PR
6013
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
p
l
POEMS OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA
Nos. L, II., HI., VI., VII., VIII., IX., X., XL, XII.,
XIII., XV, XVIII. reprinted by courtesy of the
Editor from the Perak Pioneer.
The Design on the Cover is taken from " Indra Sebaha,'
a Fairy-Tale recently translated by a Malay
writer from the Hindustani.
POEMS OF THE
MALAY PENINSULA
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
ON THE MALAY PEOPLE
BY
R. GREENTREE, B.A.
LATE OF THE PERAK CIVIL SERVICE, MALAY STATES
PHILIP WELLBY
6 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
1901
Printed by BALLANTVNE, HANSON
At the Ballantyne Press
Co.
PK
6(9/3
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 7
I. THE SINGING BAMBOO . . . . '. ' . 47
II. SONG OF THE CHANDRAWASI .... 50
III. MENJELMA 53
IV. KRAMAT 56
V. WRECK OF THE PERDANA, KUALA PAHANG . 59
VI. KUALA PAHANG 62
VII. MALACCA 64
VIII. SWORD OF HANG TUAH 66
IX. FATE EAST AND WEST 69
X. CARVING ON THE WALL OF A MOSQUE . . 72
xi. AMOK 75
XII. THE PILGRIMAGE 78
XIII. ABDULLAH . 8l
<f
vi CONTENTS
PAGE
XIV. THE WITCH OF THE MOUNTAINS . 83
XV. VOICE OF THE FORESTS 89
XVI. SETTING SUNS 91
XVII. SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND .... 94
XVIII. MALAYA FROM THE SEA 95
XIX. AVE ATQUE VALE 97
NOTES 99
POEMS OF
THE MALAY PENINSULA
INTRODUCTION
I
THE following poems, with one or two ex-
ceptions, appeared originally in the Perak
Pioneer.
They formed an attempt to bring into promi-
nence certain aspects of the Malay character,
history, and natural surroundings, which under
the materialising influence of latter-day civilisa-
tion are passing gradually out of view. The
Malays themselves, in their passionate regard
8 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
for what they imagine to be the actual truth
concerning matters of history which only re-
motely affect their individual lives, are largely
responsible for the prosaic way of looking
at things which is noticeably gaining ground
among them every day, assisted as it is by
that suspicious dislike of ideal conceptions, and
contented tendency to sheer materialism, which
dominate every branch of the Mongolian
family. But inasmuch as neither wilful blind-
ness nor, as is probably the case with the
Malay, an imperfectly developed conscious-
ness can prevent the Rational Order which
pervades the universe from manifesting itself
in national life and thought, though perhaps
such a manifestation can be seen only by
other eyes than those of its medium, there is
INTRODUCTION 9
sufficient ground for viewing the occurrences
both of ordinary life and of legend definitively
in this light. And although in modern times
we generally condemn, as laboured and peda-
gogic, the Dantesque l method of calling atten-
tion to the organic unity of analytic criticism
and direct intuition by giving play to the
formative imagination for the avowed purpose
of making it serve as a handmaid to philosophy,
still, to take an instance from one department
of artistic sensibility, the beholder can feel the
charm of a beautiful face, even though his
mind may be capable of dissecting it anatomic-
ally. Michael Angelo indeed would have said
that he cannot do so on any other condition.
And in the same way impressions of the
1 See Dante's Vita Nuova and // Convita.
io POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
spiritual life of a people are not otherwise pre-
served from fleetingness and fluctuation than
in virtue of their being the outcome of rational
and creative principles.
For this reason I shall try to show what
the Malays are, and what they would seem
to need for their full development, relying on
the fact that even fragmentary legends and
proverbs give a clue to both one and the
other. For the future is determined by the
present ; what is dim will become clearer,
and the lapse of time in a process of intelli-
gent evolution will help to characterise the
vague and relatively formless.
INTRODUCTION i i
II
The Malays are a nation of shy and proud
individualists, with a pride which is never
aggressive, but merely defensive or silently
reproachful. Quite recently freed from the
artificial bonds of a feudal system, they have
not as yet had the time necessary for the
growth of an idea to evolve from themselves
and their environment a new system of social
and moral unity. As among all Oriental
nations, custom has a certain influence among
them, but it rarely conflicts with their indi-
vidual inclinations, and when it is obeyed, it
is obeyed as something imposed on its servants,
as an arbitrary ordinance which it would be
a needless annoyance to defy, not as the ex-
12 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
pression of a man's better self reflected in,
and modifying, his social conditions. It has
thus no universally binding force, and, were
it not for its sanctions, might be reduced
to individual liking. On the same principle,
in the Mongolian family, argument, which is
essentially a symbol of the interdependence
of mind and mind, is not tolerated ; neither
is it tolerated outside. The Malay prides
himself on having what he calls a "divided
face," one part of it to hold by his own
opinion in the face of all persuasion, the
other to gratify his interlocutor by a seem-
ing assent. Nor is learning exempt from this
omnipresent atomism ; native scholars will tell
you, as one of them in fact told me, that the
collaboration of two men in writing a book
INTRODUCTION 13
is considered a sign of weakness in both, as
implying that neither is learned enough to
dispense with the other's assistance. Altogether
it is as though the World-Spirit had resolved to
incarnate for his envisaging the idea of sheer
individualism, as well marked as the conditions
of a scheme of things, in which men have to
live together somehow, permit. (Cp. "Amok,"
the insane exaggeration of something felt by
the Malay to a less extent in a condition of
sanity.) Under ordinary circumstances such a
temper can lead to nothing but weakness, and
it is primarily responsible for the evanescent
character of any influence which the historical
Malay may have exercised over the various
fields of human activity in the past, as well
as for the fact that his descendants are being
14 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
gradually crushed out by other races to-
day.
There is, however, one external bond of union
which has secured for the Malays a certain
amount of coherence, inorganic though it be.
The Mohammedan religion, of which they
are unquestioning followers, enables them to
maintain a sort of solidarity as against the
worshippers of other gods with whom their
sea-girt lands are crowded, but for intellectual
and moral sympathy amongst themselves it
provides hardly any basis at all. Sympathy de-
pends very largely on growth, and that growth
the growth of ideas, inasmuch as the many-
sided man of many conceptions a universality
which does not come into being at one stroke
must obviously have more points in common
INTRODUCTION 15
with his fellows than the one-sided man. On
his imaginative side the former will be in
contact with one man, on his practical side
with another, and so on, every one of these
sides being represented by thoughts and judg-
ments which through their constant growth
and transition from phase to phase, still further
widen his sympathies. But orthodox Mo-
hammedanism, being in its essence an un-
changeable revelation, implants in the mind of
its followers a few limited truths, from which
they think it criminal to deviate, and which may
not be discussed. That is all. Heresies and
Sufism no doubt have sprung up within it, but
they are chiefly to be found among the learned,
and the orthodox regard them with peculiar
abhorrence ; semi - civilised peoples of the
1 6 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Mohammedan creed do not seem to be aware
of the existence of such dissensions, and esteem
the faith to be one and indivisible, as its im-
port and genius certainly is.
