Wasted Sweetness
A RECITAL by Tom Swinley of Gray's Elegy was broadcast recently by 3YA, writes a correspondent. I count myself a hearty adherent of this poem, but I can never hear it without wondering just how successful it is. In the first place, of course, it presents the so-called classical style in poetry at its zenith; and as we are living in an age when the innocent young are still brought up to believe this style to be insincere, undemocratic, and at all points inferior to
romanticism, it is worth remarking that such a condemnation is nonsense. What is it exactly that Gray is saying about the rude forefathers of the hamlet? That their lives and passions are obliterated and forgotten, which is true enough? Or that lives at such a level must contain little of the heroic? This is contradicted by the line about the "village Hampden" and "the petty tyrant of his field." Anyone who knows anything of the heat with which the tiniest municipal and village political issues are contested and the principles that may be at stake knows this to be false; not would the village Hampden necessarily feel that the stage on which he had acted his life was insufficient.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 343, 18 January 1946, Page 25
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206Wasted Sweetness New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 343, 18 January 1946, Page 25
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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