CALVERLEY CENTENARY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21118, 27 February 1932, Page 9 (Supplement)

CALVERLEY CENTENARY.

GOOD. MAN TO REMEMBER. A Christmas centenary befits Charles Stuart Calverley; he is a comfortable man to remember at this time. His verse was the best-tempered mischief that ever tweaked the wreath over a laureate's solemn brow, said the Observer, London, at the recent Christmastide. It was Calverley's queer fate to do many things twice. He went to school at Marlborough and Harrow, and followed up this strange double with careers both at Balliol and at Christ's. Cambridge. He wrote ancient and modern verso with equal brilliance, and it was the causo of his triumph with the jesting Muse that he had all the qualities of a considerable and serious poet. Not for him a mere neatness of jingle. His favourite trick was to start on the high note and work down to a glorious bathos. The trick succeeded because the high note was authentic. Consider—

"Who nsketh why the Beautiful was made? A wan cloud drifting o'er a waste of blue. The thistledown that floats above the glad?, The lilac blooms of April—fair to view; And nought but fair are these, and such, I ween, aro you.

A sweeping variety of meters was part of the equipment. Cnlverley established a technique of light verse from which the followers would be rash to break away. He caught the general ear in a way that other academic wits and singers of (lio first lustre, J. K. .Stephen and A. D. Godley, never quite achieved. He had, perhaps, a broader range; at least ho could light, up any turn of the day's journey, and on a rhyming Baedeker he was grandly in his element. .At Munich he saw There the Amazons of Rubens Lifl tho fniliiiK arm to strike, And the pale liniit falls in masses On the horsemen of Vandyke. And all purest, loveliest fancier That, in poets' souls mny dwell, Startled into shape and substance By the touch of Raphael. These lovely glimpses are. all mixed up with midges and fleas and raw polonies, for lie never could resist tho contrast, of the rainbow tint with the drag fog of commonplace. Ho would translate, the Greek anthology at. one moment; at another observe, contemporary beauty—and insects —at the table. At my side she mashed Die fragrant Strawberry; lashe* soft as silk Drooped o'er saddened eyes when vagrant Gnats sousht. watery slaves in milk.