Marriage Song
OETRY blooms or withers in a true or false reading of it. When I listen to Stephen Spender reading his own poetry he lifts and animates the otherwise lifeless print, but when I heard Poetry Interlude’s rendering of Spenser’s "Epithalamium" over 3YC I would have wondered at the selection of a subject had I not chosen it for myself long ago. The reader gave to this grave and ritualistic marriage song the speed, almost haste, of one of Shakespeare’s more passionate declamations.. To me the varying refrain at the end of each verse, "That all the woods may answer and your echo ring" will not really "ring" back and forwards through the poem unless read slowly. That the reader deliyered the poem with naturalistic rather than ritualistic passion was indicated also by a pause inserted between "behold" and ‘"whiles" at the beginning of the 13th verse as if the word was meant to be exclamatory. There is neither comma nor exclamation mark in my copy of the poem. These, however, are only two instances, which would not have the same importance were they not characteristic of the reading as a whole.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530327.2.21.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 715, 27 March 1953, Page 10
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193Marriage Song New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 715, 27 March 1953, Page 10
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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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