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Salient: An organ of student opinion at Victoria University, Wellington. Vol. 23, No. 4. Wednesday, May 4, 1960

"Parse The Following"

"Parse The Following"

"I can hear the voice quite clearly now: 'Parse the following —scan the following. Give example boy, of metaphor simile alliteration, onamatapoeia. Copy this down, all of you: Poetry equals the best words in the best order. It is important that you should understand the difference between prose and poetry

"Our puzzlement, my puzzlement, was great. Surely the difference was plain? Surely it did not need the weight of this critical authority to explain the obvious. Poetry looked different, poetry sounded different … And I have some memory of it yet: Something about the while walls of Tunis: Something about a dying slave something about a square that broke, All committed, at one time to memory; all reguitated, in mindless rote, during the doodling dozing, buzzing hour of the English lesson…

Maurice Duggan holds the Burns Fellowship at Otago University for 1960, Aged 37, he is a first generation New Zealander. A collection of his short stories has appeared under the title "Immanuel's Departure: won the £50 Katherine Mansfield short story award last year.

"And the other? The unlettered breathless brawling thing we did not know experience at all but only as something, an element in which like a trash of leaves and twigs on a stream, we floated stranded, spun and drifted…

"In time I proved my education false; or so it seemed to me then. I did not know what might be done with the literary side of that education. It had no use; it was sealed off; it shed no light on my experience; it had no voice for me. Arithmetic, yes; that assisted me, directly, in the long exhausting 'fiddle' of a childhood and adolescence dominated by a parental resolve to teach me 'the value of money' by keeping me always short of it … These 'happiest days of my life', then—days marked by puzzlement and arbitrary poverty, by rage, boredom elation, distemper, corporal punishment (lots of that), moods of fervent depression, scorn, obscenity, football, swimming, the mowing of lawns and the memorising of The Slave's Dream and The Walls of Tunis and The Torch of Life— these days ended at last.

"Perfectly unequipped, I was thrust out into Life's Great Adventure. into the cruel World; into the Ratrace; into the World of Adult Values; into Opportunity with a knocking heart. And I found myself very much at home in it, Its values were not , after all, so different from the values of Form 3C and Form 4D. I was put to no trade and pushed into no profession. I was strong: I could sell the strength of that arm. My dim knowledge of a dim arithmetic might fetch a shilling; my recita lion of The Slave Dream was not a marketable thing.