the site in a later poem, the poet finds only  fire-blackened stones, thistle growing amidst them, finding in the fallen house not a Yeatsian 'Atridean doom that daunted / The heart with lidless gorgon stare', but rather a Hardyan 'wraith of dead joy haunted':
     There once the murk was cloven
     By hearthlight fondly flaring within:
     Adamant seemed their hope and haven.
     O Time, Time takes in a gin
     The quick of being!  Pale now and gossamer thin
     The web their lives had woven.33
The old McColl site was on 'the clay track leading / From Black Bridge to Duffy's Farm'.
At the farm at the end of that track, on the hill above the ruined orchard, with its 'twisted apple trees / that bear no fruit', was the still-standing ruin of Duffy's house, with its memories of Duffy and his common-law wife Sarah still present. 
To the poet it presents an accurate image
of what life holds for us: 
    . . .  I cannot 

     promise  more than this, the clods
     divided by purgation
     of frost, rustling autumn head

     of thistle - space, air, light in
     a room whose door is broken.34

While at least the ruins of the orchards remain with Duncan McColl's and Duffy's farms,  along with the ruined house or at least its firestones, nothing, not  even the twisted trees,  remains  to mark where the orchard and farmhouse had been on the farm on Creamery Road, below Saddle Hill, where Baxter's father Archibald had grown up.  A visit  to the site with his father shows only an empty paddock, 'not a stone of the house standing', although it all remains there in his father's memories.  But for the poet it is another image of loss: 'I inhabit the empty ground'.35   Another visit, this time alone, to the Kuri bush farm where his 'first years flung by / (Earth's) folly unseen yet',36  shows that only a mound stands where the farmhouse was.
But he carries memories of his mother lighting the kerosene lamp and his father taking him outside at night
     Holding me up to look at
     The gigantic rotating wheel of the stars 
     Whose time isn't ours.37

In Brighton township itself the house and garden on Bedford Parade where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence are associated with his father and mother.  His father is seen mostly in relation to the garden and the surrounding landscape, embodying the cycles of nature, including loss but also sometimes the possibility of rebirth or redemption. 
He is seen 
     . . . up a ladder plucking down
     The mottled autumn-yellow
     Dangling torpedo-clusters
     Of passion-fruit for home-made wine.39

The  garden where the 'passion-fruit hang gold above an open doorway' is associated with the 'single vison' of the childhood Eden, but 'single vision dies'.  In the nearby cemetery the 'bright lizard' is the image of 'The moment of animal joy', but the 'maimed gravestones' imply mortality and loss (the  27 year -old poet is back in Brighton for the funeral of an uncle).40 Earlier, at 21, the poet had returned to the house to find 'no fault' in his father  but knew that 'Nor can we thus be friends till we are foes', for he had to break free even from his father's 'light and sympathetic yoke' if he was to grow.  He would leave, but bearing with him the image of his father 'rooted like a tree in the land's love'.41 Returning at 40 to see his aged father,  he is charmed by that smile that 'like a low sun on water / tells of a cross to come', but perhaps the cross implies also rebirth, for he sees his father against the background of spring in the garden,  and although he can 'mourn the fishing net  / hung up to dry', image of the man whose gardening days are almost over, he can also see 'where crocuses lift the earth'.42 Several years before returning to Otago for the Burns Fellowship, in a poem in which he mourns the 'desecrated earth', the possible destruction by 'atom cloud' in a world where we seem to have only 'our Christ of death . . .  A child that has no breath /  Not able to be born', he yet imagines a drunk walking Scroggs Hill Road and seeing  'a blaze of light / In a sod hut' that reveals a Maori Mary and a 'Christ of fire' from which vision the drunk would come down to the town. 
And praise the living scene
     With an unwounded tongue.
   In the land where I was born.43

        The boring jailors, far below, indoors
         In steaming kitchens floured a batch of scones
         Hot-tempered as their ovens, squat and humming
         In a closed universe of mutton bones.46

Or she is in the kitchen making 'thick hot winter soup' (in contrast to his father's passion-fruit wine), or is in  the rock garden tending 'the gold and pearl trumpets called angels' tears', or she is in the sitting room  with the family photographs.47  The 'brown-filmed photographs' link her with the possessive mother on the 'gully farm' who tries to hold Odysseus at home, and the 'macrocarpa windbreak' of that farm links it  with the 'old house shaded with macrocarpa' from which 'rises my malady'.48  Thus in Baxter's symbolic world, his mother and her places are associated with family conflict, the rebellion of the adolescent, his struggle to get free of the maternal net.  The most painful associations are with the hillside below the Bedford Parade house where, fleeing a 'difficult session' with his mother over his leaving the university, Baxter, like Horse, sat 'on the bare earth under one of McArthur's gum trees,' and wept, gripping 'the huge smooth bole of the tree as if it were a human body'.49    However, he is calmed when  he looks down on the river, symbol of the flow of Time (and his own life), the flow that inevitably carries him on to adulthood and independence.

