‘Life Should Grow Richer As One Grows Older’

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29058, 21 November 1959, Page 2

‘Life Should Grow Richer As One Grows Older’

"Life should be like a tree. It should grow and spread, not becoming impoverished,’ but growing richer, not getting narrower, but widening as one grows older,” says Mrs Maria Dronke. To prove her words, Mrs Dronke, a Wellington speech and drama teacher, a reader of poetry, and a grandmother, has gone back to the classroom.

For two years now she has sat alongside the students at Victoria University of Wellington, learning Greek from scratch and studying English and philosophy. She has just taken her secondyear examinations, and if successful, next year she will be back, with a B.A. degree as her goal at the end of the year. For two years Mrs Dronke has not given any of the poetry readings for which she is perhaps best known in New Zealand—she has been too busy as a student.

Tonight she will be heard reading poetry again in an evening to close the annual festival of spoken poetry and prose arranged by the Canterbury branch of the Association of Teachers of Speech and Drama.

Mrs Dronke plans to illustrate the poet and his world, through the words of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost and Eliot, and aspects of marriage as seen by Shakespeare,. Chaucer, Euripides, Congreve, Emily Bronte and Milton. In between she will present three poems of the sea, including “The Changeling,” by the New Zealand poet, Alan Curnow. Finished Examinations Mrs Dronke finished her examinations on November 12. The next day she set to work preparing and arranging tonight’s programme, because it was promised to the printer. She had gone back to the angle from which, she says, she had always approached poetry before and frorii which, when she decided to fulfil her lifelong wish and go to university, she had decided to make a change. So far the hardest thing in her course has been Greek. Studying with younger people she had not found too difficult. “I have taught students' and produced student plays, so the age group is familiar,” she says, and both her children are graduates. Marei, now married to a Wellington author and the mother of 15-months-old Nicolas, is a graduate of Canterbury. Peter is a graduate of Victoria University and is now a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. After he finished at Victoria he lectured there for a time

“That was another reason I couldn’t go before,” says Mrs Dronke. He would have hated me to sit at his feet.”

Learning—supposed to become more difficult as age catches up—has been no trouble. Last year she took a W.E.A. drama course

as well. “I have never stopped learning. You cannot just teach, you must learn all the time in order to be able to teach.” Her own desire, to communicate through poetry to overcome what her own native poet, Goethe, described as “man’s dumbness,” began during her German childhood when she convinced her father, who disliked modern poetry, of the truth and beauty of a piece she admired herself. , She spared him her , teacher’s suggestion, after she had recited a long piece of Schiller in class, that she r-hould repeat it to her parents every day as a blessing to them. “It would have been no blessing,” she says. Travelled as Actress She travelled as an actress in Germany, Austria, and Holland, playing in Germany and becoming increasingly aware of the magic of being able to communicate with other people through the medium of words. Today that sense of wonder is still with her. “I am always surprised at the number of interested people, ’ she says. “I have found surprising attendances in numbers as well as in quality. “I think it is up to us who love poetry to crea'te the demand for it. If you love it enough and are convinced enough and fearless enough you will convince an audience.

“For many who learned only to hate poetry at school because they had to learn, say, 20 lines of Milton by heart as punishmentthank goodness they do not teach like that now—it is often a surprising experience to find that a poet has shared an experience that you have had yourself and not been able to express,” says Mrs Dronke.

In Mrs Dronke’s opinion, there is no room in reading poetry for the voice that is conventionally “beautiful.” •

“The best people would be put off by elocution,” she says. “You must share the poetry with them.” Mrs Dronke came to New Zealand with her husband more than 20 years ago. With, she hopes, her degree safely tucked away, she plans to go on a year’s visit to see her son in England. Her daughter, who, is also abroad at the moment, will be back before then. “Children,” she says, “pull one this way and that—you can never be with them all the time. I waited to achieve my ambition until they were away and did not need me. “But one should lead a full life children or no children,” she says. So, after her final examinations and her visit abroad, she plans to go back to university—to try for her M.A.