But these are aimless rhymes and will be understood by few,
Because I am the poet of those old things men call new.
IN the shadowland regions of a barbarian poet’s brain flows the river Lethe that murmurs the most subtle music of sentient Nature. Of such a poet I shall tell in the following pages, one whom I instinctively understood. For I also have stood in the primeval forest and “heard the silent thunders of the leaves” and seen the lightnings of a wild bird’s eyes, and God’s hand carving a thousand pillars for the temples of Nature, painting magical halls with the storied history of the blue days and daubs of all the dead sunsets. Wonderful eerie temples they were too. I have even been a pagan and half fancied I have seen the dead children creep out of the shadows and gaze around as they heard the sad songs and whisperings of those old forest trees. Nor was I deaf to the cry of anguish from the bleeding forest flowers as my foot crushed their uplifted faces of brief enough beauty. O Le Langi saw the world with such eyes. He was the first poet of his race. He was crammed full of mythical light, his imagination touching with splendour all that his eyes gazed upon. He hated most white men and their wretched boast of advancement. He deeply read the books of Nature, but threw the white man’s lotu books into the sea! He too might well have cried out to his chastened people who had accepted the white man’s dogmas and gifts of clothing from the European morgues:
“Lo! thirty centuries of literature
Have curved your spines and overborne your brains.”
O Le Langi’s ever earnest cry was:
Lo! centuries of grand belief in gods
Have chasteneth us; my mind a forest is
Of budding-light and thought’s bright spirit-flowers
And faery-wings of Beauty’s moving hours.