That hillside looks down not only on 'the beer-brown somnolent wave / Of the brackish river' and the cattleflats beyond it, but also on the 'narrow tumulus' of The Giant's Grave standing between hillside and river.  The area is associated with childhood memories: racing 'sledges down the hill to the Giant's Grave over dry cowpats to the slimy swamp at the bottom, while the grassheads threshed at your knees';  fishing for eels; sailing flaxstick boats.  Fear then seemed irrelevant:
                     Nothing made us afraid.
     No, not fear of drowning, drawn down in weedy arms,
     Nor any ghost dragging the eyes unwilling
     To gaze on Adam's wound. 50

Yet  the young Baxter did imagine Antaeus' bones 'bedded deep' in the tumulus, perhaps an image of the knowledge of Time, Death, and the Fall buried within the child, for he dreamed of seeing the corpse of his 'loved grandmother' with 'her face in anguish smiling' burning on a funeral pyre on the mound.50  Even in the child's paradise,  the dark knowledge creeps in.The nearby  Brighton River,  running sluggishly to sea at the Bay, is repeatedly a symbol of the cycle of Time and Death, seen innocently by the child but now seen more darkly by the adult.  The adult poet looks back in memory at the 'daft boy' watching paradise ducks on the 'brackish river shallows' and  is brought to 'Thoughts of Eden lost, and the sheen man had broken'. Now, in  proper Dylan Thomas fashion, he sees the meaning of the dead duck that he had found then,
        Knowing the natural world, like man's, founded
        On death, by the same canker grieved and wounded.51

The middle-aged poet  watches the winter river carrying 'a freight of floating pine cones'7 as it runs out to the Bay, remembers his unhappy adolescent sexual yearnings, and thinks of the objects of his resentful lust as they now 'sag on porches, in back rooms, flabby as I am'.52   He remembers following the river back to its source 'among broom bushes / In a gully above the dam', but all he found there was a deserted house and a tree with 'one bitter shrunken apple'. The experience taught him 'nothing but how to die'.53   Where the river runs out between two rocks into the cattle flats with the rotting weed and logs in the swamp like the bones of giants, he and his 'crooked shadow / Bring with us briefly the colour of identity and death'.54 He cannot return to 'the rock bend' up river 'past the cattle ground' as it was when he was a boy, when he could glide in his canoe over 'a hole going down to the world's centre, / Waiting to swallow the sun' or could drop his line into 'the bog-black water' while sitting on 'a branch of the oldest tree'.  When he was a youth 'He'd swum in that cavern, down to the bottom' to discover a 'riddle' which the man now answers with death. The adult thinks that if he  were there now he would be 'the invisible drowned man' beneath, 'too tightly held / By the weed's arms to rise  / Again to the dazzle of the day '.56  If the adult returns, the river is no longer like'a smaller Amazon',  but rather  now
               The river
     is foul weed and sludge
     narrower
     than I had supposed, fed by
          a thousand drains.57
When  he returns in the late 1960s, even Black Bridge is gone, 'under fifty bull- / dozed yards of gravel and dry clay'.58

These images of the river as the indifferent process of Time, involving inevitable loss, are all from the Brighton River.  The neighbouring Taieri , 'the river that goes / Southward to the always talking sea',59   also features in the poems, but is not so consistently symbolic.  Where it leaves the gorge and moves into the estuary at Taieri Mouth  the poet sees it as 'the old water-dragon / Sliding out from a stone gullet', while further up the gorge it bends 'like a bright sabre'.60  To the poet on his brother's boat in the river it seems to speak, "Does it matter? Does it matter?"  and its tidal nature seems to symbolise his own inner state, 'carrying like salt and fresh inside me / The opposing currents of my life and death'.61    On the other side of the gorge, on the Taieri Plain, it takes on other significances.  When the poet looks down on it from Scroggs Hill when it is in flood and has 'covered paddocks, sheds, and fences',  the sight moves his 'inward guardian' to say to him 'All / Knowledge, my son, is knowledge of the fall'.62  The process of association is obscure (except that almost everything brings Baxter to the Fall), but it is probably  Noah's Flood that provides the implicit link.  At Henley, the river before it enters the gorge becomes a perhaps overdetermined  symbol to one of Baxter's dramatic monologuists, a suicidal adulterous commercial traveller.  He  sees the river first as 'Jehovah's book' and then dreams of suicide beneath its 'serpent waves', swallowed by the 'bog-black stream'.63   In his prose commentary on the poem, Baxter also refers to the Styx and to the Norse world serpent in relation to the river,  sees both it and the Leith as symbolising 'the obliteration of the conscious mind by subconscious forces', and points to the traveller's imagined view of himself as a decomposing corpse among the trout and eels as 'a very apt  image for any South Islander acquainted with the Taieri and the Clutha rivers'.64 

Here perhaps the literary mythology  overloads the natural image.  Less complexly, when the younger poet sees the rapid river in its other, steeper gorge, between the Strath Taieri and the Taieri Plain, the 'raving river' becomes a metaphor for the blood associated with sexual passion and pain. 'River, cattle flats' thus did supply Baxter with images, but 'waves, rocks, beaches' are even more significant in his mythology of place.  Brighton is not only the fallen Eden, but its beaches are places 'at the fringes of the human domain, where the City encounters the Wilderness, [where] artists are able to discover those forms which become the treasures of their race and the real knowledge which liberates the intellect'.66  In 'Symbolism in New Zealand Poetry', he listed no less than four symbolic meanings for beaches:
     as an arena of historical change, the arrival and departure of races;
     as a place where revelations may occur;
     as the no-man's land between conscious and unconscious;
     as an arena for sexual adventure.67

