Trains

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 319, 3 August 1945, Page 10

Trains

HIS was the theme of the latest BBC Anthology heard from 3YL, and the poets were of necessity modern. Hardy, Spencer, de la Mare, Brooke, and others -a surprising number of short poems can be got into fifteen minutes reading. It was interesting to notice how the quarrel between industry and the rural tradition persists in modern verse; even the Spender poem ("The Express") has something consciously defiant about .it. The most strikingly successful at overcoming this divided allegiance was Walter de la Mare, who simply absorbs a mere railway train into his own woodland experience and worries no more about it; this must be more difficult (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) than the position of a later writer whose name I missed-whose experience was clearly so predominantly industrial that he felt no uneasiness. Anti-industrialism in verse would be no great loss in most cases; though the pre-urban charm of Gilbert White’s Natural History (Mr. Simmance’s choice for the week) with its engaging description of the habits of a tortoise-to whom, he says, Nature has given more than the normal span of days, that he may spend more than two-thirds of his time. asleep-is pleasing in its reminiscence of older days. But you can’t industrialise tortoises.