Rostrum 1942

Present conditions make it so difficult for any University publication to achieve more than a purely pathological interest that a review of this year's Rostrum should begin with congratulations to those responsible for producing something at least as good as Rostrum 1940, edited at Victoria, and much better than Rostrum 1941, the work of Auckland.

Of the prose, five anonymous paragraphs (on the pages headed "Singing in the Rain" and "The Barrett Man") are of extremely high quality, and the rest, if not remarkable, is considerably better than the verse. "Death in Recent Poetry" is happy in its quotations and an example of a genre of which we should like to see more and better specimens; one of the two articles on music—that by Mr. Alpers—makes its modest point in an intelligible manner, various exhortations to political consciousness (notably the editorial and "Finding the Family"), left us with suitable feelings of mild aproval and extreme antiquity.

Apart from a sonnet on Houseman by Mr. Meek—which differs only in the depth of its analysis from one on the same theme by W. H. Auden—the verse, in Rostrum shows as its main influences Eliot, Lawrence and Jesus Christ. Tendencies derived from, we hope, inadequate interpretations of these personalities are distressingly manifest, though they tend to blur into a plaintive and formless disapproval, natural enough all things considered, but not very memorable in thought or expression.