The contents of primitive narrative, poetry and song are as varied as the cultural interests of the singers. It does not seem admissible to measure their literary value by the standards of the emotions that they release in us. We ought to inquire in how far they are an adequate expression of the emotional life of the natives. To primitive man, hunger is something entirely different from what it is to us who ordinarily do not know what the pangs of hunger mean, who do not realize all the implications of starvation. If a people like the Bushmen or the Eskimo sing of their joy after a successful hunt and after a hearty meal, if the Orang Semang of the Malay Peninsula sing of the gathering of fruit and of the successful hunt, the connotation of these songs is no different from that of a harvest song. We are too easily mislead by the concreteness of the picture and assume that the emotional connotation that we require in poetry must be absent. Even among ourselves a graphic passage in a lyric poem does not by any means always release a definite, mental image but appeals rather through the feelings engendered by the descriptive terms. For this reason we must necessarily assume that the emotional setting of the picture is the essential poetic element for the singer, not the objective terms that alone appeal to us because we are not familiar with the emotions of every day native life. We feel only the graphic value of the words. The much-quoted Semang[159] song represents a good example: Our fruit grows plump at the end of the spray. We climb along and cut it from the end of the spray. Plump, too, is the bird (?) at the end of the spray. And plump the young squirrel at the end of the spray. [159] W. W. Skeat and C. O. Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, Vol. 1 (1906), p. 627. This song which deals with plants and animals serving as food, should be compared with another one that is more readily appreciated by us: The stem bends as the leaves shoot up. The leaf-stems sway to and fro. To and fro they sway in diverse ways. We rub them and they lose their stiffness. On Mount Inas they are blown about. On Mount Inas which is our home. Blown about by the light breeze. Blown about is the fog (?). Blown about is the haze. Blown about are the young shoots. Blown about is the haze of the hills, Blown about by the light breeze. etc. If we feel the latter as a more poetic type it is presumably only because we cannot share the feelings aroused in the Orang Semang by the reference to the efforts in gathering fruit and in hunting animals. The effectiveness of poetry does not depend upon the power of expressive description that releases clear mental images, but upon the energy with which words arouse the emotions.