Low Fever

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 24

Low Fever

OMING to on the morning of one of the whitest frosts of the year I heard the breakfast session warbling: that

= spring would be a little late this year. You’ve said it, I said; but the sunshine and the peach blossom outside the win‘dow denied it Ambivalent feelings also (continued on next page)

pervaded Alistair Campbell’s verse programme To Spring that evening. There was a strain of elegy among the bursting buds. Spring verse has long been a set exercise for poets, in the same way that Jacobean men of affairs all wrote in praise of contentment and the quiet life; but Mr Campbell used nothing merely perfunctory. He found a fine variety, too, including New Zealanders, although, as he said, New Zealand poets seldom get excited about spring, which the early settlers seem to have brought with them. There were familiar pieces-Housman’s cherry trees among them- but most were less well-known, American as well as British. The reading was uneven and mostly poor. The Robert Frost and the Henry Reed and one or two others were done with feeling and understanding, but one reader persisted in a uniformly dirgelike tum ti tum; while several poems, like the Thomas Nashe, which demanded formal if gay music, were given just too free an expression. Mr Campbell ended with a Yeats which brought the spring fever down with a bump. Bruce Mason cheered me up later until he ended with a like wallop. We seem not to believe wholeheartedly in spring. :