Poetry
The Beggar
R. A. K. Mason · 1924
Synopsis
Twenty-two short poems, many of them written during his school years. They bring forward figures of outcasts, Christ among them, and return to death and to the transience of human lives, which the poet nonetheless holds to be bound to one another. The tone is dark, often morbid, at once sardonic and stoic; the forms are classical, the punctuation almost absent, and the constraint of the verse holds back an emotion that threatens to overflow.
Context
Whitcombe & Tombs printed a thousand copies, published at the author's expense. The book found almost no readers in his country; in London, Harold Monro took two poems from it for his Chapbook the same year, and two others in 1929 in an anthology. It has been said since that the author threw two hundred unsold copies into Auckland harbour, but several commentators consider the story apocryphal. His collected poems appeared in 1962 in Christchurch.
Who it is for
Twenty-two short poems, never translated into French. The reading is austere, and it is better to read them in small doses.
Prizes and reception
Allen Curnow, who collected his poems in 1962, saw in him the first fully original poet of the country, a formula repeated since.
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