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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 895, 28 September 1956, Page 5

Sir-Could you support one more opinion on this subject? We are all so anxious not to be taken too seriously that G.leF, Y. alone among your contributors has conveyed in words that first fine careless rapture. But why in a far country? It is here. At any rate, I would rather have spring in New ZeaJand than in the Antarctic, The fault, dear Editor, is not in our seasons, but in ourselves, that we are kiwi-blind, At twenty-one we would not have been so. We are too busy, too encompassed in noise, to pause and know that "Lo, among the\ grasses Young September passes," I wish I could quote the whole of Enid Bowie’s lovely, unschooled

poem. Whether or not Christchurch is more English than the English, new life awakened in its grasses when those words were penned, and will do so each September so long as grasses blow and birds sing. Whether it be the first cuckoo or the wise thrush or the little grey warbler matters not, so long as it expresses soft sounds as at the dawning of the world, sudden discovery, swiit joy and renewal of life. Nature knows that the best things of the past are worth renewing, if not in the same form then in another. You have only to look at the new green leaves on the lopped willows by the Avon to realise that. Why must we pretend to be like stuffed cabbages that do not care about these things? We do not deserve the loveliness of spring. The illustrations to the symposium were delightful-the kites, the absurdly bounding lambs, the early ‘birds; the tender new potatoes and caterpillars and lovers; the springing paint-pot, the car springs and the thoughtful Mooloo in Solemn, purposeful procession: ‘all had the forward leok.

ANOTHER M.B.

(Christchurch).