In his own poetry, the first of these meanings is associated with the Bay at Brighton, where the Brighton River flows into the sea.  The image of his Gaelic-speaking ancestors arriving at the place and crossing the river becomes the central image in a tribal myth, a myth that incorporates the third, the historical Fall, the Fall into modern rational and technological secularism, but a myth that also looks back to the dream of building a Pastoral Paradise and a Just City.  In the uncollected 'Ancestors', the poet has a vision of those first  settlers, 'heirs of hopes', as they cross the river, but realises that they are all 'hunched in their last cradles'
     . . . leaving our plight
     To be fed only by shreds of windy light,
     Fibres of dark in the river's rope and fable.68
The image is picked up in the prose of 'Conversation with an Ancestor', where Baxter describes the image of the crossing, sees the dawn sky as intimating 'a new thing, a radical loss and a radical beginning', sees the settlers, as Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway imaginatively saw the Dutch sailors before Long Island in The Great Gatsby, and eloquently expounds their significance for him:
     . . . and the earth lay  before them, for that one moment of history, as a primitive and  sacred Bride, unentered and unexploited.  Those people, whose bones are in our cemeteries, are the only tribe I know of; and though they were scattered and lost, their  unfulfilled intention of charity, peace, and a survival that is more than self-preservation,  burns like radium in the cells of my body; and perhaps a fragment of their intention is  fulfilled in me, because of my works of art, the poems that are a permanent sign of  contradiction in a world where the pound notes and lens of the the analytical Western  mind are the only things held sacred.  I stand then as a tribesman left over from the  dissolution of the tribes.69

The view of his ancestors is complex.  They are seen as heroic, coming to New Zealand to create 'a Utopia, a Happy Island, a Just City in which the best of the Old World would survive, taking new Antipodean forms'.70 However, they were defeated by history, their 'country virtue' was 'betrayed' by gold when the new colony was swamped by the gold rush.  The young poet would not wish them to be alive again to share his Robert Lowell-ish vision that 'their orchard wealth decays' on 'gorse-choked farms' while 'our markets thrive / Dry tinder, touchwood for the final blaze'.71   But their intention went unfulfilled partly because of what they brought with them, a negative Calvinism that knew 'their Christ or no Christ ' only in 'the raging crackle of  / These fire-blackened thorns', so that they left us with 'the green blood / Of thorns that thickens in our veins'.  Our society, then, has 'a strong Calvinist bias unconsciously received by us from our forefathers, the early settlers', a latent puritanism that it 'carries like strychnine in its bones', or, to change the image, that 'underlies our determinedly secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden plot'.72 These forefathers, the poet's great-uncles and great-aunts, had 'strong chains in heart and head', could deal with 'Adam's dirt' only by repression and projection, so that 
     the lack ate inwardly like
     fire in piled-up couchgrass too
     green for it, billowing smoke. . . . 73

Thus for Baxter that mythical scene of the ancestors crossing the river at Brighton Bay relates to a complex ancestor myth, one in which the ancestors both, as remnants of the primitive tribe, contrast to the present technological and rationalistic culture, and, as puritans, carry the seeds of that culture's disease.  This complex myth appears again in the last section of 'Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet', when the poet again contemplates Brighton Bay, 'where a thread of brackish brown water is flowing out to the river mouth, where the early settlers crossed once, leading their horses'.  He feels an 'unfathomable sadness' as he views the place.  He would like to imagine that the bird-tracks left on the hard sand on the beach were 'made by the feet of human dancers, meeting around an altar or a bonfire in a nightlong dance, men and women joined, or perhaps women only, honouring the Earth Mother'.  That is, he attempts to imagine a more primitive tribe than his ancestors, unfallen; but present-day Brighton stands in utter contradiction to such a vision:
     But the glass-fronted houses above the bay will supply no ritual, nothing to join the  intellect or body to the earth it came from - only TV aerials, trucks of bricks, washing  hung out to dry, ice cream cones stacked behind the counter of a shop - the trivia of a   culture that has ceased to understand itself. The spondaic thud I hear is not the noise of feet but the beating of my own heart.74

The poet turns to the buried rocks in the wet sand flats, which he sees as 'the half-buried limbs of . . . the Titan Prometheus,  principle of the rebellious energy in man that enlarges our order by breaking it and allowing it to re-form in another pattern - an energy that our way of life dismembers and disregards'.  In the poem that he writes to honour Prometheus, the Titan's pain and gift, both repressed, are brought back to us by 'calamity, time, deeply thwarted desire', and as the poet contemplates Prometheus' limbs he feels the presence of the ancestors: 
           Only a pressure at
     The fences of the mind.   From clay mounds they gather
     To share the Titan's blood with us.74
But only the occasional ghostly presence is left to him, 'the tribesman left over from the dissolution of the tribes'.  Where his father's uncle could nearly kill a man who taunted him with having no tartan, the poet fears that 'the cloth has worn too thin', that there is nothing like that left to him to fight for.75

