Catullus in Geyserland

Extract

A cycling holiday is necessarily one of limited baggage, but this was not the only reason why I took Catullus in my pocket to Rotorua. I enjoy reading a well-known book in new surroundings. I once read the Greek Gospel of Saint John on the Christchurch-Dunedin Express and filled its simple pages, like a medieval manuscript, with pictures of white beach and headland, smooth plains of wheat and snow-capped hills, from that incomparable stretch of railway that runs down the coast of New Zealand's South Island. So did the beauty of the North Island lakeland illuminate a well-thumbed Catullus. How wrong to read our poets always in the study! We have lost them when they remind us only of grammar and philology, German tomes and prosody. We discover them anew when we can fill their lines with new associations and colour them with a colour sometimes all our own. With my eyes full of scenes from a day's wandering, guideless and off the beaten track, where Maori legends cluster thick about lakes, hot pools, and dark green woods, I read Catullus.