The Malays, however, were not always Mo-
hammedans, and the liberty they give their
women indicates that the passion which each
of them possesses for ordering the details of
his daily life as he individually thinks fit, has
not been affected to any appreciable extent
by the dictates of his religion, or at any
rate by the practice of his co-religionists the
Turks, whom he admires so much. Immersed
in local interests and very incurious, he cannot
be said either to know or care much about
any foreign lands other than those inhabited
by his own kindred that is to say, the islands
INTRODUCTION 17
of Malaysia, with which, if we accept Sir Stam-
ford Raffles's exceedingly probable 1 idea that the
Malays were originally Tartars we may reckon
Constantinople. But he has heard some names
which make up for him the great world outside,
Miser (Egypt), Siam, Awa (Burmah), Samar-
cand. If he is an educated man, he has read
something about Hindustan (much as we read
about Tartary in Marco Polo's travels) in the
romances, translated from Hindustani, which
form the staple of his literature. He may
even have heard the name Mogul somewhere,
1 Probable, because (i) the Malay language is agglutinative, not
inflected, and words seem to have been largely formed by the
mechanical welding together of two monosyllables, the Mongolian
type ; (2) the identity of name between certain places in Man-
churia and the Malay Peninsula (e.g. Tekka) ; (3) the wide con-
quests of the Tartars ; (4) the Tartaresque aspect of certain wooden
Malay buildings with lantern turrets.
B
1 8 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
without being able to give it a very precise
connotation. It is possible that he has been
on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Ajam (Persia) is
to him a part of India, lying somewhere
" beyond the wind " (di-atas angin), and only to
be reached by sailing through the Silken Sea
(The Red Sea).
Mohammedanism was introduced in the four-
teenth century, most probably by missionaries
from Arabia, and it may be gathered from one
or two passages in the " Malay Annals," a book
written in the sixteenth century A.D., that a
tincture of philosophy came along with it, of
which the priests still know the terms, though
they have probably not much more grasp of
their meaning than has the average Oriental,
who, in these modern days, is a pure formalist.
INTRODUCTION 19
That (ci?lj), a conception which is radically the
same as Kant's Noumenon, the unknown sub-
stratum of objects which is held to persist in spite
of a possible denudation of all their perceptible
qualities, seems to have been one of the things
understood by a great apostle of Islam who
visited Malay territories : though Allah alone was
and is generally supposed to be able to read the
inner reality of things, and understand the lan-
guage founded thereon a language in which
one must conceive of words as sounded
according to their import and spiritual in-
tention, rather than according to their letters
or syllables. But before the introduction
of Moslem culture, the Malays were probably
Hindus, and of this time abundant traces
remain in their literature and language.
20 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
That they were Buddhists is less likely ; indeed,
almost the only consideration which can be
adduced in support of this possibility is the
known activity of Buddhist missionaries. 1 For
exclusively technical terms of Buddhism have not
found derivatives in the Malay language, while the
regal title "batara" recalls the Hindu avatar, Jugi
represents the Hindu Yogi, and the names of
many Hindu gods appear as spirits in the Malay
folklore. The greatest scholar that England has
hitherto sent out to the Far East has, in his
" Manual of the Malay Language," collected
many such names, the names of gods and
heroes whose precarious sovereignty, so far as
1 Buddhism superseded Hinduism in Java, but throughout the
historical part of this discussion and most of the remainder I refer
more especially to the Malay Peninsula, in which Malay, and not
Javanese or Tagal or the like, is spoken.
INTRODUCTION 21
the Malay is concerned, is fast disappearing.
Further, I have met with Baruna among this
people as a personal name, a fact which, in
view of the Oriental propensity to name men
after their gods, leads one to suppose that in
time past the Malays worshipped Varuna, lord
of the West in the Hindu cosmos. Their
language is full of Sanscrit derivatives, some
of which are the commonest words, con-
junctions and the like, while others are rarely
met with except in the flowery, that is, the
literary style ; also it was originally written
in an Indian character called Ganga Malay u,
which is still used, it is said, by the present
Sultan of Perak for cipher correspondence.
With the Hindus, religion and culture were
never far removed from one another ; grammar
22 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
was a divine institution, and on this as well
as on more general grounds we are entitled
to say that most of the Malay mythology and
folklore came from India. (Cp. "Chandrawasi,"
" Menjelma," " Kramat," the idea of which
recalls Rama and his monkeys.)
From that quarter came all the strange myths
which abound in the earlier half of the " Malay
Annals" as well as those which are still pre-
served by oral tradition among the nobles
of remote districts, the pawangs or medicine-
men, and the kabayans or witches, a fast-
diminishing class. No doubt the old Malay
translation of the " Rdmayana " (a long pas-
sage from which is printed in Marsden's
Grammar, but which can hardly be obtained
now), greatly aided the diffusion of unearthly
INTRODUCTION 23
Hindu legends among a docile people, who
loved portents and the fantastic arbitrariness of
the supernatural. In early times credence was
obtained for these stories by the authority of
religion, which exacted worship for the heroes
of them as demigods, and when this authority
disappeared before the advance of Mohammed-
anism the conservative instinct of men for keep-
ing alive the traditions of their fathers took care
that this part of them should not pass into entire
oblivion. On the other hand, Mohammedanism
is gradually sapping the study of books which
contain them in favour of biographies of Emirs
and " Lives of the Saints."
It must not be supposed that the Malays are
generally aware of the origin and ethnic impor-
tance of their earliest development. Their anti-
24 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
quarian knowledge has not got beyond the idea
that " in the beginning " they came from the
kingdom of Menangkabau in Sumatra. They
have not yet asked themselves the question
whether this kingdom was the real home of their
race, or, as seems more likely, only a compara-
tively ancient settlement. Even of that country
which has had such an enormous influence on
their destiny they have the vaguest notions. Of
the origin of most of the legends and conceptions
which float about amongst them, the Malays are
entirely ignorant ; and in this respect they have
something in common with those multitudes
of men in every country who never rise above
phenomenalism. But there is this difference
between the phenomenalism of the ordinary
Western mind and the phenomenalism of the
INTRODUCTION 25
Malay : the former is ignorant of the source and
causes of many things, in detail, but he knows
where to find them out and how, being guided
in his search by that fruitful mother of knowledge,
intelligent curiosity. The Malay's very dim idea
of causation or natural law, which may almost be
considered nothing, so dim is it, is not enlightened
or warmed by the sun of wonder, a sun able
of itself to make such an idea spring up. It
would not be far wrong to say that the Malay is
not aware of having such an idea at all. Neither
morally nor intellectually has he anything of that
questioning spirit in which, according to Aristotle
and human experience, philosophy begins.
Under such mental limitations the Malay lives,
and has lived for a long time. His wisdom is all
of the proverbial type, the type which can give
26 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
no reasoned account of itself, but trusts to aper-
9us formed by the help of empirical observation,
feeling sure of their truth if experience, which
under the circumstances moves within an in-
evitably narrow circle, is not found to be in any
way discordant with them.
Without doubt the Malays are accurate ob-
servers of the facts of nature, as is shown by
many of their metaphors and comparisons, such
as that one which likens the empty gravity of a
would-be sage to the pithless stem of a bamboo ;
but they are destitute of the scientific temper,
which would impel them to ask why objects
appear as they do and how they are related
to other objects. Accordingly, this accurate
observation of theirs remains mere words, and
is not translated into the concrete of wood or
INTRODUCTION 27
stone ; for, though a man may know the form
of every tree in the forest, yet he cannot
make a design from the tangle of jungle trees
and creepers, if he is too much the slave of
that nature which strikes the eye alone to
venture on the exercise of artistic choice ; and
without this it is impossible to delineate faith-
fully a natural group. Artistic discrimination
of this kind necessarily depends on a con-
ception of spiritual order which puts each thing
in its proper place and rank, sacrificing acci-
dental detail as unworkable material, if so be
that it is not subservient to the main idea
and primal characteristics of the object treated.