Thus the beach as an 'arena for historical change' operates for Baxter as a symbol within an ancestor myth.  The beach's other symbolic meanings tend to gather around the sexual one  for him. If the beach is a 'place where revelation may occur', the revelations are usually of Venus. 
Sometimes  she refuses to appear, and the revelation is aborted.  In 'Elegy at the Year's End', the poet walks down to the the Bay, but there is no revelation of  'green Aphrodite' rising from the sea 'to transfigure the noon'.  Rather, he hears 'the Sophoclean / Chorus: All shall be taken '.76  When at 30 he revisits Brighton, 'Venus with her thunder slept / On tired dunes, in grey maternal / Macrocarpa branches'.77  When he returns ten years later to the 'smooth edge of the flax-covered cliff' below Big Rock that had tempted him to suicide when he was younger, 'gutted by / The opposites of sex and pain', 'No squid-armed Venus rose / Out of the surf', but rather he received from the 'hurdling water' the 'invisible spirit ' embodied in the poem.78   The uncollected 'Encounter with Venus', taking place at Tait's Beach rather than at Brighton, is more sardonic.  The poet walks the beach, thinking of 'how great Venus . . . has lately abandoned our shore', when he sees an object bobbing in the waves.  He wades out to it to discover 'our islands' emblem, a dead sheep' with 'a great swollen gut, putrefied':
             Yes, mate, indeed
     a sacred occasion!  Through
     the surf I stumbled back, dumb-
     struck by shades of nationhood.79

Again, at the Otago Heads, he looks down from 'cliff-top boulders' to see, not any Venus to be 'born / Out of the gulf's throat', but rather the kraken of the fog, whose 'wide / Blinding tendrils move like smoke / Over the rock neck, the muttering flats, the houses'. 80
When Venus does appear, she may be primarily a projection of desire.  While the teen-age poet could see her as 'the birth of beauty' as she emerged 'shining from the sea-foam',  the mature poet  imagines the boys on the beach at Aramoana constructing 'their sensual fantasy, which is also sacred',  transforming a girl with a surfboard into 'the image of Venus not rising from the sea but going into it'.82  He preaches to the men at of Holy Cross that 'That long-haired girl upon the beach / With her eyes half-shut' is there because he had 'found / A Venus in the heart', and if they judge her they 'turn her from a pretty girl / Into a demoness'.83 At Brighton, 'That girl in her beach suit loitering among the dunes is no longer a figure of Venus' to the forty-year old poet who is no longer 'fighting the wars of Venus'.84 At Long Beach,  in contrast, the sleepy middle-aged poet is brought back to life by an 'apparition of the goddess Venus' in the person of 'A girl like a green hard stringy lupin pod',  his 'venereal thought / Constructed out of air or nothing. . . .' 85

The most positive revelation associated with a beach is sexual, when Horse and Fern make love on an abandoned gun emplacement above the surf:
 It was the hour of the hawk, not the hour of the dove.  While the waves chiselled at the rocks below, the mythical identification with all things living was achieved. 
'The goddess sex' had 'led him through a low doorway to the only earthly paradise'.86   At Tunnel Beach the 'hour of the dove' is experienced, but the revelation is more ambiguous. 
The sexual act seems to 'shut out sea thunder', to bring doves that still 'the lonely air'.  But then the poet hears 'the voices of the sea's women riding / All storm to come', and he is  not left with the doves of love but rather  'combers grinding  / Break sullen on the last inviolate shore'.87
A passage in the later 'Letter to Robert Burns' provides a gloss on that experience, as the poet praises it for putting him in touch with the 'biology' and 'mythology' that our culture represses and that are essential to the poet:
     And I must thank the lass who taught me
     My catechism at Tunnel Beach
     For when the hogmagandie ended
     And I lay thunder-struck and winded,
     The snake-haired Muse came out of the sky
     And showed her double axe to me.88

