Pōkarekare Ana lyrics, translation and story

The Pōkarekare Ana lyrics are a love song in te reo Māori that opens on troubled water: Pōkarekare ana ngā wai o Waiapu ‘the waters of the Waiapu are stirred up’. The chorus calls the girl home, E hine ē, hoki mai rā ‘O girl, come back’, because ka mate ahau i te aroha ‘I am overcome with love’. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, says the song originated among soldiers from Northland during the First World War and is sometimes called New Zealand’s unofficial national anthem; the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography says Paraire Tomoana wrote it to court the woman he married in 1913. This guide gives the words as they are usually printed, every line word for word from Te Aka Māori Dictionary, what the famous lines mean, who wrote it and where the accounts differ, and how it travelled from an army camp in Auckland to Korea.

Updated 18 October 2026 · 11 min read

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The words of Pōkarekare Ana

These are the four verses and the chorus exactly as NZ Folk Song prints them, with its line breaks and spelling. The chorus is sung after every verse. NZ Folk Song notes that these days often only the first verse and the chorus are sung, perhaps several times over with added harmony.

Pōkarekare ana
ngā wai o Waiapu,
Whiti atu koe hine
marino ana e.

Chorus:
E hine e
hoki mai ra.
Ka mate ahau
I te aroha e.

Tuhituhi taku reta
tuku atu taku rīngi,
Kia kite tō iwi
raru raru ana e.

Whatiwhati taku pene
ka pau aku pepa,
Ko taku aroha
mau tonu ana e.

E kore te aroha
e maroke i te rā,
Mākūkū tonu i
aku roimata e.

Three small spelling differences from Te Aka Māori Dictionary, which the tables below follow: Te Aka writes raruraru ‘be troubled’ as one word, it gives rā with a long vowel in the sense the chorus uses, and the e that ends most lines is Te Aka’s ē ‘a call that closes a line’, “used to conclude a line or the end of a traditional song with no apparent meaning”. The words are free to print and sing: see the note on copyright below.

Pōkarekare Ana line by line

The middle column gives each word’s meaning from Te Aka Māori Dictionary. The last column is a plain reading of the line; where a published translation reads it differently, that is noted in the sections after the table.

Māori	Word for word	What it says
Pōkarekare ana ngā wai o Waiapu	pōkarekare be agitated (as a liquid), stirred up; ana marks a continuing state; ngā the (plural); wai water; o of; Waiapu the river	The waters of the Waiapu are stirred up,
Whiti atu koe hine marino ana ē	whiti cross over, reach the opposite side; atu away; koe you; hine girl (a term of address); marino calm, still (usually of the sea)	you cross over, girl, and they are calm.
E hine ē, hoki mai rā	e calls someone; hoki go back, return; mai towards the speaker; rā adds emphasis to a request	O girl, come back to me,
Ka mate ahau i te aroha ē	ka names an event, with no tense; mate be dead, and also be deeply in love; ahau I; i by, through; te aroha love	I am dying of love.
Tuhituhi taku reta, tuku atu taku rīngi	tuhituhi write; taku my; reta letter; tuku send, let go; rīngi ring	I write my letter, I send my ring,
Kia kite tō iwi raruraru ana ē	kia so that; kite see; tō your; iwi people, tribe; raruraru be in difficulty, troubled	so that your people see I am troubled.
Whatiwhati taku pene, ka pau aku pepa	whatiwhati break, snap into pieces; pene pen, pencil; pau be used up; aku my (more than one); pepa paper	My pen is broken, my paper used up,
Ko taku aroha mau tonu ana ē	ko singles out what is talked about; mau be fixed, firm, lasting; tonu still, unceasing	but my love holds fast.
E kore te aroha e maroke i te rā	e kore … e will not; maroke be dry; i te rā by the sun	Love will never be dried by the sun;
Mākūkū tonu i aku roimata ē	mākūkū be somewhat moist, damp; tonu still; roimata tear (of crying)	it stays wet with my tears.

Pōkarekare: what the waters mean

Te Aka defines pōkarekare as “to be agitated (as a liquid), stirred up”, and its own example sentence uses it of people: Kei te pōkarekare te ao ‘The world is restless’, dated 1919. NZ Folk Song reads the agitated waters as the singer’s feelings for the girl, and argues that the image was an old figure of speech before the song, quoting an 1899 Māori newspaper that speaks of “te pokarekare o te wai”, the turbulence of the water, in a story about a man and a woman. The Waiapu itself is a real river: Te Ara calls it “the major artery and spiritual heart of the Ngāti Porou landscape”, running to the sea on the East Coast past Ruatōria.

