A Pagan Poet—Influence of Byron and Keats—Star-myths—Enchanted Crab. The imaged stars the oceans knew a million years ago
Are dancing in the eyes of all the cities that I know!
The man who sails to heathenland to preach the newest creed
Sees in the happy pagan’s eyes his own soul’s greatest need.
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 204splendour 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.
I am the darker-age grown old and thin—
Personified, tattooed from toes to chin,
And for you and your God care not one pin!
Such was O Le Langi’s cry to the white men—O Le Langi, who stands out like some wonderful, tattooed bas-relief in the background of my memory.
O Le Langi means Chief of the Heavens, and, so far as his handsome physique and fine, expressive face were concerned, he deserved that name. He was a fine sample of his race. Though he lived in Samoa, he was a full-blooded Marquesan, having emigrated from Nuka Hiva to Samoa in his youth. His father had been high chief of Queen Vaekehu’s royal bodyguard when that South Sea Semiramis had reigned supreme over her dominions and a thousand death-drums had called the hour of the sacrificial festival. O Le Langi’s mother had escaped from the rods of the French officials by beating a hasty retreat from Nuka Hiva to Papeete some fifty years before I met him. From Papeete she had stowed away 205in a trading schooner with her three little children, O Le Langi and her two daughters.
Both the girls had succumbed to the privations and terrors of some long voyage in an open boat which had finally drifted O Le Langi and his mother to the Samoan Isles. The incidents of that terrible voyage O Le Langi only hinted about. Nor was I one who would attempt to learn more, it being quite obvious to me that the sad old chief had some strange idea that the whole truth of those days were best kept a secret in his own heart.
Though secretive over the tragic history that had caused his father’s execution and his mother’s flight from her native land, O Le Langi never tired of telling me the wonders of his tribe, and commemorating in words the mighty deeds of his forefathers.
His knowledge of heathen mythology was marvellous, as were the tattooed armorial bearings, the insignia of blue blood, which were visible on his massive chest. I entertained no doubt whatever as to Le Langi’s royal pedigree. Seeing that massive human parchment inscribed with wondrous savage hieroglyhpics, the truth of all he said was perfectly evident. I knew that the Marquesans of royal blood had the tribal mottoes and family crest tattooed on their sons before puberty.
Langi looked liked some Greek god as he stood on his village stump, his royal robe of the best tappa-cloth swung about his rosewood-hued, majestic frame. Never were the graceful, god-like shoulders wholly covered. Even the maids, as they listened to his impassioned oratory, sighed as the lightnings of poetic imagination leapt from those fine dark eyes of his. Yes, old as he was. By profession he was a travelling scribe, a genuine South Sea poet. This talent he had inherited. For I discovered that his father had once stood in the barbarian forums of Tai-o-hae and spouted the charms of his queen, 206Vaekehu, commemorating in verse the warrior-like deeds of the many brief kings who had ascended her throne—and their deaths when she had tired of them.
His temperament was Byronic, but at times he would become strangely imbued with the savage instincts of his race, becoming extremely bitter and cynical when his fortunes were at a low ebb. For I must confess he had a large share of the commercial spirit. This much I noticed when he looked into the coco-nut-shell that he always passed around amongst his audience. Often one could see a poetic grin of extreme satisfaction end the handsome wrinkles in a bunch up to the northern territory of his high, bald, intellectual physiognomy as he counted the collection.
I never tired of listening to his way of telling the poetic legends of his island world to the white men, though I must admit that, beyond myself, few men of my colour were interested in all he had to say. Grins and jokes and indecent remarks were their highest contribution in the way of interest or gifts when he finished his poems.
I do not exaggerate in saying that, though Langi could not speak our language better than an English child of ten years, he was conversant with the works of many of our poets. He had an old volume of Byron. He asked me if I knew Keats!
“He great Tusitala chief!” he said, when I told him Keats was dead. Then he started off in raptures over Saturn and the fallen deities and goddesses of Hyperion! He had also read Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
It seemed a wonderful thing that one should leave one’s country and travel thousands of miles across desolate seas and pioneer lands, to find, at last, on a savage isle of the remote wild South Seas, a savage who loved poetry!
It is true enough that the old chief got little appreciation out of his talent, but many kicks.
207Poor O Le Langi! None of the natural chances of the literary world came his way either by birth or luck. He was born in a spot remote from all the dubious possibilities that the civilized world offers to budding aspirants. He had none to puff him. With all his astuteness he could seize on no scheme that would elevate him on a pedestal in the eyes of men. Alas! no starving, unrecognized poet of another tribe expired on his doorstep, so that the O Le Langi family for successive generations might write the dead poet’s memoirs, and the memoirs of their father’s memoirs concerning the poet’s last sigh and the benevolence of the O Le Langi family to the dying poet’s last ten minutes! Ah me! No publisher chanced upon sad O Le Langi till I, a penniless traveller, appeared on the scene, recognizing his wonderful genius. And now that his body is dust beneath his beloved coco-palms, I would write these humble memoirs and commemorate the dust of the greatest poet I ever met on earth.
It is nothing against the posthumous poetic fame of O Le Langi to say that he had loved passionately, more than twice. Indeed, it is well known that men who are not poets have this mortal failing.
The amorous weakness of O Le Langi was impressively forced upon me, for did I not walk beneath the coco-palms and breadfruits to that silent, hallowed spot where slumbered his sleeping passions?—the little native cemetery where slept the dead women and children that he had loved.
It was through this sad visit that I heard so much; for as O Le Langi knelt over each little mound of crumbling dust he kissed the earth and wept like a child. I saw at a glance that the solid earth did not hide from the eyes of imagination the stretched figures, the eyes, the lips, and the little fingers that he had once loved.
208Rising to his feet he surveyed me with solemn eyes, then said:
“Ah, Papalagi, me now grow old and weak; me now belonger to fool time.”
“No, you don’t, great O Le Langi, high chief of handsome bearing, and mightiest poet of the South Seas,” said I.
My heart was truly sorry for the old savage man, and well I knew that such flattery was worth its weight in gold at such a melancholy hour.
Then I continued, as with an effort he drew his tattooed shoulders up to their ful............