Tribute to a Forgotten Man

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 5

Tribute to a Forgotten Man

O poem of the very first rank is better known or more commonly quoted than Lycidas, and fresh beauties are revealed even after many readings. Also "it provides what is perhaps the commonest of misquotations, "fresh fields and pastures new," instead of "fresh woods and pastures new." The occasion of Lycidas was this. Edward King, Fellow and Tutor of Christ’s College, Cambridge, aged twenty-five, a young man of golden opinions, was drowned in a

shipwreck in the Irish Sea in 1637, It was a cutting off of a life of promise such as is all too common in all ages. King’s friends in Cambridge resolved to issue a volume of memorial verse, just as friends might do to-day, and among the some thirty contributors to the volume was Milton, who had been an undergraduate with King. One of the many treasures in our Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, is a copy of that little volume-the original edition of Lycidas. The book is worth, on the market, many times its weight in gold. I’m afraid we don’t worry much about Edward King when we read

Lycidas. Indeed it may not strike us forcibly that the poem is a lament. We are captured by the universality of the poem, and especially by its truly magnificent literary art.-(" Poetry Hour,’ 2YA, April 4,)