from 'Letters in Canada' University of Toronto Quarterly - 1954
The poetry of 1954 includes some reprinting of traditional poets as well as new work, and it may be simplest to deal with the serious verse in a roughly chronological order.
The impact of Lampman, Carman, Roberts, and D. C. Scott on Canadian poetry was very like the impact of Thomson and Group of Seven painting two decades later.
Contemporary readers felt that whatever entity the word [33] Canada might represent, at least the environment it described was being looked at directly. Like the later painters, these poets were lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude; like the painters, they sought for the most part uninhabited land-scape. The lyrical response to landscape is by itself, however, a kind of emotional photography, and like other forms of photography is occasional and epigrammatic. Its variety is provided essentially by its subject-matter. Hence the lyric poet, after he has run his gamut of impressions, must die young, develop a more intellectualized attitude, or start repeating himself. Carman's meeting of this challenge was only partly successful, and it has long been a commonplace that he badly needs a skilful and sympathetic selection. This is provided in The Selected Poems of Bliss Carman, edited by Lorne Pierce (McClelland & Stewart, 119 pp., $3.00).
Carman should, of course, have edited himself. I have heard the late Pelham Edgar turn a poem of Carman's into a thing of unalloyed delight by leaving out a couple of bad lines, but what a public reader can do an editor cannot do. What the selection brings out is that Carman's conscious mind and his poetic instinct were disastrously at odds. The first stage in the development of a romantic poet's mind is normally a sense of the unity of that mind throughout its variety of impressions: this in turn is likely to be projected as some form of pantheism, which has its advantages if properly developed, as Wordsworth shows, but the disadvantage of adding vagueness to monotony if it is not. Carman's conscious mind stuck at a broken-down and corny version of Emersonian over-soulfulness: his editor, with a touch of distaste, speaks of "his elaborate theory of Unitrinianism -- spirit-leading; mental guidance, physical fulfilment -- the full revelation of the doctrine of Personal Harmonizing." I don't know what all this means, but it sounds in more than one sense too awful for words, and I note that most of the poetic results are omitted from this selection. On the other hand, Carman's poetic sense told him, as it told Isabella Crawford before him and Pratt after him, that the most obvious development of a romantic landscape poet is towards the mythological, towards making his emotional impressions into [34] a dramatis personae of forces at once human and natural. Carman's formative influences were late Victorian, and he follows Swinburne, Morris and Rossetti in enamelling nature with primary colours and peopling it with the pagan gods of the turning year, "Our Lady of the Rain," the dying gods Adonis and Attis, nymphs and fauns. And while his conscious mind called for songs of the open road and getting in tune with the infinite, his real poetic imagination became in-creasingly brooding, lonely and haunted:
The windows of my room
Are dark with bitter frost,
The stillness aches with doom
Of something loved and lost.
Outside, the great blue star
Burns in the ghostland pale,
Where giant Algebar
Holds on the endless trail.
This is the kind of thing we remember from Carman, and we are grateful to Dr. Pierce for confining himself to the memorable work, ignoring the pseudo-Carman, with his stentorian hymns to the Great Beyond like "Lord of my heart's elation," which are usually what get into anthologies.
A poet of the same generation as Carman is George Herbert Clarke, whose Selected Poems (Ryerson, xxvi, 54 pp., $3.00) have been edited by George Whalley. Clarke was a university professor, and his poetic qualities are the typically scholarly ones, notably a tendency to identify the poetic impulse with melancholy moods and sonorous diction. Like most such poets, he loves the sonnet and the commemorative ode. The poems are academic in every sense, springing from a world in which everything from ideas to flowers has been ordered and disciplined, a world which would be almost paradisal if it were not just close enough to the working world to recollect its disorder in a meditative tranquillity. Death is for such a poet best understood in the funeral of George V, where it has the maximum of dignity; poverty and pain are best understood as things that may distract one from true knowledge: [35]
Perchance man may not climb
Higher than Pisgah on the mountain road
That twists and loops and narrows, for a load
Of fear cumbers his heart, and sweat and grime
Blind him. Benighted, he may mistake the trail. . . .
The limitations of such poetry are obvious enough, but it is still a valid form of poetic experience, and it is good sometimes to be reminded of more leisurely days when poets wrote odes on the hundredth anniversary of Queen's or McMaster and could feel convinced that
Man was born
To think eternal thoughts, yet to be torn
Between the invisible world that looms sublime
And this apparent, this ambiguous star.
