Verse and Music
AVING heard, in the series "Anthologies of Poetry and Music," the poems of Walter de la Mare with music by Quilter, I was eager to hear "Ships" from 4YZ. It is an interesting experi-. ment, the welding of verse and music. With so many poems and so little time left between them for the music, it is apt to sound scrappy if there is no sug-
gestion of continuity. But in the case of Walter de la Mare, the fact that there was only one poet helped to make the readings a blended whole instead of a succession of snippets, and the same effect was achieved in "Ships"
because all the poems had a similar theme; in both cases the music was by one composer, although I would rather have heard Ansell’s " Windjammer" Overture played by itself and not used as background for poetry readings. I felt that the short extracts from Masefield, Bridges, and others, made we want to look up the particular poems and read them entire. One which I hadn’t heard before, "There Was a Queen," with its incredible history. of the fair damsel swallowed by a shark, and its reiterated chorus, "All in a good seaboat, my boys," surely deserves, like Walter de la Mare’s "Three Jolly Farmers," to be ranked with the immortal ballads of old.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19450112.2.11.8
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 290, 12 January 1945, Page 7
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224Verse and Music New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 290, 12 January 1945, Page 7
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