Twenty years later the poet returns to the same beach.  If  twenty years before,'Venus came over the sea' to the lovers, 'Lying (as so many do) / In one another's arms',   she  had left them 'Like shards of a dish the spade jars on'.  This time what the poet sees is the cliff above the beach: 'a high stone Rhadamanthus / Washed by the black froth of the sea'.89    As the notebook drafts make more explicit than does the final version of the poem, Baxter wishes us to recall not so much that Rhadamanthus was king of the Isles of the Blessed, where the lovers may temporarily have beached, but rather that he was judge of souls in the underworld, where the lovers will end, their moments of bliss long ago lost.  Thus in the version entitled 'The Tunnel' the poet makes explicit that he had not seen the cliff as a young man, 'made / Blind by Venus', but now he sees it as 'the myth / Of judgement when love dies'.90
If the beach can sometimes be the place of ambiguous revelation associated with Venus and the sexual experience, it is more often a less exalted 'arena for sexual adventure'.  As such it is seldom positive in its implications, for it is associated with 'the wars of Venus, the bitterest of all, to lose', which the forty-year-old poet claims to be relieved to be beyond, leaving him 'a little nearer to that community of the living and the dead which I have looked for all my life'.91 The sexual adventure is associated with a complex of recurring images involving lupin, sandhills, the Brighton bathing sheds, the Brighton boathouse, summer, Venus personified in girls in bathing suits, frustrated or exploitive sexuality, condoms, and masturbation.  The poet remembers the older boys with the 'big girls': 'Under the lupins, whispering in the dirt, / They imitated dogs'.92   Or, later, he sees  himself as 'savage empty boy / Haunting the bathing sheds',  drawn to and afraid of the older girls, 'furiously inventing a unicorn / Who hated the metal of Venus'.93    He remembers youth and 'the same sweet lie the lupin teaches' as it drops its 'gay pollen' on the frock and the bare leg and shoulder of the girl.94   The depressed and hungover Horse looks out in the morning on 'the treeless Domain' with a few 'early cars from town' already there, and thinks that later 'A few young men would take their girls into the lupins that grew along the sandhills, to lay down their overcoats and bang them in peace, absorbing the healing influences of the sea and soil.'95   In middle age, the poet walks the beach, 'Beyond the high-banked green domain / Where boy and girl lying in lupin mazes / Pluck the dragon's apple'.96   He remembers that 'From Black Head to the bar of Taieri Mouth' his father's uncle 'scattered lupin seed', and he thinks of the lovers who find cover there, leaving 'pale condoms' under the bushes with their 'bright female bloom' and their 'pollen blown over the wide stretch-marked belly of the sea'.97   The boathouse across the road from the river mouth and Domain he also associates with youthful sexuality.  He remembers the 'lifted frock' and 'the boathouse spree and the hayloft bed', 'white legs among the cords and rowlocks', and  his attempts 'to learn the tricks of water / From the boathouse keeper's daughter'.98  A married man in middle-age, he is still haunted by 'The floating feather / Of adolescent love' that he associates with the boathouse, and it is one of the icons of Brighton that he 'left behind in going to the city'.99    But it is the lupin that comes to mind most frequently. He imagines the 'rumbustious bad young man' (with echoes of Fairburn) persuading  the young girl to 'make the two-backed beast' 'under the yellow lupin', and then leaving her.100 He depicts the young man at the dance persuading the girl to come with him into the dunes at the mouth of the creek to defy the morality of her great grand-uncles 'In tartan plaid and moleskin cloth'.101  At the bonfire on the beach, he imagines how the young lovers later in the evening 'two by two will vanish / Into the dunes', their 'widening flesh' possessed by the spirits of the Maori who made a midden of shells on the beach.102   In his more Dylan Thomas- ish moods, he  stands  on the 'Low lovers' dune', hears Parson's Rock 'preaching to . . . the lupin-sheeted / Bed of the sway backed sinners', while he 'alive must grieve / For the true flesh time wounded. . .' , or he climbs  'to Barney's pulpit rock' and imagines the lovers: 
     Among night dunes the moony lovers 
     In lupin shade far and near 
     Twined under Venus' carnal star 
     Mock the power of the prince of air. 
     Their doomed flesh answers an undying summer. 103

Those  rocks  between sea and beach obviously symbolise a kind of permanence that 
contrasts to the transitory flesh.  'The stubborn rocks withstand / The ebb and surge of 
grief'.104    Barney's Island is a presence reminding us of the limits of our technology and the 
small scale of our time: 
     The island like an old cleft skull 
     With tussock and bone needles on its forehead 
     Lives in the world before the  settlers came 
     With gun and almanac.105
The poet preaches to the gulls from 'Barney's pulpit island side', and he feels most secure in 
his work when he is 'standing on the rock of real knowledge'.106    The fisherman on the rocks of Barney's Island becomes the image of the poet fishing  into the unconscious to find the dark material for the poem: 
     While loud across the sandhills 
     Clangs out the Sunday bell 
     I drop my line and sinker down 
     Through the weed-fronded swell, 
     And what I see there after dark 
     Let the blind wave tell.107

     I go on the beaches when the tide is low 

     And fish for poems where my four dead uncles, 
     Jack, Billy, Mark and Sandy 

     Let down their lines from laps of broken stone 
     For the fat red cod and small-mouthed greenbone.108

The symbolism of the rocks varies.  If those half-buried rocks between Barney's Island and the swimming beach  become the limbs of Prometheus, Lion Rock out off Big Rock, surrounded by the sea, 'shaped like a lion, fronting the south, / With mane of greybrown kelp alive and coiling', is associated with a cynical love affair between a young man and a middle- aged woman living in a cottage opposite it.109   To the older poet it seems to speak of death: 
            out there 
     Where the waves never cease to break 

     In the calmest weather, there's a hump-backed 
     Jut of reef - we called it Lion Rock - 

     Growling with its wild white mane 
     As if it told us even then 

     Death is the one door out of the labyrinth! 110

With Lion Rock, as with Barney's Island, rock as symbol merges with island as symbol. 
Baxter as critic has interpreted the island  in Curnow's terms as 'a symbol of isolation from 
European tradition, both in place and time'.111  The island in his world is Green Island, 
primarily a marker of the boundaries of his little world, but also to the young poet  in 1944 a symbol of isolation, more natural than cultural: 
     Stone sea moves southward; the volcanic island 
     Scrub sides quiet, surf-eaten 
     In antarctic isolation 
     Breasts that tideless flow.112