The generation of poets growing up in the twenties encountered more urban and intellectual poetic influences, and found in T.S. Eliot especially a technique for adapting the old mythological themes to a human as well as a natural environment, and to ironic as well as to romantic uses. The mythological impetus itself simply reinforced the romantic heritage: Leo Kennedy's "Words for a Resurrection" is very close in theme to Carman's "Resurgam." This generation of poets is represented in the contributors to New Provinces (1936), two of whom, A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott, have issued new books of verse this year.
A. J. M. Smith has always been a careful and sparing writer, and A sort of Ecstasy (Ryerson, viii, 55 pp., $3.50) contains several poems which appeared in 1943 in News of the Phoenix, and were not new then. Even the passage from Santayana which gives him his title appeared in the earlier book. Mr. Smith has the reputation of being a metaphysical poet in the tradition of Donne: Professor Collin's essay on him in The White Savannahs uses his own phrase, "difficult, lonely music," to describe the quality of his work. Certainly Mr. Smith is scholarly: we meet such phrases as "proud Romanticism" and "Apollonian energy," and part of the point about a poem on the H-bomb turns on the ironic [36] application to it of a phrase from Shakespeare about mercy and from Hopkins about the Holy Spirit. Every poet demands his own kind of erudition; we need some knowledge of the Odyssey to understand "The Plot against Proteus," but we need much more classical background than that to follow Carman's Sappho lyrics, and in both cases whatever obscurity there is is due to the reader's ignorance and not to the poet's wilfulness. Still, Mr. Smith's learning perhaps does interfere with his spontaneity. Too many of the poems seem to me to lack drive: the words do not develop rhythm but are fitted into a containing pattern. The poetry is intensely visual and conceptual; it slowly clarifies, but it does not dance. Sometimes, however, this slow clarification contains great emotional power, as in "The Bridegroom," in which the social and sexual anxieties of modern man come into a nightmarish focus:
Where slaves or workmen strained to mist huge gears
That moved vast vents or fed the flues,
And fell some
Into the fire, of sheer fatigue, and fried.
Looking at the new poems, one is surprised by the number of them that are romantic landscape poems in the Carman tradition: "To Hold in a Poem" is a summary of Canadian romantic themes. One wonders if the intellec-tualized irony of "Resurrection of Arp," even of the remarkable "Universe into Stone," is negative in direction, attacking the political and religious obstacles that prevent the poet from following a naturally romantic bent. That would account for a lack of exuberance in the difficult lonely music, if I am right in finding the lack there:
I would put away intellect and lust,
Be but a red gleam in a crystal dish,
But kin of the trernbling ocean, not of the dust.
Mr. Scott is a more fluent writer than Mr. Smith, and his Events and Signals (Ryerson, vi, 58 pp., $2.50) gives the impression of highly cultivated metrical conversation. This [37] does not mean that it is shallow, but that its sincerity is controlled by urbanity. Its main theme is the inability of events in the modern world to produce signals that are profoundly communicative. The poet stands in churches aware of, but untouched by, the symbols of communion; he reads newspapers which reveal a misery that he is powerless to affect; he goes through a day's duties realizing that
Though all is available, nothing is taken
that is not pre-selected, hence the unsubstantial
is the practical, the theory all-important,
and the routines, sub-conscious theories
wall up the doorways slowly, one by one.
It is part of the paradox of such an attitude that Mr. Scott's verse is least convincing when it is most explicit, and at its best when sardonically observant. He is one of our best writers of epigram and light verse, and sometimes a serious epigram, such as "The Bird," hits a bull's-eye, but his fables are better without morals. In the first of the "Social Sonnets," for instance, the octave sets up a satiric situation with great economy and brilliance, but the sestet, by commenting on it, merely weakens the point already made.
Students are often urged to use short words of Anglo-Saxon origin when possible -- the polite ones, that is -- but there are so many abstract and technical words in the language that the basis of conversational rhythm in modern English is polysyllabic, and a style founded on short Anglo-Saxon words can be the most artificial of all styles. Mr. Scott has grasped this fact about conversational rhythm, and he has brought to a high level of technical competence a kind of meditative, musing poem through which the longer words of ordinary speech ripple with great colloquial freedom. "I am Employed," "My Amoeba is Unaware" and "Some Privy Counsel" are his best achievements in this vein. The same competence makes him extremely good at a kind of literary collage. "The Canadian Social Register" is based on an advertising prospectus, with all its fatuous phrases gripped in quotation marks like a pair of ice tongs. The very funny [38] "Bonne Entente" I could quote, but I do not wish to save the reader the trouble of looking it up himself.
