VERSES IN TRAMCARS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 715, 27 March 1953, Page 5

VERSES IN TRAMCARS

_ $ir-I was delighted to read your pleasant article on this subject, as in almost 20 years I have met.no one else who ever noticed the verses. In the late _thirties -I was living and working in Wellington, and I too memorised, like the young man you mention, the poem "Wellington." I have often quoted parts of it in defence of that libelled city. On days of humid heat in Auckland, those words "" no languid ~beauty she spreading her soft limbs amid dreaming flowers. But rough and strenuous, red. with rudest health, Tos:ing her blown hair from, her eager eyes ..; ; +3 are most apt and telling. I, remember the poem by Hubert Church, "Victoria College," and I am almost certain you are correct in thinking that Bracken’s. "Not Understood" was in one tram, because I was particularly unhappy during some of those years, and you know how the young when miserable wallow in that poem! Imagine all this pent up. in one human being for 20 years, and at last released by an article in your paper (in which, may I here assure you, I find much. excellent reading). It makes one wish there were some magic sign by which people who notice and appreciate odd things could recognise one another on sight-they seem so rare in one’s life. ' The whole delicate fabric of the allusion _ is ruined by lengthy explanation to those _.who do not understand. Would some reader, or would you in an editorial note, please tell me who wrote of someone dying "with all his music still within him?"

E.

S.

(Auckland).

(A poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Voiceless," has these lines: Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!-Ed.)