Islands, however, are not a major Baxter symbol, and rock images relate more frequently to the symbol of the cave or protective ledge. On a stormy night the older poet avoids the cliff-top overlooking Lion Rock, where he had contemplated suicide when he was younger (and where he did not see Venus), because 'the sea's throat / Is filled with the voices of oldest friends / Who offer what the living cannot find'.113 However,  there is also a 'Rock ledge above the sinuous wave' where the suicidal impulse was quieted by 'A rock carved like a woman, / Pain's torso, guardian of the place', a 'Magdalen of the rock' who can 'ask for us the death hour's peace'.114  There is also a rock chair on Big Rock, sitting 'over the whelming / burst of recurrent breakers / down there in the channel outside / the bay' which offers the reward of 'difficult safety' and seems to relieve the sense of stress.115  Near there is the cave on Big Rock  where he could 'listen to some greater I / Whose language was silence', and feel his despair and his sexual tension eased by 'a silence that accepted all'.  The cave becomes at the end of the poem the womb of the Earth Mother: "Open, mother.  Open.  Let me in".116  The poet remembers his first poem as coming when he 'climbed up to a hole in a bank in a hill above the sea' and there 'first endured that intense effort of listening' from which the poem emerges.117   That  experience in turn relates to the limestone cave below Saddle Hill, off Creamery Road, where 'The smell of the earth was like a secret language / That dead men speak and we have long forgotten', and he could feel protected from 'age's enmity and love's contagion'.118

If caves symbolically become the womb of the Earth Mother, then hills become her breasts, the landscape her body.  When he flies north out of Dunedin, the poet sees the land below in those terms: 
     My mother Gea below me is undressed 
     Showing her stretchmarks got by long childbearing.119
When he flies to Dunedin to take up the Burns Fellowship, he sees that 'a quarry like a cancer / Has cut away half of the smaller breast of Saddle Hill'.120  A prose commentary makes more explicit the significance: 
     . . .  perhaps . . .  a wiser but less affluent society might not have allowed half of Saddle  Hill to be cut away - a symbolic amputation of one of the breasts of the earth mother.121
At Aramoana  he turns away from the Venus figure in the surf , the dream construction of the boys on the beach, to 'my dream, in nooks / below the sandhill cone, where Gea / speaks in parables of rock'.122

   The prose commentary spells out the implications: 
     . . .  my own dream, my way of hiding myself from death, from the lack of spiritual  support in all created things, is to turn  to the least demanding and the most supporting  reality, Gea, the earth herself, the oldest of the tribe of gods.  The sandhill cone is her 
     breast, the mats of cutty-grass cover her ancient vagina - my words, if they are to make  sense, depend on her and return to her as the symbolic ground of existence - away from   her I feel lost. . . .123

But Gea is not the ultimate reality in Baxter's symbolic Brighton world.  Rather it is the sea. 
If he finds peace in contact with the Earth Mother, a return to the womb in her caves, he still finally turns to the ocean, where 
     . . . the sea aisles burn cold 
     In fires of no return 
     And maned breakers praise 
     The death hour of the sun. 124
Its meaning is paradoxical: 
     as symbol of death and oblivion; 
     as symbol of regeneration. 125
In the semi-autobiographical 'The Prisoner Describes Himself', the speaker remembers how powerful was the formative presence of the sea when he was young on the Kuri Bush farm: 
         I began my life within sight of the sea.  Looking out through the gap in the  brushwood fence I would see the blue-grey waves where currents moved like great  serpents, and at night the smell of the sea was in my nostrils when I fell asleep. . . . 
          All night the sea moved in my blood. . . .  The sea carried me always on its breast like  a floating bundle of kelp. 126

In 'The Waves' 'the slow language of the waves' seemed to the adolescent  to 'give hope of truth to come' in a sexual encounter, a 'dark meeting / With  a woman with a body like the moon'.  However, the moon became 'Goddess of sexual pain' and left the young man contemplating the sea with 'poison crystals' whirling in his blood.  The middle-aged poet hopes to find some ruler beyond 'the flux of fire, / Salt tides and air' other than the goddess of sex, a way to share the 'fluid motion' of the waves instead of fighting it, and acknowledges that 'the flesh I love will die, / Desire is bafflement.'  He ends by identifying with Noah, hoping that true knowledge will come as he is keeping watch 'while the dark water heaves'.127 In many poems 'the thunder of the obliterating sea' suggests death, but only in death will freedom be found: 'The ocean I / Once feared, I love more than the frozen land'.128 'The unique left-handed saint', the dark creative force within him, tells him 
     . . .  that Sophocles 
     Heard in the thunder of Greek seas 
     On beaches grey with ambergris, 
     On the recoiling serpent hiss 
     A voice proclaiming to the land 
     That men are banks of broken sand . . . .129
The October storm at Brighton, 'the great sea-devil or the wind of middle age', may induce in the poet 'bad dreams / In which the sea has taken charge of the land',  but it is finally a 
liberating force, freeing him from 'the chains of Eros':
     . . .  turn to watch 
     The tide flood in at the river mouth, 
     Washing under the bridge, making the canoes float 
     Upside-down. 
                            Freedom by death is the chosen element. 
  The black strings of kelp are riding on the tide's cold virile breast. 130