The next generation, growing up in a largely urbanized Canada, has two representatives this year. P. K. Page's The Metal and the Flower (Indian File Book, no. 7; McClelland & Stewart, 64 pp., $2.75) got the Governor-General's Medal, and deserved it, although my opinion of the practice of giving a medal to any poet over the age of ten is not high. But if there is such a thing as "pure poetry," this must be it: a lively mind seizing on almost any experience and turning it into witty verse. The taste is not faultless: sometimes a conceit is squeezed to a pulp, as in "Mystics Like Miners," "Christmas Eve -- Market Square," and "Mineral," or dragged in by a too restless ingenuity, like the unpearled barbiturates in "Subjective Eye" or the hydrocephalic idiot in "Sleeper." The writing is less mannered than in As Ten, as Twenty, though she will still talk too much, in the sense that some of her points are made over-conceptually, in undigested prose. This is true of "The Permanent Tourists," for instance, where most of the impact is made by the first stanza. Although she is essentially an occasional poet, Miss Page has a symbolic language of her own that operates on three levels: a lower level of emotion and instinct, symbolized chiefly by the sea; an upper level of intelligence symbolized by angels and abstract patterns in white; and a middle level of metal and flower, rose garden and barbed wire, where there is passion but little communion:
Black and white at midnight glows
this garden of barbed wire and roses.
Doused with darkness roses burn
coolly as a rainy moon;
beneath a rainy moon or none
silver the sheath on barb and thorn.
This lovely stanza needs to be read in its context, for Miss Page is skilful at varying a stanzaic pattern throughout a poem -- one of the most difficult techniques in modern lyric.
She seems interested in everything, from salt mines to ski tows, but resists the temptation to be merely decorative and looks for the human situations involved in what she sees. [39] The salt mine poem has a deceptively casual development in perspective from beauty to horror. Only a few subjects (such as "Freak") get outside her emotional range. Her studies of girls are perhaps the most obviously attractive of her poems: "Morning, Noon and Night," "Sisters," and "Probationer" are all highly successful, and the conclusion of "Young Girls," in her lower-level key, is a sensitive evocation of adolescent tremors:
Too much weeping in them and unfamiliar blood
has set them perilously afloat.
Not divers these -- but as if the water rose up in a flood
making them partially amphibious
and always drowning a little and hearing bells. ...
She is also admirable in seeing a story within a scene, and "Man with One Small Hand," "Portrait of Marina" (a spinster bullied by a sailor-father and "antlered with migraines" in consequence), and "Paranoid" are excellent little novelettes. More elaborate are the longer fantasies, "Images of Angels" and "Arras," both very beautiful, the latter a somewhat elliptical treatment of the Alice-through-the-mirror theme. Miss Page's work has a competent elegance about it that makes even the undistinguished poems still satisfying to look at, and the book as a whole is as consistently successful in reaching its objectives as any book I have read since I began this survey.
Mr. Irving Layton, like Bliss Carman, is a poet whose conscious and creative minds are at odds, and the former has, up to now, effectively concealed the fact that he is not only a serious poet but an unusually gifted one. The Long Pea- Shooter (Laocoo%n Press, 68 pp., $2.00) is mainly satiric verse, the double-entendre in the title giving the general idea. The book takes what one might call, borrowing a term from architecture, a miserere view of humanity, but the ironic eye does not have free play; it is oppressed by a conscience-driven and resentful mind which sees modern society as a rock pile and the poet as under sentence of hard labour. When there is a core of detachment in satire, there may be a core of reality in its caricature, but most of the world of The Long [40] Pea-Shooter is a depressingly unreal world. If the book stood alone, one would be inclined to say that here is a remarkable mind that has somehow missed its vocation. And yet, there is a personal test which every critic applies to poetry, the test of involuntary memorizing. If one remembers a poem, or part of a poem, without making a conscious effort to do so, one is probably dealing with a genuine poet. And the little pieces of phraseology that keep sticking in one's mind are surprisingly frequent:
I saw a continent of railway tracks
coiling about the sad Modigliani necks
like disused tickertape, the streets
exploding in the air
with disaffected subway cars.