(Cp. "Carving on the Wall of a Mosque.") In
any ornamental design which, hand-drawn, one
may find in a Malay book, there are presented
28 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
to the view irregularity, an entire want of
symmetry or proportion, and an equal lack of
correspondence between elements which one
would think ought, in this species of art, to
correspond e.g. parallel straight lines, to-
gether with a superfluity of rococo ornament,
and flowers which might be everything and
anything in their lack of characterisation. But
all honour to the beginnings of art ; the spirit
at first flounders into the world, as Plato 1
said, and animated beings of its creation
move all ways unguidedly, but at length it
harmonises and is harmonised, settles and is
settled. Barbaric wealth of intricacy is but the
sub-conscious waking of unborn order in the
craftsman's mind. So Malay art will eventually
1 "Timseus."
INTRODUCTION 29
learn to look less for gaudy and erratic detail,
more for balance and self-restraint.
As this multiplicity of unsystematised incident
rules everything Malay, it is not surprising to
find that no science, and hardly any mathe-
matics, exist in such surroundings. There .is
much talk about the science (elmu) of this, and
the science of that, but, as these so-called
sciences consist merely of a very few practical
rules loosely strung together, such talk appears
rather an instance of the Oriental respect for
anything like learning than a proof of know-
ledge. Science is the perception, acquired by
methodical and selective experiment, that each
particular object is the manifestation for the
time being of a certain totality, which deter-
mines its mode of existence. And this percep-
30 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
tion must be not merely general, but also one
which takes cognisance of the manner of the
manifestation and of the mathematical combina-
tions which are involved in the object as so
related to the general law or totality. But the
few general notions which the Malay mind con-
tains are unrelated to natural facts as well as to
one another, and very little distinction is made
between the essential and the accidental. Bacon
would have called them hasty notions abstracted
from the surfaces of things.
Mere phenomenalism always leads to a sort of
pseudo-rationalism, in those matters, above all,
which cannot be verified by the senses. Of this
sort are pictures indicative of an original life
they had in ancient or far-away scenes. And
so the more cultured Malays are beginning to
INTRODUCTION 31
take a pride in their scepticism, which disposes
of ghosts, fairies, death-visitants, and the like as
ignorant superstitions, only fit for the vulgar.
There is a conflict of ideas going on : on the
one side is a natural deference to ancestral
traditions ; on the other side, arrayed against
it, this tendency to reject whatever cannot be
satisfactorily explained by the private judgment.
The latter is no mean power among individu-
alists who secretly think that what they fail to
comprehend cannot be comprehended at all. A
Malay chief once asked me what was the use
of having scenic representations of fairies and
goblins, if, as he was told, there was no known
country which numbered such creatures among
its inhabitants. He did not conceive the possi-
bility of looking at such supernatural beings
32 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
in the light either of the time at which the
belief in them grew up, or of the physical and
moral surroundings which favoured its con-
tinuance. This spirit of incredulity is spreading
widely among modern Malays, and they are con-
firmed in it by their limited estimate of the prac-
tical value of exploring supra-sensuous regions.
As the sub-conscious idea of causality will,
however, force its way now and then into the
daylight, it did not seem to me a matter for
surprise to hear a native scholar hazard an
unsystematic though happy guess that the story
of King Suran's reign in the depths of the sea,
as told in the " Malay Annals," probably con-
cealed a reference to the great sea-power of
that monarch, though indeed there was little
else to prove its existence. This piece of myth-
INTRODUCTION 33
interpretation was an isolated instance ; its pro-
poser proudly confessed himself a sceptic on
other things of the same class, and, what is
more, he did not see how such a fact would
probably lead to such a story. An imagination
more vivid than his prosaically minded race
seems to possess might have set before itself
the amazement with which men in those early
times would behold a powerful fleet, going so
far as to consider the skilful management of
it a proof that its great captain had learnt his
art from the king of the sea, who could surely
tell his friends the whereabouts of every rock
and current in his dominions, and protect their
ships from the uncouth monsters 1 which owed
1 One of these sea-monsters was said to have attacked a great
city where Singapore now stands.
C
34 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
him allegiance. The portals of nature were
always receding then ; we knew nothing of her
laws or uniformities, and we thought it strange
if in our childish rambles we did not find vanish-
ing women or a goblin feasting merrily in our
fish-traps, as the old Malay fisherman found
him. The Age of Faith departs, and the Age
of the Reflective Judgment, hastened more or
less by external circumstance, succeeds ; but
in this also are marvels, though of another
and more scientific sort. For the philosophic,
this Age is the result of mental development ;
for the unphilosophic, it is borne in from with-
out, and this is what Western influences are
tending to do for the Malay.
An individualist in his life, and a phenomenal-
ist in his outlook on the world, one can easily
INTRODUCTION 35
see how it comes about that he is a materialist
in his opinions, at any rate so far as his con-
scious thinking in relative contrast with the
glimmerings of the sub-conscious Reason deter-
mines the matter. (Indeed, to be a materialist
is not very different from being an individualist
or a phenomenalist, since everything perceived
by the senses appears in a shape which is dis-
crete and at the first glance unconnected with
its environment, while these same things are,
from the nature of the case, material.) It is
not strange, therefore, that the Malay language
does not recognise any distinction between the
physical life, which humanity has in common
with all other organisms, and that life of re-
flective consciousness by the exclusive posses-
sion of which it is distinguished from them.
36 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
The word "nyawa" or "jiwa" is used for both
alike. Neither does the language conceive the
heart, or seat of individual feeling, as in any
way to be contrasted with the mind, whereby
men think in common with valid and trust-
worthy results, either as part with whole or in
any other way ; the word " hati " is employed
in each case. The Malay hunter solemnly lays
the ghost (badei) of the deer he has slain, just
as he ordinarily shuns the place where the
unquiet spirit (badei) of a murdered man is
reputed to wander. It is comparatively easy to
see how among people living in the rudiment-
ary stage of intellectual growth which we may
call materialism by insufficient attention as
distinguished from materialism by denial, there
readily come into vogue stories of singing trees
INTRODUCTION 37
and men transformed into tigers, or conversant
with their dialect. (Cp. "Menjelma," " Kramat,"
"The Singing Bamboo.") In all these cases
there is no difficulty felt in the transference of
what we know to be specially the human mind
into the body of an animal or a plant ; for to
the Malay there is no difference between the
normal life of man and that of any other living
thing. It is true that the Hindus also had a
theory of the transmigration of souls ; but, as
they understood it, this operation was depend-
ent on a gradual depravation of his higher
faculties by the individual man, at every degree
of which he approximated more and more to
the life of a beast, till he actually reached it,
at a time coinciding with his death in human
form. But among the Malays this idea of
38 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Karma is wanting, and no such downward pro-
gress is necessary for the transformation, these
two states of life being to them identical at the
start. (Incidentally, it may be observed that while
there are in the Malay language numerous traces
of Hindu mythology and. popular religion, there
are none at all of Hindu philosophy or rational-
ised religion.) So also to a nation so much in
bondage to the tangible, what readier way of
following a leader's precepts could suggest itself
than the keeping some extrinsic memorial of
him? (Cp. "Sword of Hang Tuah.") * The
symbol being regarded as ultimate, anything
further would be supererogatory goodness,
though such might be, and is, practised.
1 The sense of the sense-symbol has not yet become apparent.
(See V. Welby, " Grains of Sense," 8.)
INTRODUCTION 39
And yet one cannot but feel that the Malay
has, in the words of Emerson,
" avenues to God
Hid from men of northern brain.''
Not by the Hindu philosopher's attempt to
unite himself through meditation with that
at the fountain-head from which all nature
comes, or by the philosophy which sees the
union of the human and the divine in a
man's deliberate self-surrender to the incor-
ruptible expansion of his own higher nature ;
but by childlike trust in a personal God and
avenger of wrong, with a resignation which
sometimes wears the garb of quietism, the Malay
conventionality is unknowingly drawn to some-
thing higher. In one of the more recent books,
the "Autobiography of Abdullah," a story is
40 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
told how the people of Singapore were once
delivered from the oppression of a certain Dutch
official by a visitation of God in answer to their
prayers, and the historian, moralising on the
event, advises his readers to look for redress
rather in help from above than in self-asser-
tion. And indeed, though feelings of revenge
occasionally get the better of the Malay, yet
this idea of Divine intervention is his ruling
principle, and on it he relies with all the
quiet dignity so characteristic of his nation.
