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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 15, No. 15. August 7, 1952

Whence The Emotion?

Whence The Emotion?

Mr. Paterson's In a Brown Bird is another poem of this Romantic Revival, with the rhetorical weaknesses of which I have noted in Lament.

It is notable for its careful manipulation of sound effects—which I find artificial because I do not see where Mr. Paterson gets all this feeling from. When G. M. Hopkins writes of his "morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-draw Falcon", he is writing of Christ, as well as of a windhover. No such impressive analogy is made in Mr. Paterson's poem, and I think that the emotion conveyed in the sound effects is in excess of what one can be expected to feel for a Brown Bird in the Dominion Museum. If more is intended Mr. Paterson has not made it clear.

The Puppet Master is a different matter. Here Mr. Paterson succeeds admirably. His form is just right; the stanza echoes back upon itself monotonously with the two lines added where the ear expects a quatrain finish, and this reinforces the steady unemphatic movement given by the changing sounds and by the apparently unending grammatical sequences. ("They think not of the audience nor will / While wheel and gasket, sickle and spade, the cogs/That move the wheels that move the strings need oiling still.") The central image of the puppets is not new, but Mr. Paterson explores the cliche afresh, making an application to workaday Wellington here and now rather than refurbishing the old generalisations about Man and Fate. His attention to detail is rewarded by success in all but the last two lines, where vague words and ambiguity suddenly slur the crispness of the presentation. Who are the "patient chained kings"? Who is to praise and sing? And why "lock out every thought of peace"? As I rend the poem, it is lack of purpose, lack of freedom, rather than lack of peace, which makes the puppet world what Mr Paterson feels it to be.