In any case, the question of whether Mr. Layton is a real poet or not is settled by In the Midst of My Fever (Divers Press, Majorca, 41 pp.). An imaginative revolution is proclaimed all through this book: when he says that something "has taught me severity, exactness of speech" or "has given me a turn for sculptured stone," we see a new excitement and intensity in the process of writing. At last it is possible to see what kind of poet Mr. Layton is, and he proves to be not a satirist at all, but an erudite elegiac poet, whose technique turns on an aligning of the romantic and the ironic:
Or hex me to see
the great black-bearded Agamemnon
slain by a danceband leader
bonged on the head on the polished floor. ...
The ridicule of the body, the sense that human genius grows out of human corruption, has always been a central theme in his work: here it becomes a coordinated vision of pity and terror:
Life is horrifying, said Cézanne,
but this is not
what he meant who picked flowers blooming
in the slaughterhouse; he meant the slit throats [41]
The bear traps smeared with blood, the iron goads,
the frightened servant-girl" Caesarian,
And this planet dancing about Apollo,
the blood drying and shining in the sun. ...
One finds something of value on nearly every page of this book: vivid imagery in "Metzinger: Girl with a Bird"; quiet eloquence in "Paraclete"; well-paced narrative in "The Longest Journey"; and, in "The Birth of Tragedy," this:
A quiet madman, never far from tears,
I lie like a slain thing
under the green air the trees
inhabit, or rest upon a chair
towards which the inflammable air
tumbles on many robins' wing. ...
Whatever lapses in expression one may find are of little importance when one is so constantly in touch with a poetic mind of genuine dignity and power. The real poet is now strong enough to dispense with the bristly palisade of self-conscious satire which has obviously been protecting him, not against the world, but against his own fear of sentimentality.
A still younger generation of poets born during the twenties of this century is represented in Trio (Contact Press, unpaged), a selection of verse by Gael Turnbull, Phyllis Webb, and E. W. Mandel. Here finally one meets the responses of people reared in a fully modernized Canada who find the forest as strange as Lampman found the city (see Mr. Turnbull's "Lumber Camp Railway"), and who accept political malaise and existential dread as the most elementary poetical assumptions (see Mr. Turnbull's "Twentieth Century," Miss Webb's "Earth Descending," and all of Mr. Mandel's "Minotaur Poems"). In a way this acceptance has protected them, like an inoculation. Poets who reached maturity between 1930 and 1945 were affected by the world's hostility to creation: these poets take the hostility for granted, and have been driven back on poetry as the most solid basis for experience of anything they know. [42]
None of them have as yet wholly distinguished the process of writing a poem from the process of finding a poetic subject and writing it up, and all of them are apt to take refuge in some kind of literary allusion when they approach the emotional crux of their poem. That there are influences and derivations, such as Marianne Moore in Miss Webb's "Standing," goes without saying: one should not look at those, but past them. Mr. Turnbull's "Post-Mortem" treats a difficult subject with great simplicity and directness, and "A Landscape and a Kind of Man" well evokes that curious nostalgia for mean streets that is a trade mark of contem-porary sensibility:
In some brick-infested town
Where only the damp cobbles shine,
And slate and soot and sarneness blend,
And smoke and cloud have no sure start or end,
Crowded upon the margin of a garrulous sea. ...
In Miss Webb another contemporary trade mark, the sense of apocalyptic parody, of the world soon coming to an end in after all a quite meaningless way, is what moves her to greatest eloquence:
and, as a world tumbling shocks the theories of spheres,
so this love is like falling glass shaking with stars
the air which tornorrow, or even today, will be
a slow, terrible movernent of scars.
The variety of tone and technique in her work makes it interesting but somewhat uncertain in direction: "The Color of the Light" perhaps indicates most clearly both her latent powers and the core of a more individual style.
Mr. Mandel is less superficially attractive, with his strident rhythm full of strong beats and spondees, and is much more difficult to follow, with his superimposed mythopoeic imagery. But these are signs of staying power, and to my mind he is the one of the three most likely to develop not only in technical skill but in depth and range of vision. He is preoccupied by the perennial technical problem [43] of transmuting the substance of myth into the form of immediate experience. And just as Carman turned to Sappho and the Adonis lament to express the plangent melancholy of a late pagan romanticism, so Mr. Mandel, born only a few years before Carman died, turns to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur to express our own sense of sinister initiation into some kind of fearful ordeal:
It has been hours in these rooms,
the opening to which, door or sash,
I have lost. I have gone from room to room
asking the janitors who were sweeping up
the brains that lay on the floors,
the bones shining in the wastebaskets,
and once I asked a suit of clothes
that collapsed at my breath and bundled
and crawled on the floor like a coward.
