R.A.K. Mason and the Passing of Time

Abstract

R. A. K. Mason (1905-71) is a hauntingly impressive poet who not only shows himself acutely aware of where he is as someone who `Burnt Dian's temple down at Otahuhu' (with an imagination reaching beyond a geographical presence which is nevertheless intensely felt,) but who also has what amounts to a profoundly interesting obsession with the relationship between the present on the one hand, and the past or the future on the other. In this essay, Daalder examines the various ways in which this obsession manifests itself as something ultimately Romantic and modern rather than, say, Christian as that word might have been understood in, for example, the Renaissance.