english ballad of calvary street

The Ballad of Calvary Street is an analysis of the New Zealand suburban family trapped inside its mortgages and gender stereotypes and decayed morality. The two old souls in the poem are Roman Catholics (which didn’t help his popularity in some circles at the time.) But his point was that there is a rottenness in our society which even his own faith does not always avoid or prevent. He identified the rottenness as the rigidity and unforgiving judgemental view of Puritanism which is far more ready to condemn what it sees as wrong in people than to love what is…