Finally, after several stories,
in the staired and eyed hall,
I came upon a man with the face of a bull. ...
from 'Letters in Canada' 1955
from 'Letters in Canada' University of Toronto Quarterly - 1955
Poetry, like painting, has two poles: the pole of content or subject-matter, the thing represented, and the pole of form, the conventional structure of the art. Painting may be very formal, as in geometrical ornament or abstraction, or it may be very representational, as in illusion-painting or trompe l'oeil. Poetry may be representational, as it is in reflective poetry where the poet describes a landscape, his emotions, his thoughts, or his society. When it is formal, the poet seeks metaphor, the language of pure identification that he shares with the lunatic and the lover; he seeks myth, the stories of gods whose actions are not limited by reality, and hence form abstract literary patterns; he is erudite and allusive, for the forms of poetry are conventions and grow out of other poems; and he seeks apocalyptic imagery, the vision of a universe which is humanly as well as divinely intelligible. The representational tendency in poetry is [44] sophisticated and civilized: the formal tendency is primitive, oracular, close to the riddle and the spell. In our day, however, the primitive tendency has been reached through a further refinement of sophistication: "modern" poets use myth, metaphor, and apocalyptic imagery just as "modern" painters use abstract or stylized patterns. In Canada, the Romantic nineteenth-century traditions are reflective and representational: "modern" poets have unconsciously bridged the cultural gap with the Indians,just as the painting of Emily Carr bridges the gap in British Columbia between a culture of totem poles and a culture of power plants.
Two volumes this year illustrate each of these tendencies in our tradition. Sepass Poems (mimeographed, 60 + 12 pp.) is a collection of Okanagan Indian mythical poems, recorded by a chief and translated by Mrs. Street. (They were apparently recorded in 1915 but not published because they conflicted with what scholars then thought they knew about the tribe's origin: an extraordinary reason, but that's what it says here.) They are myths of creation and flood, of the sun-god and his paradisal world, of the evil spirit, an Indian Ogopogo, at the bottom of a stormy lake; they are myths of metamorphosis, of how animals were shaped as they are; myths of Titans revolting against the sky-god and of a box of evils like Pandora's. In short, they are the same myths that we find in our European tradition. In spite of a slightly old-fashioned cast to the translation (the translator was born in 1857), the structural outlines and rhetorical devices of the original, notably repetition, obviously show through. They make fascinating and haunting reading.
The other tendency is illustrated in The Selected Poems of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (Ryerson, xxvi, 100 pp., $3.50), edited with a concise introduction by Desmond Pacey. This book is a companion volume to the selection of Carman by Lorne Pierce, reviewed here last year. Roberts is a subjective and descriptive poet, not a mythical one, and the organizing formal principles which give both intellectual and emotional unity to his work come out of his personal life. The formal basis of his poetry is chiefly in the recollections and associations of his Maritime childhood. Being a late [45] Romantic, this means that his central emotional quality is nostalgia. From there he expands to descriptive landscape poetry, still usually with a nostalgic emotional core, and from there the next logical step would be to intellectualized poetry. Roberts tried hard to attain to this third stage, but had nothing intellectual in his mind, and Mr. Pacey has quite properly omitted the poetic results -- still, the pattern of a representational poet is complete in him.
In 1955 there were four volumes of poetry of particular importance. Two, Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child and Anne Wilkinson's The Hangman Ties the Holly, are highly formalized poetry, making considerable use of relatively primitive forms, such as ballads and nursery rhymes. Miriam Waddington's The Second Silence and Irving Layton's The Cold Green Element are at once more subjective and more objective than the other two. They have very little in common with Roberts and his Romantic nostalgia, but their organizing associative patterns begin in personal experience, which in its turn shapes and colours a direct reaction to the world around them.
Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child (Faber and Faber [British Book Service], 56 pp., $2.00) is typically formal poetry, mythical, metaphorical and apocalyptic, using religious language because it is impossible to avoid religious language in poetry of this kind. The expected influences are present: Hopkins (notably in "I Praise God's Mankind"), Eliot, the later Yeats, and more particularly Dylan Thomas, the most exuberantly apocalyptic poet of our time. (There are two poems on Thomas, an "Admiration" and a "Contempt": the latter seems to deny the apocalyptic element in him, which I find incomprehensible, in spite of the great eloquence of the poem itself.) Such themes and influences are by now familiar, and the familiarity is a challenge to the poet to "make it new," in Pound's phrase. It is an impressive tribute to Mr. Watson's integrity as a poet that he meets this challenge by being simple rather than clever, and a tribute to his ability that he succeeds.
The framework of his ideas and imagery is conventional enough. There is a world that is "real," and another world that [46] is intelligible. The real world is the world of nature, where life and death, love and lust, chase each other around in a closed circle. Its presiding genius is an "old woman crossing and breeding all creatures," the central figure of the haunting "Ballad of Mother and Son." It is true that "the dead wave is pierced by the living reed," a phrase with overtones of Pascal indicating that life is as powerful and as primeval as death. Yet one discovers
That love in its simple essence
Is death mourned to magnificence,
and that the energy of passion is driven by the death-impulse: Tarquin the ravisher is "lit at death's white taper." In "In the Cemetery of the Sun" there is a wonderful evocation of the sense of life and death as simultaneously present: the city of Calgary is "a hill of tombstones" and the flapping clothes on Monday morning suggest the ghosts of the Crucifixion and Ezekiel's valley of dry bones.
The other, the intelligible world, is the world of divine presence revealed by Christ, and its first impact on the world of nature is one of total opposition, the light striking into the uncomprehending darkness, into a world protected from Paradise by "the hard mercy of the flaming sword." The terror inspired by the "windy bishop" -- presumably the Holy Spirit -- "who'd preach our dust home," is the terror of being confronted with something that threatens not death but annihilation -- the same terror that made Eliot's Gerontion speak of "Christ the tiger." Yet there is a stage beyond this at which the world of light becomes simply the world of darkness illuminated, a new earth in a new heaven:
... the exigent
Last moment, when the creature at last comes home
To reason, order, proportion, doom.
The reconciliation of the two worlds and the awakening of life-in-death to life is the theme of the powerful "Canticle of Darkness," typologically the key poem in the book, where [47] we move from creation through the death and resurrection of Christ into a new creation.
Friday's Child is brought out by a well-known British publisher, and the blurb expresses a genuine admiration for the book, along with the faintest trace of polite surprise that lyrical tones more highly organized than a buffalo's mating call should come from the windy plains of Alberta. The present reviewer does not share the surprise, if it is there, but he fully concurs in the admiration. One gets very tired of poets who indicate an impressive subject and then walk quickly away from it, but Mr. Watson never starts anything he can't finish, even an apocalypse. He can describe Emily Carr in a way that reveals not what she painted but what she tried to paint, the vision she staked her life on. We feel that even a line as breath-taking as "When in her side my eyes were but blind seeds," or a phrase like "the tomb egg broken," is merely what fits the poem at that point: brilliant as the imagery is, there is no costume jewellery. A refrain, such as "Stand gentle in my words" in the "Canticle of Darkness," steadily tightens the tension and concentrates the reader's awareness, where a merely facile refrain would put him to sleep. "Friday's child is loving and giving," and the book shows the upsurge of creative energy that obeys the command of the thunder in The Waste Land to give, sympathize, and control. How posterity will sort out and rank the poets of today I do not know, nor much care; but in such poems as "In the Cemetery of the Sun," the "Canticle of Darkness" and perhaps the title poem, one may catch a glimpse of the reasons why, in the course of time, what the poet has to say about his culture becomes so important and what everyone else has to say becomes so much less so.
Anne Wilkinson's The Hangman Ties the Holly (Macmillan, vi, 57 pp., $2.50) is another book of mythical and metaphorical poetry which has many resemblances to Friday's Child. The resemblances would be startling to anyone unaware of the highly stylized nature of such poetry. A poem of Mr. Watson's puns on "gone" and Maud Gonne; a poem of Mrs. Wilkinson's, "Swimming Lesson," a rather painful poem in spite of its crisp organization of narrative [48] and description, speaks of "A good Seamaritan," "the warm gulf seam of love," and a girl who "did not holy believe." The subject of Mr. Watson's "O my Poor Darling" and of Mrs. Wilkinson's "The Pressure of Night" -- very different and very remarkable poems -- is the subject of beauty and the beast. Mr. Watson's "The White Bird" and Mrs. Wilkinson's "Dirge" are both based on the Cock Robin nursery rhyme, though Mr. Watson's bird connects with the Ancient Mariner's albatross and Mrs. Wilkinson's with the turtle-dove of marriage. The other nursery rhyme which gives Mr. Watson his title is quoted in Mrs. Wilkinson's "Once upon a Great Holiday." Mr. Watson's "And Should She Ask" and Mrs. Wilkinson's "I was Born a Boy" are both riddle-poems based on a conceit of reincarnation, like some of the early Welsh poems. Mrs. Wilkinson holds her own very well against this formidable competition -- so well in fact that we must desert the comparative at once for the positive.
