You have your portion—of love;
Humanity smells at the door.
Aye, indeed.
The imagery of this poem is peculiarly obscure and the meaning difficult of translation. The allusions are so local and special that their meaning does not carry to a distance.
Wai-aleale is the central mountain mass of Kauai, about 6,000 feet high. Its summit, a cold, fog-swept wilderness of swamp and lake beset with dwarfish growths of lehua, is used as the symbol of a woman, impulsively kind, yet in turn passionate and disdainful. The physical attributes of the mountain are ascribed to her, its spells of frosty coldness, its gloom and distance, its fickleness of weather, the repellant hirsuteness of the stunted vegetation that fringes the central swamp—these things are described as symbols of her temper, character, and physical make-up. The bloom and herbage of the wilderness, much pelted by the storm, are figures to represent her physical charms. But spite of all these faults and imperfections, a perennial fragrance, as of mokihana, clings to her person, and she is the object of devoted love, capable of weaving the spell of fascination about her victims.
This poem furnishes a good example of a peculiarity that often is an obstacle to the understanding of Hawaiian poetry. It is the breaking up of the composition into a number of parts that have but a loose seeming connection the one with the other.
