Pai's grandfather, Koro, lets her know under no uncertain terms, that he has no use for her. She tries to gain his attention and affections, but to no avail. She is a female, and therefore not worthy by his standards. For many generations, Pai's family had been the leaders of the local Maori tribe. Since the responsibility of selecting and training the next leader falls upon his shoulders and with her brother dead and her father gone, Koro desperately widens his search of all the Maori village boys hoping to find a suitable replacement. Koro's rigid belief that teaching Maori girls leadership skills is taboo, causes him to miss a potentially great leader in Pai. In her pain, rejection, and loneliness, she experiences a spiritual death, as does the entire community due to its fear of an uncertain future. Regardless of Koro's actions and rejection, Pai knows that she has actually been chosen to lead the village back to the righteous path. She has been made aware of her destiny by her grandmother, and feels it to her marrow. The town is spiritually and physically deteriorating, the young men are lazy and hedonistic, forgetting the ancient and honorable Maori ways. The village is thrust into chaos as it has moved from trust in the universe to a mindset of doubt and despair. It appears that all hope and faith in the cosmos is lost.
At this point, Pai suffers into knowledge and falls from innocence into experience when she realizes that regardless of the fact that she will never be the perfect leader in Koro's eyes, something must be done. The answer is to sing to the whale, to use the mystic chord of memory to animate a world that is sterile, stagnant and having death in life. By secretly watching Koro attempt to teach village boys Maori leadership, tradition and all that a Maoi Chief should learn, Pai learns. Despite her grandfather's prejudice and lack of support, Pai prevails thus returning the village to its righteous path.
In comparison to Whale Rider, Wordsworth's poem, "Tintern Abbey", also follows the pattern of the Romantic Journey, in that it essentially begins with the memory of a child.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (20-49)
Wordsworth takes nature in poetry to a level of transcendence where he connects them to everything and everyone else together in a tranquil, place of harmony. Wordsworth illustrates that the most tranquil place in nature that each person holds in his or her memory always remains pure and unspoiled. It is the center of each person's quiet world; it is the place that each of us can reflect upon and retreat to when needed. It is a place of spiritual rebirth.
Wordsworth creates a world far better as it is a world one seen through a child's eyes; it harbors no fearful thing, no danger because no harm can come to one who is spiritually immortal. He illustrates the stages of the development of experience and the loss of innocence, but at the same time, he recalls the glorious age of childhood or innocence.
Wordsworth describes the inevitable as the child suffers into knowledge, and falls from innocence to experience, his view on nature changes, as reflected in the lines below. The childish imagination, sense of immortality and belief in magic has been replaced by the knowledge, experience and responsibility of adulthood Nevertheless, although the child can no longer see the landscape with his eyes the way he used to, when he ventures back to the tranquil place in his mind, it remains as it was before.
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (65-102)
Through the power of imagination, Wordsworth is able to connect to the power within the universe, and is able to see into the life of things, this transcendent mode is the power of transforming the imagination. After the spiritual rebirth Wordsworth returns to the world and brings with him the affirmation of the meaning in life. This movement is the action of the poem and of the romantic journey.
Tintern Abbey and Whale Rider both illustrate not only the stages of spiritual death and rebirth, but by revealing the power of innocence, they demonstrate the return to the world with reaffirmations. The romantic impulse transcends any particular period and may be applied to times both before and after the Romantic Era
