Not Understood

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 234, 17 December 1943, Page 5

Not Understood

T is not mere frivolity that turns us this week from Teheran to Thomas Bracken. Nor is it wholly the fact that Teheran will have been overexploited before we can get into print. Although we do not subscribe to the theory that it is better to write a nation’s songs than to win its battles, it is important to write the songs if the nation survives to sing them. It is in fact a major misfortune that a great singer has not yet arisen in New Zealand. Bracken was not a great singer-even in the popular sense. But he did sing, and it is better to have a singer of sorts than no singer at all. He wrote at least two poems that everybody knows, and, one has become our national song. The other is pretty thin in thought, and pretty thick in sentiment, but it has meant something to thousands of people who have remained unmoved by better things; and would still have been unmoved if the better things had been written in their day. In fact no good poems were written in Bracken’s day by anybody, and not many that were nearly good. New Zealand has lived through his century and a little longer, without giving birth to any writer who has captured, and held, the national mind. We have not even, like Australia with the Sydney Bulletin, developed a school of writers who instantly suggest New Zealand. We remain inarticulate. But Bracken is one of the influences that will untie our tongues some day. For it does not seem to be true that there is a Gresham’s Law of verse. Instead of driving out good poetry, bad poetry seems to make good poetry a little more likely. So if Bracken was "not understood" in his own day, there is no reason why we should perpetuate the misunderstanding by expecting things of him to-day that he never pretended to know or say. He did know what poetry was made ofalways and everywhere; and when our great writer does arrive he will dip his pen into the same kind of ink.