Word: poem
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This version of a poem by Rudyard Kipling is much quoted in Viet Nam by Americans who are desperately trying to hustle Premier Nguyen Khanh's regime into stepped-up action against the ever more aggressive Red guerrillas. The latest factor that hampers U.S. efforts is that old Asian standby, the rainy season, which is now beginning over South Viet Nam's Mekong Delta. As usual, while the mud and discomfort would seem to be the same for both sides, they favor the enemy...
...charming, Keatsian and somehow like every other poem tossed off by a carefree youth in the flush of summer...
Then Wilfred Owen went to war, and in the muck and death of the trenches wrote a different sort of poem...
...tricked-up Shakespearean production that Guthrie has ever been associated with in the U.S. Except for cutting some lines for pace, he trusts the author and the playgoer, for a change, and the play flashes like an unsheathed sword, keen, virile, inescapably compelling. It is a patriot's poem of valor, a memorial ode written in the bright and acrid air of combat for all men who ever fought, bled and died for their country's honor...
...sharp contrast to Scarlatti's simplicity were the shifting moods of Gabriel Faure's Pellas and Melisande, composed as incidental music to the Maeterlinck dramatic poem. Biss achieved a good variety of sonorities in the four richly orchestrated movements. In the Prelude the orchestra sounded rich and as one unit; at other times, as in the second movement, subdued violins contrasted sharply with pizzicati in the celli and wood-wind solos. The dance-like quality attained in the third movement was excellent. The music lost direction, however, in the Marche Funebre, when Biss had to struggle to keep the dotted...