Whiti atu koe hine marino ana e: the famous line

Te Aka lists several unrelated words spelt whiti. Next to water, the one that fits is “to cross over (a river, bridge, etc.), reach the opposite side”, and atu sends the movement away from the speaker. Then marino, calm, which Te Aka says is used “usually of the sea”. What the line does not contain is any word for if, when or they: word for word it is you cross over, girl, calm. Translators supply the link. NZ Folk Song gives “If you cross over girl they will be calm”, so the waters settle once the girl comes to him, the agitation in the first line resolved in the second.

Ka mate ahau i te aroha: dying of love

The chorus begins with the same two words as the Ka Mate haka, and the grammar is explained in Ka Mate haka: the words and what they mean: ka names an event and, in Te Aka’s words, “no tense is implied so it may be past, present or future”. Te Aka gives mate several senses, the first be dead and the fourth “be in want of, lacking, overcome, deeply in love”. The little word i marks what causes the state, as Te Aka’s “by, with” for stative verbs like mate. So the line can honestly be put into English as “I could die of love”, as NZ Folk Song has it, or “I am overcome with love”: the senses Te Aka gives allow both.

NZ Folk Song also records a variant for singing at a funeral, from Kare Leathem: if the person who has died is a man, hine ‘girl’ can be replaced with tama ‘son, boy’, making the chorus E tama ē, hoki mai rā.

Who wrote Pōkarekare Ana?

Nobody can say for certain, and the reputable sources disagree. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography says that Paraire Hēnare Tomoana, a leader of Ngāti Te Whatu-i-āpiti and Ngāti Kahungunu in Hawke’s Bay and a pioneer of the action song, courted Kuini Rīpeka Raerena of Ngāti Porou “by singing his own composition, the love song ‘Pōkarekare ana’, to her and her Ngāti Porou elders on Te Poho-o-Rāwiri marae”; they married at Gisborne on 27 March 1913. Te Ara’s history of folk music says instead that the song “originated among soldiers from Northland during the First World War”.

Tomoana’s own account points the same way as Te Ara. In the 1921 second edition of his booklet A Noble Sacrifice, sold for a fund for Māori soldiers, he wrote, as NZ Folk Song quotes it, that “these ditties emanated in the North of Auckland and were popularised in Narrowneck Camp”, the army camp at Takapuna, then drifted to Torere in the Bay of Plenty and on to the East Cape, where “they took the present form with appropriate action” and became closely associated with the 19th and 20th Māori Reinforcements. NZ Folk Song notes that the first sheet music to credit him, in 1927, says “words and music arranged by P H Tomoana”: arranged, not composed.

NZ Folk Song’s conclusion is that the song was a group effort, as Arapeta Awatere told Mervyn McLean, author of Maori Music (1996), most Māori songs were: verses from Northland reworked by Tomoana, perhaps with his friend Āpirana Ngata, to tell the story of a Hawke’s Bay man’s love for an East Coast woman. A 2002 television documentary, Pōkarekare Ana – A Māori Love Song, examined the rival claims.

Where the accounts differ

Question	One account	Another account
Who wrote the words	Paraire Tomoana, his own composition (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography)	soldiers from Northland in the First World War (Te Ara); a group, later reworked by Tomoana and perhaps Ngata (NZ Folk Song)
When it was first sung	before Tomoana’s marriage in March 1913, at Te Poho-o-Rāwiri (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography)	from 1914, at Narrowneck Camp, reaching the East Coast later (Tomoana’s 1921 account, as quoted by NZ Folk Song)
Ngata’s part	his descendants told the 2002 documentary it began when his daughter Tai ran away to the Waiapu headwaters (as reported by NZ Folk Song)	NZ Folk Song argues the dates do not fit, since she would have entered university around 1922, after the song was published
Which waters	the Waiapu, on the East Coast (the usual printed words)	Rotorua, in the version sung to tourists; NZ Folk Song thinks the first Northland version was probably Hokianga
How it reached Korea	New Zealand soldiers in the Korean War (the New Zealand Embassy’s deputy head, Korea Times, 2015)	the same embassy account describes the song as a woman crossing the waters to her loved one, which is the Hinemoa story, not the Waiapu words

Waiapu, Rotorua and the story of Hinemoa

The one part of the song that moves from place to place is the water. The printed words name the Waiapu, the river at the heart of Ngāti Porou country; Kuini Raerena, whom Tomoana courted, was Ngāti Porou. NZ Folk Song notes that the version sung to tourists at Rotorua changes the line to ngā wai o Rotorua ‘the waters of Rotorua’, with the first and last verses chosen to carry the story of Hinemoa.

