Yesterday was Tuesday Poem day and that always gets me thinking about “the best words in their best order”, which was what Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834; he of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Xanadu fame) said about poetry.

I suppose poets and prose writers, if they so choose, may argue forever about which group may lay claim to the best words and better order, but there is no doubt in my mind that poetry often provides very apt words.

Shortly before Christmas I was (legitimately, I hasten to add) sent a series of black and white images of Scott’s last and ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. Wonderful photographs of the stark, white world that is Antarctica and of the men, and also the ponies and the dog teams brought to the frozen continent for the expedition.

Coming right on the celebration of Christmas, which is traditionally a festival of life and renewal—and of course in NZ is all about light and summer, as well—these photographs struck me hard. Perhaps because the last, ill-fated Scott expedition left from New Zealand—and Christchurch, in fact—I had grown up with the sad and terribly moving story, which is mainly about death in that white, unforgiving world. I knew, for example, that the ponies had died and the dogs been shot, and that many of the men in those beautiful photographs would also have died.

So to me, the photos, despite their austere beauty, spoke of sorrow and loss and death—and sent me to poetry for the ‘apt words’ that could encompass those emotions.  In this case, the “best words in their best order” came from poems in Bernadette Hall’s 2007 collection The Ponies (Victoria University Press), produced in part from her time in Antarctica as the 2004 Antarctic Arts Award recipient:

“That’s when the blizzard struck. Now it’s white-out.
Our faces grow black from burning blubber, our eyes
weep, our lips split. Jofe says we have to keep calm,
keep on talking to each other. Our rations run low.

Outside, the ponies lying dead in the snow.”

[from the title poem, The Ponies, pp 23-4.]

and

“When there is white only,
when everything is coloured white,
the land, the sky, the ice and the horizon,

the heroes as they walk away
you’d say were climbing a white wall to heaven.”

[from the poem Heaven, p 30]