At Goat Island at Long Beach the poet hears 'the sea god's voice' echo off the cliffs and turns away from 'the young girls in their pink blouses' to the liberating power of the sea: 
            Blessed be 
     The sea god's hammer that will break 
     Dome after dome the cages of the land 
     And set the dead men free.131
The sea cave, with its 'kelp smell, / Sea smell, the brown bladdered womb' is tempting, but he finally must turn away from comfort to face the sea itself.132   On the beach at Aramoana,  the poet finally turns away even from Gea to 'where the black swells begin' and beyond that to 
     where the serpent current flows 
     out of the harbour gates, long- 
     flowing, strongly tugging at 
     the roots of the world. 133
For the sea 
     is the image of death, the separating and dividing void, which nevertheless is the source 
     of my joy. The serpent current betrays the world by delivering it into the hand of God, 
     yet man is not a creature of earth, his renewal can only come out of the storm, out 
     of  the void, out of the depths of God.  And the serenity of God's silence is the 
    answer to  man's prayer. 134

The world of Brighton and its coast was thus central to Baxter, the place where the twenty- five year old poet imagined he would wish to be buried...
          Know I loved most when alive 
          A certain bare coast open to the South 
          Where ocean and continual gales do strive 

          In hoarse green breakers by a river mouth. 135
It was the place that formed his poetic consciousness: 
         There is no coast I can compare to this. 
           Here is the ampitheatre of my dreams 
           Where once, a lonely child, I made 
           My own mythology of weeds and shells 
           And grew acquainted with the moods of Death 
           Till we were friends, old friends.136
His Brighton environment gave him the material for a full symbolic world, both a fallen Eden and a world in which natural images body forth the basic powers and patterns of life.  As Vincent O'Sullivan has said, 'The Otago coast and hinterland - the only landscape, he said, he ever really loved - provides precisely adequate detail for most moods, and for their mythical embodiment'.   Brighton and the coastline from Taieri Mouth to Long Beach are thus at the centre of his poetic world, but they are flanked by two other important aspects of his symbolic universe, the City, represented by Dunedin, and the Wilderness, represented by Central Otago. 

The City to Baxter is the human domain, an imperfect emdodiment of the dream of the Just City, 'a City of a kind', one which is 'finite, exact, and reasonable, designed for the fulfilment of limited aims'.138  The crucial symbolic elements in the city townscape (except for the pubs) are all there in a prose passage in which the middle-aged Baxter confronts the site of his youthful rebellion and wonders 'What happened to that stupid sad young man?. . .  Who killed cock robin with his drumming heart and his head full of feathers?': 139

Time, said the Town Hall clock, the four-faced master of the windy year.  Sin, said the First Church spire, needling up to the Otago heaven of tombstone clouds.  But the Leith Stream, the last and only woman in the world, lulling the dead sky in her arms,  sighing under bridge and over weir down to the flat crab-wet harbour, had nothing at all to say.139
In the symbolic world of Baxter's City, there are on  the one hand the forces of the living death of bourgeois respectability.  The three clocks - 'the railway clock, the Town Hall clock, /  And the Varsity clock'- are a recurring symbol of them, as they 'clang early summer time / Across the town cold as a Shacklock range',  or as they  mark off the night hours, 'genteel, exact / As a Presbyterian conscience'.140 They 'fill the conduits of air' with somewhat different messages. The Town Hall clock cries 'honour me', while the railway clock reminds us that 'Each traveller . . . /  Has the horizon for a hangmans's noose, / Will end in a small stone cell'.141'The imperative clang'142 of the clock tower of the University is more various.   To the young poet it says merely 'learning and secrecy;' while 'frowning at the wicked weirs', while the young man in 'Cressida (a lyric sequence)' associates the clock ironically with the lecturer in the classroom clearing his throat and speaking 'Of McDougall's instinctive drives'.143   It  implicitly reminds Horse on behalf of the repectable Dead that he has been wasting his time at the Bowling Green Hotel, while   in 'Walking up Castle Street', it speaks to the narrator more directly      Its voice reverberated and grew in the Presbyterian silence. 
         - You're late!  You're late!  You'll be late when the trumpet's blown.  I've seen you, I  know you.  Where were you on Monday?  Drunk in the Bowling Green.  Where were  you on Wednesday?  Smooging in the town belt. Where were you on Friday?  Nobody 
     knows.  What would your parents say?  What will the examiners say?  No application. 
     No team spirit.  No sense of decency at all. . . .
         Grey as a hangover conscience, the old clock looked down on me; but as the chimes died irreverent sparrows flew back in a cloud to squabble and skitter and nest in his elder's hat.144

In the unpublished 'The Clock Tower' it attempts 'to save / us from ourselves' with its 'fatherly' emphatic explanations, but to the poet it is merely a 'petrified phallus', to be blessed perhaps but not to be loved like the mother Leith.145 The church spire is not so much in evidence as the clock towers in most of the writings, but it too is associated with the phallic fathers, 'Being so finely built / On Calvin's masturbative guilt'.146   Horse takes note of its obscene parody when he walks 'quickly along the edge of the Queen's Gardens where the floodlit war memorial pointed a dead phallus at the stony heavens'.147    The poet in 'To a City Father' puts the point more bitterly, calling the cenotaph 'The great stone prick of Old Man Death'obscenely erected 'to celebrate / A million graves, a million rotting bones / That fertilise your interest and security'.148   Death is likewise associated with the images of secular repectability, the lights of suburban houses, as Horse looks at them: 
     The lights of Anderson's Bay glittered steadily, each point of light indicating a suburban  hutch where people talked and yawned and killed time, afraid of the graveyard night   outside their windows.149

