POEMS BY DOUGLAS STEWART

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 131, 26 December 1941, Page 16

POEMS BY DOUGLAS STEWART

ELEGY FOR AN AIRMAN, by

Douglas

Stewart

Published by

Frank

C.

Johnson

Sydney.

New Zealand newspaperman and poet now on the staff of The Bulletin, Sydney, has recently published two volumes of verse, most of which can be described, roughly and inadequately, as war poems. Elegy For An Airman, which has decorations by Norman Lindsay, has been published some time now, and shows that Stewart is generally carrying on the promise he showed in his early verse. Elegy For An Airman is dedicated to the memory of a young Pilot-Officer in the Royal Air Force, and is largely an emotional recollection of boyhood experiences and friendship in Taranaki. Most of the other poems in the small volume are rather orthodox and straightforward in thought and form, with a suggestion every now and then, however, of a revolt against everyday ugliness, which is a welcome relief from undiluted lyricism. Thus in "Furnished Room": D OUGLAS STEWART, the young What use to stare in the mirror, Beat on the stony walls, When even the face of terror Is stale, is stolen from you, When every ill that falls Between the dark and the day Has whitened other knuckles? Let the next tenant say When the party’s broken up And the white water chuckles,

My midnight sun of knowing Dried up all waves and words, And all I lett on going Was seaweed, snakeskin, thistle, And the thought of the red birds That is certainly a world ending not with a bang, but a whimper. As Constant Lambert has pointed out whimpering has now become one of the higher pleasures.