The Heart of the Matter
UPERBLY appropriate to Easter meditation, the hour-long session of Edith Sitwell’s poems, read by herself and sung by Peter Pears, was an unforgettable experience. Dame Edith’s deep, -s
rich voice-the voice of the Sybil her-self-is as appropriate to the declamatory rhythms and the prophetic utterances of her later verse as Dylan Thomas’s voice was to his very different poetry. In her reading, the elaborate symbolist patterns came across as passionate and profoundly simple vision, not as mannered contrivances. The beauty, compassion and deeply religious temper of these poems fell from the air like "the great dews that come to the sick rose." Surely no greater poem came out of the war than "Still Falls the Rain." In Benjamin Britten’s inspited setting, this poem pierced to the heart. Perhaps because I had been thinking of the hydrogen bomb tests and all they imply, I realised, as never before, how more than anyone else’s poems, Dame Edith’s are poems of the atomic age, how completely she catches its mood, and how, while touching universal themes, she makes the perfect comment on man’s folly now. "Then to the murdered Sun a totem pole of dust arose in memory of Man." That and the "Starved Man Christ" form, surely, |
"the heart of the matter.’
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570510.2.36.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 20
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217The Heart of the Matter New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 20
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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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