It is the gospel of the surrender of the in-
dividual self to the higher reason and its con-
sequent renewal, attained, not by a process of
thought, as in the West, but by a sort of
magnetic intuition.
"We think in names," said Hegel. Perhaps
INTRODUCTION 41
this aphorism may explain the rarity of general
terms in the Malay language and its entire lack
of words to express those more recondite
characteristics of the human mind of which
all particular activities are the outcome ; only
a few of the simpler passions are within the
compass of Malay nomenclature. Speaking
generally, the conscious perception of a unity
between mind and the world is wanting, and
so cannot be stated. Possibly it may come
in time, necessarily from within, though its
advent will be accelerated by hints from with-
out, in word and deed, of a transcendental
import. Accelerated and nothing more ; since
it is impossible to make artificially for any
nation the Avatars of its higher tendencies.
After this it will not be necessary to point
42 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
out that the following poems are not transla-
tions, but simply an attempt to bring out the
spiritual meaning which is latent in various
legends and phases of life, though only dimly
perceived, if at all, by the men whose heritage
it is to have " bodied forth " those at dawn and
to sustain these at noon. Further, their national
poetry, at present, consists mostly of discon-
nected strings of natural images, thrown into
the metrical form of four-lined trochaic stanzas,
in a few instances of which some vague con-
nection is discoverable, by straining a metaphor
or two. Even in this art, where it is most
easy to discern and obey, the Malays have not
arrived at any conception of organic complete-
ness, either of subject or treatment.
Still I can see them across so many miles
INTRODUCTION 43
of sea. Along the white high-road, from which
every now and then a narrow path diverges
into the green depths of tangled orchards and
brakes of fruit-trees, there walk in Indian file
three figures. The first is a man, and behind
him come two women of his household, chatter-
ing incoherently and incessantly about ordinary
things, in a minor key, with, now and again,
long-drawn musical cadences. Thus they, their
faces partly covered by a long veil or wimple,
follow their lord and master. He, with brown
beardless face on which the grave irony of
the Malay temperament has set its seal,
leads by the hand a little child, whose
wistful beauty contrasts strangely with the
father's half-sad, half -amused, concern for
this monotonous world and the fruitless
44 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
efforts of those whom a less phlegmatic
temper incites to enliven it. So they walk,
gravely as of old, along the endless path of
a reminiscent imagination.
R. GREENTREE.
TWYFORU, April 30, 1900.
POEMS
I
THE SINGING BAMBOO
(Legend locates this tree on a mountain in the neighbourhood of
Ulu Selama, Perak.)
ON the top of the hill I was singing alone
When the man climbed up to die ;
For he knew not a death-dealing power was
there,
Which I gained in days gone by.
A daughter of men, I died for love,
And the Universal Will,
Being just, decreed that in shape a tree
I should mourn my scorned love still,
47
4 8
And that many should die for me, distraught
By the spell of my love-sick wail ;
For " the giver shall get " is a primal law,
Nor is it in God to fail.
" Then be of the secret things," It said,
"Which procure atonement due
From those who have played with broken
hearts;
Of such shall be brought to you."
Bright were the eyes and flushed the cheeks
Of my victim, while he quaffed,
With his mouth agape, my song's fierce
wine ;
Some might have said I laughed,
THE SINGING BAMBOO 49
But I know no malice ; I think it was
But a wind from the rainy west,
Tremulous, rustling amid my stems
To herald the listener's rest.
For his eyes grew dim, and an ashen grey
Drove the rapture from out his face,
When the third day dawned, and he neither could
Nor desired to leave his place.
D
II
SONG OF THE CHANDRA WASI
(Founded on a Malay legend derived from the Hindu.)
LIKE to the singing of a bird,
From out the clouds my voice is heard,
As it goes sounding through all lands ;
But none may see my glittering wings,
Or tell aught of my wanderings
Through palaces not made with hands.
Sometimes, surrounded by a cloud
No storms disturb, a misty shroud,
SONG OF THE CnANDRAwAsi 51
By power divine invisible,
I skim across the heaving sea,
And drink its sparkling foam with glee,
As once the wine on Indra's hill.
For I, a goddess born, erewhile,
Was sent a Rishi to beguile,
When he would lose himself, to be
United with the Over-Soul,
And reach the Brahmin mystic's goal,
" I am in Thee and Thou in Me."
He cursed me, and his words had power
To bind my nature to that hour
When like a careless bird I came ;
Straightway my outward form was changed,
And through the clouds of heaven I ranged,
But with divine life, still the same.
52 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Wherefore, whoso hath eyes to see
Ideal laws continually
Appear in each existent thing,
Hears his own thoughts transformed to song,
Which human weakness cannot wrong,
Or make discordant, when I sing.
Ill
MENJELMA
" WHEN I am dead, then lay me down
Beneath the forest wall ;
Fill not my grave, for I would see
The upas-trees so tall."
He spake and died ; then we, his sons,
Dug out a woodland grave,
But minded not his last command ;
" Perchance he did but rave."
At eve I wandered in the woods,
Brooding upon the dead ;
53
54 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
I reached the spot, I heard a wail
From out the ground, and fled.
Next night we watched, and by the light
Of sleepy morning stars,
Beheld a leg rise from the grave
Chequered with transverse bars.
Next night we sat there with the dark ;
The phantom lightnings glanced
And vanished, and the air was dead,
As though the dead advanced.
From out the ground there rose again
Another paw, a head
Not human, and a tiger's form ;
It glared on us and sped.
MENJELMA 55
The face was like my father's face
In his last agony ;
The eyes were those of an evil thing
Rejoicing to be free.
God guard ! but when we feel a wrong
And maddening contumely,
We long to be a tiger too
And work the world a dree.
IV
KRAMAT
A LONG-DRAWN moan, much like a scream
'At close ; then hark !
The hum and hiss of unseen winged things
In forests dark.
Dull music, varied by the cry
Of nightingale
So called, two whistling shrieks with ghastly laugh
In sinking scale.
No fear smote Syed upon the way
For things like these ;
56
KRAMAT 57
His watch-dog following trembled as he heard
The rustling trees.
Out sprang, with eyes like living lamps,
And seized the prey,
A tiger, sparing Syed whom nature loved
Nor would betray.
For he no bird or beast e'er vexed,
Nor did of old
Sleman, God's prophet, better understand
What their speech told.
And even the scornful song of that
Sad nightingale
Which screams of broken lives told him at last
Good must prevail,
58 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
For mockery was ofttimes the death
Of evil things,
Shaking from roof to base the House of Vain
Imaginings.
So now Syed called ; from jungle depths,
In his lord's name,
The tiger, bidden lay his booty down,
Submissive came.
WRECK OF THE PERDANA,
KUALA PAHANG
i
FOUNDERING on the hidden sand-dune, where the
river meets the sea,
Swings a castaway, handed over to the tide's
supremacy.
Heading river wards, when the water on the bar
lay all too low,
Caught and held awhile, then staggering
under many a sea-dealt blow,
59
60 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Heeling over, bruised and battered through the
driving sleet and spume :
Helpless lies the stranded vessel ; clustering
shell-fish seal her doom.
II
Power was in that world of waters, circling
through all time and space,
For your voyage from thought's vast ocean
into action's place.
