With, and Without, Malice

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 382, 18 October 1946, Page 12

With, and Without, Malice

SEEING the title of readings from 4YA by Professor T. D. Adams to be "Apes and Parrots" I imagined some sort of verse connected with the fact that it was Animal Week. An extremely pleasant surprise awaited listeners who heard these particular readings; the apes and parrots were, of course, the parodists, of whose output we hear too little. An appropriate beginning was made with C, J. Dennis’s parody of "The Lost Chord," which begins "Seated one day at the wireless,’ and which could bear reproduction in its entirety, had we space. Parody, as Professor Adams pointed out, is not always vindictive, as proved by the parody of Wordsworth in which J. K. Steven uses the medium for purposes of indirect criticism, and the parody of "Blue Bonnets" in which Gilfillan proves himself a devoted and apparently quite uncritical admirer of Sir Walter Scott. Shirley Brooks’s shrewd lines suggesting that "We dare be rich for a’ that" put Burns’s poem firmly in its place; Frank Sidgwick’s imaginary correspondence between Whitman and Austin Dobson was a gem; and that parody of a parody, A. C. Hilton’s "The Vulture and the Husbandman" was almost as good as the Lewis Carroll which inspired it. One might pass on to musicians a couple of questions from Hilton’s poem, based on that list of enquiries beginning "the time has come, the Walrus said." In this parody, perspiring undergraduates are asked, in an unnatural viva voce examination, "How many notes a sackbut has, And © whether shawms have strings?" It would, indeed, be an excellent question for any quiz programme, musical or otherwise.