THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

[About October 1942]

My Dear

This is pencil – not because I am ill but because I have lost my pen.  I lie in bed this morning – just a precaution & having nothing to take me out & I can do all my correspondence & copying film music just as well in bed.
I like your poem – though there is one line I don’t understand “netting me in their meaning and their care”¹
– Also is not the end an anticlimax – ought not the voice – or do you plan a deliberate anticlimax like in Sohrab & Rustum.²
– I think the ‘Shepherds’ was the best performance ever – though our wireless behaved shockingly and alternately howled and whispered.³
Love from

RVW

1. Line 7 of ‘There are voices’ printed in Fall of Leaf, (Oxford, 1943), p.12.
2. The last three lines of the poems are:
So I listen, listen as he [a shipwrecked man] will stare
I for your voice, and he remembering land
beyond the waves’ inhuman and unchanging dance.
How is the poem by Matthew Arnold relevant to this?
3. A broadcast at the time of VW’s 70th birthday celebrations?