Wherefore did ye hasten blindly ? And ye waited
not to know
If a flood-tide from the Highest set where ye
would go.
WRECK OF THE PERDANA 61
Trusting fortune and your steerage for the ship
to cleave a way
Were the river mouth too shallow, fell ye
thus a prey.
Palsied were your hands and helpless, and your
hearts within ye burned,
When your rightful force unheeded to de-
struction turned.
THE plash and moan of heavy-rolling seas
Beating upon a beach of sand and shale,
Mixed with the fitful sobbing of the gale,
Resound among clumps of wild guava-trees
Which rise amid lawns of short turf, the
breeze
Laden with salt keeps barren ; then the veil
That hides the inner land, an uncleft pale
Of pathless forest overhanging these.
Wild solitudes of fern and giant cress
And coarse-stemmed marsh-flowers, over which
impend
62
KUALA PAHANG 63
Trunks, dead or living, bound without redress
In weedy fetters, to this pleasaunce tend ;
Even as men say life's tangled wilderness
Becomes a little clearer at the end.
VII
MALACCA
(" History is the realisation of the deeper idea." .HEGEL.)
CITY which calls up thoughts of Western lands,
Of feudal castles on a German steep,
And red-roofed villages on sandy coasts,
Not dreamless is thy sleep.
The thoughts of many men have passed away,
Who lived and died by thy deserted beach,
But faith and love appearing on the earth
Destruction cannot reach.
64
MALACCA 65
Long since there fell the empire centred here
In car-borne warriors from Hindustan ;
Now of their pageants and their fights no trace
Remains upon the plan.
But on the hill-top stand four roofless walls,
Memorials of a nation from the west,
Which came long since thy borders to subdue
And then to give them rest.
The vision of that nation haunteth thee,
Carven in stone of thy cathedral wall,
The incarnation of the strongest thought,
" Peace and good-will to all."
E
VIII
SWORD OF HANG TUAH
(He was the lakshamana (Lord High Admiral) of Mansur Shah, an
ancient king of Malacca who reigned in early Mohammedan days.
The Malays say that his sword is still guarded there under a large
bowl-shaped covering of iron. )
WHEN the distant palms in clear relief
Stood black against the sunset's glow,
His clan looked on their dying chief,
And whispered low.
" Like unto him," they said, " was none,
And also he had surely seen
The order of two worlds, as one
Who stood between,
66
SWORD OF HANG TUAH 67
" And so might tell." With steadfast gaze,
" My lotus-hilted sword," he cried ;
'Twas brought ; they waited in amaze
What should betide.
" For ever keep this sword, in sign
Ye follow in the ancient way
Of justice, which ye know was mine,
From day to day.
" For if ye lose it, losing too
In sloth a dying man's behest,
And memories of the good and true,
I come in quest,
" And, coming, smite ye hip and thigh,
That sin be remedied by woe ;
Farewell, for now the land is nigh
To which I go."
68 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Hang Tuah spoke and died ; his grave
Malacca's earth contains, but still
His life lives in the sword he gave,
As was his will.
IX
FATE EAST AND WEST
"THE wheel of Fate moves forward still, but
man remains the same ;
At every turn spring into life more hosts for
it to crush ;
God's will propels it, nor can we his domina-
tion blame,
Or, if we blame, Fate is the wind and man
a slender rush.
"With life from heaven like the atmosphere,
embracing all mankind,
A Something which we did not make and so
cannot remove,
yo POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
No demon's hand could stop its course, for
there is nought to bind,
Nor a Bidadri's smile enchant, for there is
nought to love."
Thus he, an old Malay with Eastern creed
Of blind and changeless fate as God indeed ;
To whom replied a dweller in the West,
With wisdom from a writing all may read.
" The wheel of Fate is man's own heart, o'er all
his life supreme,
And what befalls him is the fruit of every deed
and word,
And things which he has helped to make and
fancies of his dream ;
He is the wheel- wright of the wheel, right arm
of God the Lord.
FATE EAST AND WEST 71
Whose power through human hands and minds
above all else is shown,
Even as the life of plants bursts forth revealed
in leaf and hue ;
Then, if the wheel procure him ill, let man uplift
a stone,
And shattering it, create perforce, one to roll
on anew."
X
CARVING IN WOOD ON THE WALL
OF A MALAY MOSQUE
No bird or beast of Nature's make
Carven, bedecked the wall,
Nor festooned wreaths from forest-brake ;
But fancy did it all.
Self-centred in the carver's brain
Imagination wrought,
And could not grasp, or grasped, retain
A nature-moulded thought.
72
CARVING IN WOOD ON THE WALL 73
For where her tangled nets, by Art
Unconquered, Nature weaves,
The impress of no single part
An untrained eye receives.
(Though honour to the artist hand
Be rightly given, which owned
O'er inly-dreamt design command,
Mere mind is not enthroned.)
Discriminating will, with force
To order and arrange,
Must through the medley hold its course,
And show our eyes the change.
74 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Else, while, within ourselves confined
By a blank wall of green,
We draw curves gracefully entwined,
Real beauty flies unseen.
XI
AMOK( = AMUCK)
HAJI, thou sayest I have killed my brother ;
Who told this tale to thee ?
And that we were two children of one mother ;
Only one child I see.
The world I live in now is something different
From that I knew of old,
And only one man walketh in these caverns
Of crimson clouds unrolled.
Each must fulfil the laws which power prescribeth,
As in my former sphere
75
76 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
With quiet irony and hidden passion
I lived my life ; but here
Not such a life is proper, for thought's current
Setteth another way ;
The spirits bid me have no fear to murder,
And them I must obey.
Siti, whose beauty far surpassed the radiance
Of heaven's moon and sun,
But lately stole away and left me mourning,
And the old life was done.
Customs I knew before are alien to me ;
My former bonds are rent ;
Seemeth that change of world has changed me also,
And now my strength is spent.
AMOK ( = AMUCK) 77
Allah wataala ! out beyond the mangroves
Rises a white-winged mist
With chilly dew benumbing all my senses,
As though 'twere Death that kissed.
Hark, in the pandan-clump the mory warbles,
Sinking in cadence sad,
And I must leave our lovely world for ever ;
In death I am not mad.
XII
THE PILGRIMAGE
SKY like an amethyst all the way,
Sand underneath, and nought but sand ;
Save where at the foot of some stony hills
Dwarf shrubs just dotted a brick-kiln land ;
No sight or sound of our shady jungles,
No insect's humming in chains of flowers,
No boughs which creepers pull down to the grass,
No aroma of incense from tangled bowers
To give life's joy to that arid sea ;
Only the sunlight on powdered glass
Would be like it, a morning in Araby.
7 8
THE PILGRIMAGE 79
Desert without me and desert within ;
My brother, his pilgrimage checked, had died,
When winds not so cool as those which blow
Through jack-trees fringing the water-side
Swept o'er the desert, as wild grass kindled
Fierce blasts sends forth from its depths of flame,
And boughs shrivel up with a crackling sound ;
Even so the breath of the simoom came,
And my brother fell forward upon his face ;
So that I presently heaped a mound
For a tomb ; and the tamarisks watched his
place.
Still I went forward, sorrowing ;
Minarets gleamed in the purple haze
Afar, and at last I knelt to pray
Before the Kaaba stone, as prays
With bowed head one who gives up all things ;
80 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
I grudged not Allah a brother's life,
Nor turned me in anger from His sword ;
But the victim who sacrificed felt the knife,
Still felt, as 'mid orchards cool I see
Mountains rise over the sunlit ford,
While my heart lieth buried in Araby.