The young Baxter similarly watched as 'The lights of a mausoleum-to-be glittered on the hills beyond the harbour'.150 Opposed to the images of 'a culture kept alive by the drug death' in Baxter's symbolic City,'Calvin's town', are those asociated with Bohemian revolt, experienced by the poet when he 'made a mother of the keg, and 'the town split open like an owl's egg / Breaking the ladders down'.151 First there are those 'fat pubs of the harbour town' in which 'it seemed more safe to drown' than to stay in 'this boneyard peace / Of ceremonious dying' at home.152 They are there in profusion, the Green Island, the Grand, the Shamrock, the Oban, the City, the Royal Albert, the Robert Burns  and, most important, the Bowling Green, the 'student's home from home. . . 
where Mahomet's coffin hangs between earth and heaven waiting for the six o'clock judgement', the place where Horse learned 'the basic metaphors by which the human spirit expresses and conceals its tenderness, is grief, and its longing to return to the Garden of 
Eden'.153   The patron saint of the pubs is Robbie Burns, 'King Robert' on his 'anvil stone / Above the lumbering Octagon', and Baxter identifies with him, feeling that the reason for Burns' ' mandrake groans / Is wrapped like wire around my bones'.154   The statue, 'dry on his stump above the Octagon, was waiting for the traffic to stop so that he could step down to the Oban Hotel, bang on the bar and order a bucket of gin and harpic'.155 The poet imagines 'the sad old rip' grunting 'upon his rain-washed stone / Above the empty Octagon' and saying "O that I had the strength / To slip yon lassie half a length!"156

The Dunedin World

The young poet, sleeping off his Burnsian frolics on a bench in the town belt, the hours marked by the three clocks, discovers himself at 'the absolute unmoving hub',  with the sense of nada  that is 'the beginning of knowledge', so that the bench becomes another symbolic place of revelation.157   A different place of revelation is the Castle Street flat of his first love, the place where  'a certain act' did occur, the place where he 'found the point of entry, / The place where father Adam died'.158   When he returns to the site of flat  twenty years later, he finds that 'They've bricked up the arch' that used to lead to the flat, symbolising his inability to return to that youthful ardour.159 The holy places of Bohemia stand against the symbols of deathly respectability, but the most powerful symbol in the city is a natural one, the Leith, associated with sexuality and other natural forces that persist even though channelled and charted.  The 'crinkled labia of blossom / On the trees beside the weir' symbolise the sexual experiences that 'Captured and held the fugitive / From time, from self, from the iron pyramid'.160 'The Leith Stream's roar' (in most  unlikely fashion heard from his lover's flat on Royal Terrace) symbolises to the traveller of  'Henley Pub' the uncontrollable force of 'natural sexual power'.161 

Outside the University  buildings, the 'grey Leith water drum[s] / With laughter from a bird's beak at what their learning has left out'.162   She is contrasted to the authoritarian father clock tower, with its 'petrified phallus', for while the poet can only 'bless' somewhat equivocally the clock tower's 'house of learning or obfuscation', he loves 'the untouched breasts of my / mother, dark muse and succubus, / unconnected with our human knowledge', serenely 'flowing below the ledge / where gulls preen feather by feather / a whiteness that will die / soon'.163  The young poet observes how 'On smooth cylindrical weirs Leith-waters glister'.164   The middle-aged poet  on a Sunday family  walk sees the weirs as 'passionate almost beyond bearing', and the middle- aged narrator of 'Walking Up Castle Street' associates them with a 'girl ghost in an overcoat . . . waiting at the bridge, with dark hair and a voice like weir water'.165    But the passion seems mostly to be sexual pain   There is a recurring image of 'a streetlight on  / The muscled Leith water' associated with a lovers' quarrel, so that it becomes  an 'ikon' that haunts and burns him, a symbol of the failure of love: 
     For me it is the weirs that mention 
     The love that we destroy 
     By long evasion, politics and art, 
     And speech that is a kind of contraception: 
     A streetlight flashing down on muscled water, bodies in the shade, 
     Tears on the moonwhite face, the voice 
     Of time from the grave of water speaking to 
     Those who are lucky to be sad. 166

When Fern breaks with Horse, she returns to him a stone phallus he gave to her, and as he goes from her flat to the Bowling Green he gazes 'speculatively at the water frothing over the weirs' and tosses the phallus into the Leith.167   But when the despairing middle-aged poet has a destructive sexual encounter in 'the garden by the river', the river has a calming effect as it seems to symbolise life moving  towards  death: 
     Kisses scald.  Words crush.  But the river 
     Flowed on, in a bell of calm, to whom I said, 
     'Pray for us, Mother.  We are not yet 
     Able to die -168