Dream and Experience
MONG the -many well-deserved tributes to Walter de la Mare in his eighthieth year, the programme Poet and Child (from 1YC) found a way of saying something both new and moving. To the narrator of this programme, a girl grown up in a smoky city in the "Black Country," the poetry and stories of Walter de la Mare gave what she knew of beauty, turning the poor city garden into a garden of enchantment. But she never made the mistake of thinking that because his writing is childlike, it is merely pleasing. It can be strange and terrible, even shrewdly real. For this child, the drunken madwoman dancing in the street became "Miss Duveen"’; she knew a ‘"Seton’s Aunt," a cynical and dreadful old woman; and although it had ‘no real counterpart, the tiny voice of the Midget spoke to her. She felt the call to strange quests-the phantom soldiers from the sea, the summoning birds, the lure of Tartary-and knocked and listened with the Traveller. For her, these were the books that solved the conflict between dream and experience. I should add that I have never heard the poems better read, even on the excellent
Columbia disc.
M.K.
J.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530717.2.22.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 731, 17 July 1953, Page 10
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203Dream and Experience New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 731, 17 July 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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