Unwritten Literature of Hawaii | Page 3

IV. Song from the hula pa'i-umauma--Berger 153
V. Song from the hula pa-ipu--Berger 153
VI. Song for the hula Pele--Berger 154
VII. Oli and mele from the hula ala'a-papa--Yarndley 156
VIII. _He Inoa no Kamehameha_--Byington 162
IX. Song, _Poli Anuanu_--Yarndley 164
X. Song, _Hua-hua'i_--Yarndley 166
XI. Song, _Ka Mawae_--Berger 167
XII. Song, _Like no a Like_--Berger 168
XIII. Song, _Pili Aoao_--Berger 169
XIV. _Hawaii Ponoi_--Berger 172

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INTRODUCTION
This book is for the greater part a collection of Hawaiian songs and poetic pieces that have done service from time immemorial as the stock supply of the _hula_. The descriptive portions have been added, not because the poetical parts could not stand by themselves, but to furnish the proper setting and to answer the questions of those who want to know.
Now, the hula stood for very much to the ancient Hawaiian; it was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our opera and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of social enjoyment. Besides this, it kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past. The hula had songs proper to itself, but it found a mine of inexhaustible wealth in the epics and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic[1] of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was the _oli_; but it must be noted that in every species of Hawaiian poetry, _mele_--whether epic or eulogy or prayer, sounding through them all we shall find the lyric note.
[Footnote 1: It might be termed a handful of lyrics strung on an epic thread.]
The most telling record of a people's intimate life is the record which it unconsciously makes in its songs. This record which the Hawaiian people have left of themselves is full and specific. When, therefore, we ask what emotions stirred the heart of the old-time Hawaiian as he approached the great themes of life and death, of ambition and jealousy, of sexual passion, of romantic love, of conjugal love, and parental love, what his attitude toward nature and the dread forces of earthquake and storm, and the mysteries of spirit and the hereafter, we shall find our answer in the songs and prayers and recitations of the hula.
The hula, it is true, has been unfortunate in the mode and manner of its introduction to us moderns. An institution of divine, that is, religious, origin, the hula in modern times [Page 8] has wandered so far and fallen so low that foreign and
critical esteem has come to associate it with the riotous and passionate ebullitions of Polynesian kings and the amorous posturing of their voluptuaries. We must make a just distinction, however, between the gestures and bodily contortions presented by the men and women, the actors in the hula, and their uttered words. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." In truth, the actors in the hula no longer suit the action to the word.