Baling the Golden Fleece: Baxter’s Jason

An essay on James K. Baxter’s treatment of the Greek hero Jason might seem likely to be as brief as Dr Johnson’s famous chapter on ‘the snakes of Iceland’, which read in its entirety ‘There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.’ The name of Jason never appears in John Weir’s edition of Baxter’s Collected Poems. There are only two passing allusions to episodes in the Jason saga, both in very early poems: to the Sown Men who ‘sprang sprightly’ from dragon’s teeth in ‘To M.A.B.’ (1943; CP 18), and to the ‘Symplegades’ or Clashing Rocks in ‘Letter to Noel Ginn’ (1944; CP 29). 2 However, when one looks at the unpublished or uncollected poems in Baxter’s manuscript notebooks (which outnumber those in the Collected Poems by a ratio of 3:1), the Jason story emerges as a significant underground presence. In several poems in the 1950s Jason’s relationship with his two objects of desire, Medea and the Golden Fleece, becomes strangely associated with Baxter’s own troubled marriage. And, most interestingly, in the early 1960s, Jason and the Fleece appear in a series of versions of a poem in which Baxter attempts to deal with the influence of his friend, mentor, and rival Denis Glover and his formative year in Christchurch in 1948. Jason is clearly not one of the most important of Baxter’s mythological figures, but he is worth a detour. 3