Mrs. Wilkinson's most obviously striking quality is a gift for sardonic parody. In brief we have the device of altering a stock phrase, a device that may again owe something to Dylan Thomas. Thus we have "new laid lovers," "a game they know by head," "one of those fly-by-days," and the like. In large we have the parody-poem, in most cases, including the title poem, "Dirge" and parts of "Christmas Eve," a folk song or nursery rhyme gone ingeniously sour. Virginia Woolf is described in the imagery of Ariel's sea song:
From ivory pelvis spring
Her strange sea changeling children;
In sockets deep with six lost layers of sight
The sea fans open.
Not since Leo Kennedy has a Canadian poet done much with the macabre as a theme, but Mrs. Wilkinson is much possessed by death. It would be difficult to put the grotesque futility of our burial customs into fewer syllables than this:
A miser's grace
To fill with lead
The breathing earth
That gave us bread, [49]
or to make a more chillingly logical conclusion to the poet's conversation with two young lovers in a park:
I move'd
To go but death sat down.
His cunning hand
Explored my skeleton.
Mrs. Wilkinson sees nature in sharp outlines -- it is significant that one of her favourite words is "lens" -- and she has a liking for clear colours and conventionalizing forms ("Italian Primitive"). There is also a deeper prophetic sympathy with nature, of the kind that organizes the fine little poem "Tigers Know from Birth," and flashes out a phrase like
I put on my body and go forth
To seek my blood.
What she emphatically is not is apocalyptic: the death that recurs so often is the guarantee of man's identity with nature: human nature is her metaphor, and she has no use for the religious language that assumes the uniqueness of humanity. Hence what we have is a kind of parody-apocalypse, a union of life and death in nature, and the last image in the book is one of a falling man.
We turn now to the two less formal and more representational poets. In Miriam Waddington's The Second Silence (Ryerson, vi, 57 pp., $2.50), there are no apocalypses or erudite parodies: just as her metaphors are rooted in her own life, so are her myths in the society around her:
The wine we drink is bitter
Compounded of the blood
Of not one Christ but many
Who gained no holihood.
The central images of everyone's life are formed in child-hood: the child's dream world is the world of the "second silence" in which creation begins. Mrs. Waddington's "Poems of Children" (the poems are arranged according to theme) [50] move in the associative exuberance of the world of child-hood, the world where everything is mysteriously linked with everything else. In sharp contrast to the brilliant clear outlines of the two previous poets, Mrs. Waddington's images break up into a kaleidoscopic impressionism:
... Lullabies from an old book
Of apples and nutmegs and peacocks that flew
Ceaselessly circling a golden sea.
(It was dream, it was dream,
Light echoed and keys were lost in the sea.)
In adult life this associative world is driven underground into the subconscious, where the irnagery of adult dreams, with all its guilt-ridden hauntings, collides or coincides with the outer world. This is the subject of the strikingly original "Morning until Night":
... two black dogs dart out
Swift as foxes to confound my eyes,
And all the sudden wolves that had rny drearns
Revolving on fear startle me with their smiles. ...
Mrs. Waddington records both aspects of this conflict equally well. In "Poems of Love," especially "Thou Didst Say Me," the constant turning of the lover's individuality on its axis, so to speak, is expressed by an intense murmuring of repeated sound, and in "Poems of Work" the squalor that a social worker sees in a modern city is recorded with the kind of sympathy that comes from being emotionally involved in everybody else's fate. In the last section, "Poems of Living," something of her earlier "Green World" imagery begins to creep back, like blades of grass rooting in pavement, particularly in the final poem, "Inward Look the Trees," which brings the book to an impressive close. Where she is least successful, the failure is due to intellectual excess, not deficiency, as in the poems to a teacher and a pupil, where there is too much unorganized metrical talk. But she has her own distinctive quality: a gentle intimacy and an. [51] unmediated, though by no means naive, contact between herself and her world.
