A Week of Poetry

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 751, 4 December 1953, Page 10

A Week of Poetry

FOR 3YC poetry has evidently been the order of the week. On Monday evening James Crampsey and Harold Wightman read a good selection from" the work of Robert Burns. The best of these was, "A Man’s a Man for a’ That," in which rhythm and rhyme were carefully blended with a conversational inflexion. The reader considered each piece of human pride from an amused and gentle viewpoint. "O, My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose," was not delivered in

that slow manner which gives due value to the comparison, but rather with a persuasive technique which would make me distrust the declaration were I a woman. On Friday evening The Poet on Worship, an NZBS production, competently traversed the centuries, iooking in turn towards Donne, and Herrick, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw, and as far afield as Cullen Bryant. Even so, and granting the merit of the connecting thread relating each of the poets to what had gone before, I feel that the subject could well have borne the fuller treatment of a series which explored The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, and Norman Nicholson’s Anthology of Religious Verse. Trollope’s Characters B bakes dated by the dictum that art conceals art, Trollope’s The Warden, broadcast from 3YC, was indeed excellent, For the most part the story came through so strongly that the fact that it was an NZBS production rarely crossed the mind. Though this radio play didn’t have quite the finish of the BBC’s Last Chronicle of Barset it is surely necessary at this point to take into account Britain’s greater facilities. I can see, however, from both these plays that I would never really be a Trollope fan, if only because the great similarity in character and in the precise nature of the moral problems which the’ chief characters face would become monotonous if extended through other novels. Both Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset and Harding in The’ Warden are threatened by the law, and both react to it in such a way that they save their integrity only at a great expense of spirit which threatens their sanity. I cannot help thinking that there is a deeper understanding of life and faith than either man possesses. This certainly does not destroy the validity of Trollope’s characterisation, but it does show that he was a man of limited

range,

Westcliff