Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/32

a story seems to vanish; and all the writers who have adopted the common, narrative metres have been unable to dissipate a certain incongruous English atmosphere that clings to the very movement of the lines. Domett lost his legend entirely in the intricacies of his poem; Bracken’s rough and frequently changing metres are convincing now and then, but the sustained effort fails. Perhaps the rugged rhythm of “The Noosing of the Sun-God” weds best of all to its subject; and next to it the styles modelled respectively on the old English or Scottish folk-ballads and on the longer metres that William Morris used for his saga-poems. Yet no writer has produced hitherto a rendering of a Maori legend that is satisfactory in every respect; and though a dozen renderings have been given of the tale of Hinemoa alone—the maiden who swam across Lake Rotorua to her lover, Tutanekai, being guided by the sound of his flute, and was discovered by him in a warm pool on the beach—none of them approaches in beauty the simple Maori original, translated by Sir George Grey in his Polynesian Mythology: “And Hinemoa knew the voice, that the sound of it was that of the beloved of her heart; and she hid herself under the overhanging rocks of the hot spring; but her hiding was hardly a real hiding, but rather a bashful concealing of herself from Tutanekai, that he might not find her at once,