XIII
ABDULLAH
(Author of the '''Malay Annals"')
CREATOR of thy people's history,
With eye that saw so far as Macedon
From out thy jungles in the eastern sea,
Who told the tale replete with mystery
Of Suran reigning underneath the waves,
And many a silken-tressed Maharanee !
One garment thou didst bid thy race put on,
When welding legends of its scattered tribes,-
The strength and wisdom born of union,
82 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Even as the Universal Reason saves
Our thoughts from selfishness and vanity,
Lest they be buried with us in our graves.
XIV
THE WITCH OF THE MOUNTAINS
AMONG the darksome woods of these lone hills
Whence undiscovered rivers wind away,
I dwell, Nnek Kabayan, by repute,
None knowing it better than myself, a witch.
Skilled am I in all potent herbs, to know
What root the love-lorn maiden secretly
Pounds 'mid the curry -stuff and gives to eat,
Wary (for whoso tastes ne'er leaves her more),
And where the kachubong poison-flower is picked.
The spectres of slain deer obey my voice,
And sink to rest among the sandal-trees.
I know the excellence of precious gems,
Zemrud, the life preserver, and the rest,
83'
84 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Ratna mutu manikam, warding off
Death, and no doubt procuring it at times,
As also love, in one thing like, or more.
Seest thou that twin-peaked mountain
soaring there ?
It seems as if all angles in its side
Were meant to end in its two horns ; and well
It might be so. For there is nought beneath
Like to the glories which the summit sees,
Source of the dead earth's life derivative.
One morn I scrambled up the sides, intent
To find Bako-wali flowers, wherewith one cures
Men blind from birth ; 'twas well known
heretofore,
And, though they peep and mutter for a show,
Those Jugis, losing lore miraculous,
The science is not forgotten even now.
THE WITCH OF THE MOUNTAINS 85
At last, emerging from the undergrowth
Through nature-plaited meshes of rotan,
I reached the hollow where the peaks diverge,
And lo, a lake o'er which the evening wind
Played, and caressed the smiling moon-faces
Of girl-like bevies of pink lotus-flowers ;
Which sang as once in sweet antiphony
Red rose and lotus blue, pride of the close,
Filled with their choral hymns the garden
old
Of Gunong Lidang's princess magically.
And this the interpretation of their song :
" Showery balm of the gentle breeze,
Rain-drops patter in champac trees ;
Petals fall, but beauty lingers ;
Moveth life's arc through death's cold
fingers."
86 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Answered another band with like refrain :
" Leaves lie strewn upon the waters ;
Give ye the land to your sons and
daughters ;
Over our dead, brown leaves, at morning,
Blossomed a bud for Bela's scorning."
Straightway there came a troop from fairy-land,
Peris and elves, dancing with shuffling feet,
Attended by a body-guard of imps
Horned, rugged to the eye, and armed with
spears
Tufted, in close array, like feathery flowers
Which ornament the sword-growth of wild grass.
Some rode on horses, Janggis that we call,
Gaily caparisoned with broideries
Of ocean and the yellow light of even ;
Jintayu and Garuda, winged things,
THE WITCH OF THE MOUNTAINS 87
With minds which told them what their riders
planned,
Bestrid the air, like flakes of rainy mist
Uprolling in the windings of a glen.
And, for the lake seemed full of golden fish,
Some dived and caught the prey, and laughingly
Tost what they caught into the pool again ;
While others, lying hid behind the flowers,
Suddenly darted into view, their hair
Of glistening blackness streaming o'er the arch
Of tawny shoulders, agate-wrought setting
For lineaments like hers, whose goddess form
Sprang into birth from out a lotus-bloom,
And simpleness of heart appeared in them.
At length three flute-notes from the darkening
woods,
Wailed, as it were the soughing of the wind,
88 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
And silent stars looked down on a lone lake.
And tears came to my eyes, for shapes like
these
Of yore, within a little theatre
I saw, yet unoppressed by weight of years,
Holding my father's hand in mine, now gone.
XV
VOICE OF THE FORESTS
THE flowering angsana bids me stay, but the
hazels call me back,
As from their roughly wholesome leaves they
shake the summer rain ;
But it is not on the face of me stretched on the
woodland track,
Only their spirit saith, " We here, thou there !
come home again."
And the jungles say : " Behold us now with our
wealth of flowering trees,
And our spreading sharply-carven fans, our
locks like maiden hair,
89
90 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
And our dark-green robes and pale-green crowns,
'mid ferns that never cease
Rolling away through giant stems! What
wouldst thou over there ? "
I said, "No binding spell comes forth from the
lofty-minded ones,
For in their self-sufficingness they have no
griefs to heal ;
But we love the lowly and the plain whom
fortune's pride outruns ;
So less for ye than for russet elms we cannot
choose but feel."
XVI
SETTING SUNS
Jangan pandang hari-mata chondong,
Takut mengikut jalan ta' berantas.
Look not on the setting sun, lest ye follow untrodden (i.e. unholy)
paths. (Malay Proverb.)
PATHWAY to spirit-land,
(Golden the road,)
Treacherous demons planned
To their abode,
Look not on it in its glory, for evil such com-
munings bode.
Communings weary
And searchings in vain
91
92 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
After the eerie,
Fruitful of pain,
Road to escape from life's turmoil, and in a calm
brightness to reign.
Such a deceiving force,
When the tired day
Neareth his ended course,
Tempts ye to say :
Not by the earth, but in far-off skies, runs the
saint-trodden way.
Formless as spectre,
A golden haze,
Of all lies architecture,
Broods o'er the ways,
Falsifies distance and sizes beneath the declining
rays.
SETTING SUNS 93
Showing relations
And outlines of things
Firm without shaking
Of disputings,
Use is the sun's proper glory, and yours, on the
Truth's wide wings.
For the same sun's light
All the day long
Made the dull earth look bright,
Till evensong
Saw in its splendid fading the judge between
right and wrong.
XVII
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND
(The first four lines represent a Malay superstition.}
NIGHTLY he watched beside the ancient graves
Of warriors ; for his life was going astern,
And from some ghost revisitant he hoped
The lore of strength and victory to learn.
We found him lying face towards the ground,
And at his feet a panther's bloody form ;
But nought that lived could anywhere be seen,
Save foliage sparkling from a recent storm.
94
THEY called this land the Golden Chersonnese,
Dreaming that wealth untold
Might lie behind those weary mangrove-swamps,
Gold, and far more than gold.
For in that serried line of mountains blue,
Which seems to know no end,
Rolling far inland, forests piled in heaps,
Lay the unfailing friend.
Hope and imagination's fashionings,
World-weary travellers
95
96 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Found not to dwell in any land they knew ;
But as the mind avers,
Behind the foreshore of a life which tires
With seeming hollowness,
There lies a lovely dream, and more than dream,
They wished this land no less.
XIX
AVE ATQUE VALE
" I LIKE to see for master ; " so
The child-simplicity of one
Who lived and toiled, nor did he know
Thereby a task assigned was done.
The words were spoken long ago,
Their spirit still its course shall run,
And for the ages' ceaseless flow
Their prophecy is but begun.
97
NOTES
NOTES
I
THIS tree, or more properly speaking, clump
of bamboo-grass, grows on the top of a moun-
tain in Selama, North Perak. The story is
that every living man who approaches near
enough to hear its music is charmed into
immobility, and so, in obliviousness of all else,
remains near it until he dies of starvation. Its
supposed origin is ideal, and may be taken
to represent the period of transition at which
the miracles of Hinduism were beginning to
yield to, or be modified by, the Mohammedan
102 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
conception of an Avenging God. The idea of
metamorphosis by incantations is as familiar
to the Mohammedan Malay as that of meta-
morphosis by the will of gods must have been
to his Vishnu-worshipping ancestors (vide In-
troduction).
