Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/450

444 with a long hooked stick. Then a quantity of thick juicy leaves, freshly plucked, had to be thrown on the hissing stones, and when a cloud of scented steam rose into the air, and only then, the oven would be ready for Rao to be laid in it and carefully covered with more of the rich banana and breadfruit leaves. She had plenty of leisure for composition. And her sister-in-law sat by her, listening attentively, that she might be able to publish the poem afterwards to the tribe. This was Rao's lament: —

Mr. Gill suggests "Fal, lal, lal," as the English equivalent of the burden of mere vocal sounds occurring in the first and last stanzas, "E rua ua karireia ē." But one can hardly admit that Rao, however desirous of expressing her resignation, would, as a poet, have chosen to do so by enlivening her dirge with a comic chorus. Rather it may be supposed that the sounds have a note of sorrow in them to Polynesian ears; something corresponding to the mournful "waly, waly," of one of our own most pathetic ballads. There is a touch of craft in the praise of Tupa's conduct during the famine; Rao, who would not be guilty of argument against her husband, would yet, if she could, awake in him the remembrance of his former self-control — how he had borne to be hungry and had eventually been all the happier for it: she would, if she could, insinuate into his mind an emulation of himself. A like subtlety appears in the next stanza; it is not only for the aptness of the metaphors that she speaks of cavally-fish and of bread-fruit, the reference to them might perhaps inspire her husband with an appetite for more customary food than herself. Yet one would not blame her for her harmless devices to turn her husband's mood, as if they had been a resistance to it. And if, unlike Griselda who was pleased with everything that happened to her and through all her miseries "lived contented," she breaks into grief and even entreaty, it must be remembered that she could not compose a lament without.

Parenthetically it may be remarked that this unsophisticated savage, whom Mr. Gill's friend's father knew, industrious over her last song while the oven was being made ready for her, offers an encouragement to those whose sense of congruity is jarred upon by the cavatine of sopranos and tenors in peril on the operatic stage. The child of nature did what librettists make the prima donna do.

Rao completed her dirge to her own and her sister-in-law's satisfaction, and sat practising it, ready for Tupa. It so moved the sister-in-law that she formed an heroic resolution — a resolution which she kept — that she would not eat a morsel of Rao. She might perhaps have called some of Rao's family to the rescue, but she was an invalid, dying of cancer, and could not leave the house. All she could do she did; she learned the song. At last Tupa had got his leaves asteam, and came. Rao sang him the dirge. Then he