Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/333

 The Poetry of the Kiivai Papuans. 3 1 1

Another instance, also quoted above, appears in the song of the building of the darimo, men's house, by Abere. Out of the forty-four verses which describe the building and pulling down of the house there are forty in which the verb begins with a ^-sound.

" Dedearo Aberc mere darimo paea dedearo!' — " Doputimo Abere mere darimo paea doputimo." — '' Doomiro Abere mere darimo paea doomiroT Etc.

The consonance is still more marked by the recurrence of the word darimo, also beginning with d, in each of the forty verses.

Now, it seems open to question whether so many verbs beginning with d and connected with house building exist in the ordinary language. It appears more likely that some at least of the verbs are simply coined for the sake of the alliteration, without meaning anything in particular. Even if this be so, we understand that the different verses may have a sufficiently clear signification. The nouns, refer- ring to the different parts of the structure, are used in their right sense, and as everybody knows that the song is about a house in building, the meaning of the separate verbs is of minor importance.

The same applies to the verbs in the song about the making of a canoe. Different informants of mine translated many of the separate verses rather differently, which shows that they did not understand them properly, but they all agreed as to the general run of the narrative.

Although we can thus trace a sort of rhyme and allitera- tion in the Kiwai songs, what we never find in the written texts, and cannot expect to find, is metre. The reason is simply that the texts only exist as songs, and that in singing, as stated before, the words are modified at will, so that almost any text could be sung to any tune. In writing it is almost impossible to retain the deviations from the ordinary form of the words.