A sound like that of an yEolian harp is often
produced by the sighing of the wind among
the stems of the bamboo. When the messen-
gers of Sultan Mohammed of Malacca travelled
to Gunong Lidang to ask the hand of its
princess in marriage for their master, on the
outskirts of her domain they saw a bamboo-
grove from which came music so beautiful that
" the birds stopped in their flight to listen " to
it, and "all the beasts of the field marvelled as
they heard" (bunyi buluh perindu terlalu merdu
NOTES 103
bunyi-nia, burong pun terbang berhenti men-
engar bunyi-nia &c. " Malay Annals ").
There is said to be a suspicion of some past
wrong attached essentially to the deadly work
of the bamboo in question, and on the basis
of these two oral traditions the legend has
been amplified in detail.
/. 13. It, the Deity as the Personal or Con-
scious Process of events ; orthodox Moham-
medanism does not explicitly accept the latter
element in the conception.
II
The Chandra-wasi, according to the Malay,
is a bird which is heard, but never seen. It
is said to live on the sea-foam.
The name, as Mr. Maxwell (" Manual of Malay
104 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Grammar") points out, has certainly a Sanscrit
origin. In fact, a Hindu told me that it oc-
curred in the three crores of divine beings his
religion recognised ; " Chandra " being San-
scrit for the " moon," and " Vyas " meaning to
dwell. The goddess owning this name must
have been connected with the moon, in the
minds of the early Malays, who knew enough
Sanscrit to enrich their language with many
derivatives from that language. Further, there
is a Sanscrit root */vas, meaning "to sing as
a bird," and so there is every reason to regard
this Chandra- wasi myth as etymological, "the
moon-singing bird." (For the ordinary change
of the Sanscrit v into the Malay w, cp. vira,
Malay, wira = strong.)
/. 14. The goal of Hindu philosophy and
NOTES 105
religion was the losing one's individual self
(ahamkara) in Brahma or the absolute un-
characterised spirit, from which, associated with
a principle of illusion, all things were held to
proceed. It might seem that the aim of as-
ceticism was to reach Brahma as unassociated,
and prior to his state of association with this
illusory principle, which alone made individuality
and the body possible. Such was the Hindu
attempt to explain the co-presence of an all-
comprehensive God, with an (apparently) inde-
pendent being, man.
/. 19. The Hindu gods and goddesses, whom
philosophers would call personified energies of
the Supreme Soul, were always liable to suffer
from the curse of a saint or sage. Under such
an influence, the body of Indra was disfigured.
io6 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
III
An unmodified narration of something which
the Malays believe to have happened quite
recently.
The natives of Korinchi in Sumatra are
believed in especial to have this power, which
they are able to exercise while still alive. It
might be compared with the lycanthropy of
the north ; this is said to have been a form
of madness, taking its colour from surrounding
influences, chiefly from the prevalence of wolves.
The sufferer imagined himself to be a wolf, and
behaved like one, digging up graves with his
nails. The Korinchi men are said to subject
themselves to certain ceremonies ; on the mad-
ness theory, this would be due to a secondary
NOTES 107
insane idea, viz. that they are beings endowed
with^ superhuman power to be assumed and laid
aside at will. The whole would be intensified
by the self-absorption of the Malay.
IV
This also the Malays believe to have been
an actual fact, and an instance of the special
gift which is represented by one of the meanings
of the word " Kramat." The language of birds
and beasts is said to be discussed in Hindu
magic. But there is no need to look to any
one source for the conception of a power which
is attributed to all the heroes of Eastern legend.
Without supposing the utter impossibility of
such a power among "the children of the
gods," there is actually in a modern French
io8 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
romance, the " Remain Kalbris " of Hector
Malot, 1 a man who thinks he has got the
secret ; in addition to the conceivable adepts,
a dishonest man of genius might often get a
project carried out by pretending that the birds
had informed him of his excellence. I think
that there may be a lurking notion of universal
sympathy underneath it all ; its acceptance
among the modern Malays is explainable in the
light of their failure to grasp the distinction
between the conscious life of man and the
merely instinctive life of an animal. Though
all men might potentially understand the animal
language, the Kramats alone could realise that
1 " Tout ce qu'un oiseau peut exprimer, M. de Bihorel affirmait
qu'il etait arrive a le traduire, selon lui couramment." (Remain
Kalbris, v.).
NOTES 109
potentiality, because they alone knew the re-
quisite conditions, e.g. allowance to be made
for the difference of vocal organs between men
and birds, &c. Further, birds might have
languages according to their nations. This
suggestion is only hypothetical, and from a
Malay point of view. But it would hardly
seem an absurdity that a man who had perfectly
identified himself with Nature by knowledge
and love, e.g. a greater Thoreau or St. Francis,
should be able to interpret the cry of a bird.
/. 6. The Malay nightingale.
/. 19. Solomon, called Sleman or Suleiman
by the Malays. Mohammedan legends represent
him, in the words of Emerson, as having
" heard secrets whenever he walked in his
gardens."
no POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
VI
Kuala Pahang, that is, the mouth of the
Pahang River, on the east coast of the Malay
Peninsula.
VII
Malacca is built on a low-lying shore. Between
the crowded native quarter and the suburbs,
which are inhabited chiefly by descendants of
the old Dutch colonists, there rises, facing the
sea, a solitary hill, crowned by the ruins of
the Portuguese Cathedral, within which is to
be found an inscription in memory of Xavier.
There are a few relics of both the Portuguese
and the Dutch occupations of the city the gate
of the Dutch fortress at the foot of the hill,
the state-house, and an old church with a bas-
NOTES 1 1 1
relief over the doorway. The Age of Faith
was, over the greater part of Europe, ripening
to its decline when the Portuguese first sailed
into Indian waters ; but there is little doubt that
they, with a belief in their sacred mission which
distance from home would do nothing to weaken,
were the enthusiastic soldiers of an idea to an
extent which has never been reached in the
more prudent and tactful rule of their Dutch,
or till recently, their English successors. Under
Albuquerque, they gained possession of the
place in 1509 ; the Dutch took it in 1642, and
it was finally ceded to England in 1824.
/. 10. "From Hindustan" Whether Malacca
was founded from Java, as Crawfurd supposed,
or whether it was founded from India directly,
is not a matter of ethnic importance. Very
ii2 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
early in the Christian era Java was governed
by Hindu colonisers, and all its institutional
life was carried on in the spirit of Hindu re-
ligion and ethics ; any colony founded from Java
would have been founded by its Hindu rulers,
and not by the mass of the native population.
The name " Malacca " is a Sanscrit derivative.
In that language amalaka is the name of a
medicinal tree, a sort of myrobalan. There is
a tradition that a dispossessed prince of Singa-
pore by chance landed on the west coast of
the Chersonese, and, wearied with his wander-
ings, sat down to rest against a tree. On asking
the name of it, he was told that it was called
amalaka, and this determined the colonist to
call the city which he founded on the spot,
Malacca (" Malay Annals").
NOTES 113
VIII
Hang is a title of rank. The hero of this
legend is a sort of Malay Prince Arthur, but
there is no indication in the "Sejarah Malayu"
that he was ever idealised into a personification
of the genius or aspirations of the Malay people.
He was the wise prince and warrior, but also a
man among men.
I. 10. The hilt of a Malay sword or dagger
often terminates in a lotus-bud.
IX
All the Orientals are fatalists ; the " eyeless
face that waits above and laughs" is to them
a sort of brute, unconscious, and objective
force, which governs the world, either by the
H
ii4 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
sufferance of Allah, or with delegated power.
