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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 15, No. 15. August 7, 1952
No Eliot
No Eliot
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour:
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Quotation from other poets is certainly sanctified by the example of T. S. Eliot, but Mr. Eliot wears his run with a difference. He builds the borrowed phrases into his own fabric, draws on some of their significance in their original setting, and develops new Implications in them in their new one. Mr. Campbell uses Nashe's line just as Nashe uses it, as' part of a lament, and moveover weakens it by an explanatory addition.
Lament has good things in it—"lies desolate as unpeopled mirrors", "the heart that was once more than seat to all my drownings", but it is diluted, and has some bad lapses. Does Mr. Campbell intend the stress that falls on—
"Be heard then what
The small waves make. . .."?
Is "inform" in line eight used in any sense the dictionary recognises? (A head can inform a spirit, I suppose, i.e., instruct it, but surely Mr. Campbell means that the spirit informs the head, i.e., fills, animates?)
"The moon is down." Fleance put it that way first, but whether Mr. Campbell's" car remembered the cadence or not, the image works. I am not sure however of the success of the free association sequence, moon-alabaster-tide-mirror-shadow - sun, etc.