That story is a tradition of Lake Rotorua, not the story the song tells. Te Ara tells how Hinemoa’s family resisted her marrying Tūtānekai, who lived on Mokoia Island in the lake; each night she heard the flute music of Tūtānekai and his friend Tiki drift across the water, until she strung together six empty gourds to float on and swam to the island in the dark, guided by the music. A lover across troubled water fits the song well, which is why the two travel together at Rotorua.

Swapping the name of a lake or river is localisation, not dialect: the rest of the words stay the same wherever the song is sung. The real regional differences in te reo, such as Kāi Tahu’s k and Whanganui’s h, are in Māori dialects.

From a soldiers’ camp to the world

1917. By June Tomoana had organised a song and dance group to raise money for the Māori Soldiers’ Fund, and in July he took 55 men and women to perform at Waiomatatini at the wedding of Ngata’s daughter Te Rina (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography). NZ Folk Song argues that this group gave the song its action-song form.
1920. The Grey River Argus reported a performer in Greymouth singing “Pokarekare”, “a Maori love song”, alongside Ngata’s recruiting song (quoted by NZ Folk Song).
1926. The sheet music published from 1926, including Hemi Piripata’s arrangement, set it in waltz time, 3/4; NZ Folk Song notes it is generally sung in 4/4 now.
1927. Te Ara calls it “an enduring classic of the New Zealand recording industry”: it was first recorded in the Tunohopu meeting house at Rotorua in 1927, and the next year the lead singers, Ana Hato and her cousin Deane Waretini, re-recorded it in Sydney with instruments.
Kiri Te Kanawa and others. NZ On Screen’s documentary shows Kiri Te Kanawa singing it in concert, Inia Te Wiata singing it in English, and Hinewehi Mohi leading a 30,000-strong league crowd; Te Kanawa also sang it near the end of the 2000 Today millennium concert. NZ Folk Song says Hayley Westenra’s version, on her 2003 album Pure, made it a top-selling international commodity.
2013. When Parliament passed the bill allowing same-sex couples to marry, on 17 April, someone in the chamber began singing “Pokarekare Ana” and most of the room joined in, Slate reported.
Korea. The Korea Times reported in 2015 that the Korean love song Yeon-ga (연가) is set to its tune, that it was widely sung in Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and that few Koreans know it came from New Zealand; the New Zealand Embassy’s deputy head told the paper it was “brought to Korea by New Zealand soldiers during the Korean War”, to which New Zealand sent about 6,000 troops.

Te Ara notes that it is sometimes called New Zealand’s unofficial national anthem. The official anthem’s Māori verse is explained in the New Zealand national anthem in Māori. If you are learning one song for Māori Language Week, this is a good one: Te Wiki o te Reo Māori explains the week and the phrases people use during it.

How to pronounce Pōkarekare Ana

Every Māori syllable ends in a vowel, so the title breaks up as Pō-ka-re-ka-re a-na. Te Aka writes a macron on the first vowel only: the ō is long and every other vowel in the title is short. The rest of the words follow the rules in the Māori pronunciation guide:

Long vowels. Hold the marked vowels a little longer: rīngi ‘ring’, and all three vowels of mākūkū ‘damp’.
wh as f. whiti ‘cross over’ and whatiwhati ‘break into pieces’ begin like English f in most of the country today.
ng at the start of a word. ngā ‘the (plural)’, as in ngā wai o Waiapu.
The tapped r. aroha ‘love’, marino ‘calm’, roimata ‘tears’: one quick tap of the tongue, never an English r.

Is Pōkarekare Ana out of copyright?

Yes, the Māori words are, on every account of who wrote them. New Zealand’s Copyright Act 1994 protects a song’s words for 50 years from the end of the year its author dies, or, when the author is unknown, 50 years from when it was first made public. Paraire Tomoana died in 1946 and Āpirana Ngata in 1950, and the song was being performed in public by 1917. A 20-year extension that New Zealand agreed to in its trade agreements with the European Union and the United Kingdom had not been enacted when this page was written, and even life plus 70 years would have run out in 2020 at the latest. Particular arrangements, English singing versions, translations and recordings are separate works and may still be protected.

Going further

Nearly every word of the song is everyday vocabulary that a beginner meets early: aroha ‘love’, wai ‘water’, hine ‘girl’, hoki ‘go back’, reta ‘letter’, pene ‘pen’, pepa ‘paper’ and roimata ‘tears’ are all in Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course, which teaches the grammar of ka, kia and ana that holds the lines together.