Bringing to birth what Aristotle called the
"contingent," that which seems to happen
without reason and at hap-hazard, it might
be called "Nothing," on any theory that the
world is rational and rationally ordered. The
Orientals conceive it as Something by pointing
to its effects ; indeed, wherever the Will is
weak, as it is among them, the number of
events borne in upon the man, and over which
he has no control, will be very large. Of course,
the belief in such a fate will, in its turn, help
to weaken the Will.
This poem, which some might consider
Swedenborgian and some Pantheistic, is simply
a version of the aphorism of Heraclitus that
a man's character is his fate ; necessarily con-
NOTES 115
nected with this, there runs through it the
principle of Idealistic Christianity that God is
not outside a man otherwise than He is within
him, and that the devoted and unselfish thoughts
of a good man when realised in action, if alto-
gether unselfish, are adequately His existence,
relative to, and so absolute for, us. One may
hope that it is along these lines that the race
is progressing. Deism, technically so called,
the merely objective isolation of God being
its burden, can hardly be said to be either
morally useful or in accordance with the intel-
lectual needs of the time.
/. 8. Bidddri. A celestial nymph. This Malay
name is derived from the Sanscrit " vidyadhara,"
a spirit of the air. So in " Indra Sebaha," a
Malay fairy-tale in verse, the origin of which
n6 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
is to be looked for in India, one finds the ex-
pression, " a countenance like that of the
Bidadari of the clouds" (Bidadari awan).
XI
It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that
Amok (running amuck) as a form of madness is
the result of a continual brooding, self-absorbed,
on real or fancied wrongs, which at last becomes
unbearable and breaks out into ungovernable fury.
The individualism of the Malay is peculiarly
favourable to this mental phenomenon. In the
Malay language there is a word "melengong,"
which means " to sit on the ground wrapt in
thought." The existence of such a word with
such an import among a people who seem in-
NOTES 1 1 7
capable of forming general ideas is suggestive of
much.
/. 18. Princesses, in the " Sejarah Malayu," are
frequently described as being fairer than the sun
and moon.
/. 29. I have heard the moray-bird sing the
\S
notes jESEEGEDECin G major, and that
more than once.
XIII
Abdullah, who wrote the " Sejarah Malayu "
(Malay Annals), probably in the sixteenth century
A.D., certainly seems to have thought the unity
of the various branches of the Malay race both
possible and desirable. It was for this purpose
that, in one and the same synopsis of history, he
narrated the affairs of places so remote from one
n8 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
another as Malacca and Mangkasar (Celebes),
Palembang and Java. Also he had formed the
conception of organic unity between the members
of a state, to illustrate which, he puts into the
mouth of Mansur Shah a Persian metaphor, by
which the science of government might be de-
duced from natural laws as manifested in the
growth and existence of things. It frequently
takes a long time, as Metternich saw, for the ideas
of wiser heads, who are more nearly allied with
the forces that make for progress, to filter down
to the populace, which is quite satisfied with the
present.
XIV
These witches, or Kabayans, generally live in
wild and remote districts, far from the haunts
NOTES 119
of men. There they become adepts in the so-
called science of magic, which all half-civilised
or savage nations, when left to themselves, firmly
believe to influence the course of human life.
A vague trust in the workings of an undefined
supernatural power is their substitute for a
definite and well-mapped theory of the laws
of life and nature founded on o r ganised ex-
periments. All the same, it is conceivable that
these Eastern soothsayers, when they go to
look for enchantments, may sometimes see the
vision of the Almighty, falling into a trance,
but having their eyes open.
/. 9. A sort of datura.
/. 13. The emerald, the Sanscrit name of which,
"marakata," means literally "the defender who
makes men pass safely through the pestilence."
120 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
/. 14. Fine jewels. The last word and the first,
often used in the Malay literature, are pure San-
scrit (Mutu, possibly from N/mud to cleanse).
/. 17. Gunong Bubo, in the Kuala Kangsar
district of Perak, has two peaks. There is a
superstition among the Malays that lakes are to
be found on the mountain-tops.
/. 24, 25. I have seen this represented in a
Malay play, the scenery and general setting
of which was highly suggestive of Northern
India. The flower in question is probably
mythical ; the stage substitute for it was a
long yellow flower with close -folded layers
of petals, which was waved in front of the
blind man's eyes.
/. 27. Jugi. A word which, though not gene-
rally understood, I have found in a native
NOTES 121
vocabulary. It bears much the same mean-
ing as the Sanscrit " Yogi," from which it is
manifestly derived.
/. 33. In Sanscrit poetry the lotus is often
compared to a beautiful face ; the Indian type
of face, which below the forehead is almost
a pure oval, has also been, times without
number, likened to the moon.
/. 35. This story is to be found in the " Malay
Annals." (cp. Notes to I.) The princess of
Gunong Lidang was a magician.
/. 40. This song is closely modelled, in metre
and rhyme, on the ordinary Malay stanza, or
pantun, which is sung antiphonally. An at-
tempt has also been made to reproduce the
abundance of natural images by which it is
characterised.
122 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
In the garden of Gunong Lidang, "the pome-
granates laughed and the roses sung, and the
blue lotuses answered them." It is not worth
while translating their song, as it does not
seem to harmonise with its delicate and charm-
ing surroundings. Other verses speak of "The
pandan-tree leaning on the tui-tree," or the
lover fetching "kamboja leaves from up-river
forests," but this song belongs to a class in
which sordid elements create a sense of dis-
cord. (/. 48. Bela, the Sanscrit vela, stands for
death.)
/. 50. In the more elaborate drama of the
Malays some of these beings always appear,
sometimes fulfilling the commands of the king
of the genii, sometimes dancing the Natch
dance.
NOTES 123
/. 54. The spears of Raja Suran's army were
like the lalang grass, they were so numerous,
and the tufts at the end of the spear-heads
were like its flower (Sejarah Malayu).
/. 57. A cloak, embroidered with a picture
of the ocean (Sagara), is mentioned in the Malay
Annals.
/. 58. Jintdyu is the Sanscrit jatayu, a strange
bird born of the dawn. Garuda was the
feathered being on which Vishnu rode. Both
these birds figure largely in the Malay popular
tales, and it seems to be the case that the
Malays suppose them to have had a real ex-
istence in those ancient times, the "perba
kala," which contain all that the present cannot
ocularly vouch for.
/. 70. The reference is to Lakshmi, from whose
124 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
name, Indira, the blue lotus was called Indira-
layam. The lotus may be taken as a symbol,
perhaps the Hindus thought so, of the identity
of beauty and use. Its roots are edible, and
there are few lovelier sights than a pond full of
pink lotuses, which light up the rank greenery
around and their own broad bluish leaves like
so many lamps.
XV
In such lines the temporary depression of
an English official of a meditative turn might
be supposed to run. The sight of an appa-
rently chaotic and inextricable waste of natu-
ral luxuriance no doubt produces, for aesthetic
reasons, a sort of mental weariness, but the
mind can always overcome this by concentrating
NOTES 125
its attention in detail on a few aspects of the
tangle which is presented to the eye.
/. i. Angsana (Pentaptera tomentosa). This
tree, which is much planted for the shade it
gives, bears clusters of yellow flowers.
XVI.
What those who first brought this proverb
into circulation intended by it can never be
more than matter of conjecture. The exceed-
ing beauty of the expression must have had
a deeper thought to produce it than the
superstition, which formerly, when the mam-
bang kuning, or yellow devil, appeared in the
yellow glow of a Malayan sunset, prompted
mothers to call their children in from play.
126 POEMS OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
Superstitious feeling has peopled the time of
sunset with evil spirits, who are then especially
active, and the Hindus think it necessary to
propitiate them by a special sacrifice (sabali).
The interpretation given in this poem, there-
fore, is almost purely ideal.
THE END
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