THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

From R. Vaughan Williams,
The White Gates,
Westcott Road,
Dorking.

[September 1939]

My Dear

Forgive me – I have not written.
I was beset with a spate of work which had to get done & could not even try to read poetry. Now I have read it through quietly (7.30 A.M.) & like it – on the whole I like the 2^nd best – but I may be old fashioned and Tennysonian but I don’t like “fumbles” – & I am not sure that I understand the last line of the 8^tet “safe darkness after birth”. As you know I have a limited mind – and I like everything in words of one syllable.
I wrote to Maud about the Journal –  nothing doing.¹
Is it Herbert Fisher’s History of Europe² you are reading? Magnificent but depressing – all the good things men try to do perish with their births – even their monuments & their forests are destroyed.
But nothing can destroy music! (a platitude in return).
Specs arrived safely (platitude no. II)
Yrs

RVW

1. The subject of his letter about the Folk Song Journal is not clear.
2. H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe, published in 1936.