Irving Layton's The Cold Green Element (Contact Press, unnumbered, $1.50) is also polarized between personal association and a direct reaction to experience, though in a more explosive way than Mrs. Waddington's book. In such poems as "winter fantasy" (his titles are in lower case) and "me, the p.m., and the stars," there is a subjective rearranging of images, of a kind that was called "surrealism" in the fashionable slang of twenty years back, dream poems a little like Chagall paintings. What many surrealists did not sur-realize was that such techniques are of little point without their objective counterpart, the vision of a world which acts in as sex-goaded, as guilt-ridden, as arbitrarily foolish a way as the dream. Mr. Layton's fantasy is not irresponsible or a mere playing with verbal patterns, because the distortions of the poetic imagination are geared to the distortions of society. For this kind of writing a poet needs humour and technical competence, and Mr. Layton appears to have plenty of both. Sometimes the humour becomes sinister and Kafkaesque, as in "the executioner," and sometimes self-mocking, as in the end of "the poet entertains several ladies." In "me, the p.m., and the stars," when the poet is rebuked by the Prime Minister for throwing a snowball through some-body's window, the poet explains that he has met a "sage" -- presumably Zarathustra -- who has given him a motive for doing so:
He also said pity was loss of power.
Someone had to tell the people
what was happening; it's indecent to let
the death of the last god go by unnoticed.
The objective pole takes the form of social caricature -- not satire or invective, for which Mr. Layton has no gift, but the mock-heroic, or, as in the lively "birds at daybreak," the mock-mythical. In "Golfers" he says: [52]
And you see at a glance
among sportsmen they are the metaphysicians,
intent, untalkative, pursuing Unity ...
And that no theory of pessimism is complete
which altogether ignores them. ...
Exactly in the middle between the fantasy poems and the social poems comes the remarkable title poem, an ironic personal myth of the poet as a hanged god or nature spirit torn apart and distributed through the landscape. No quotation can do justice to the intricate unity of the poem, but we can see as soon as we read it that it presents the organizing image of the book. Again we note an odd coincidence: it is the same image as that of the central poem of Mrs. Wilkinson's book, "Carol."
Of the poems mentioned, "Golfers" belongs to a second volume, The Blue Propeller (Contact Press, $1.00), where there are two or three other poems, including "Portrait" and "Mute in the Wind," that are witty and sharply pointed. Otherwise much of the book is an obstacle race for the sympathetic reader, a dark tunnel of noisy dullness. The Cold Green Element is infinitely better on all counts, and in it there are at least a half-dozen poems (including, besides those mentioned, the lilting "for Naomi" at the beginning) which have a rhythmical swing, an urbane humour and a technical finish guaranteed to make the reader's toes curl up in solid contentment.
Louis Dudek's Europe (Laocoo%n [Contact] Press, iv, 139 pp., $2.00) is diary poetry: a sequence of ninety-nine short pieces recounting impressions of a trip to Europe, from England through France, Spain, Italy, and Greece, and ending with the discovery that what Europe, a shattered and demoralized civilization, really reveals to the North American is the virtues of his own culture. The century of meditation is a fatal idea for a facile poet, and although at his best Mr. Dudek escapes being merely facile, I find large stretches of [53] the book unrewarding. In the first place, the influence of Pound is oppressive. Pound is everywhere: the rub-a-dub three-and four-accent line, the trick of snapped-up quota-tions and allusions, the harangues against usura, the toboggan-slide theory of the decline of Europe after the Middle Ages, and so on. In the second place, the conversa-tional style brings the ideas into sharp relief, and the ideas are commonplace, prejudice reinforced by superficial tourism. To be told in rather pedestrian verse that the English are constrained by standards of what is and is not done hardly adds to the variety of one's poetic experience. Things improve however towards the end, where the rhythm firms up and begins to swing and lilt a bit, and where first-hand observation replaces second-hand theorizing. The eighty-first piece, a concise and ironic sketch of a Greek village, is an admirable vignette; and the ninety-fifth, on the sea, achieves the difficult feat of talking beautifully about beauty:
Beauty is ordered in nature
as the wind and sea
shape each other for pleasure; as the just
know, who learn of happiness
from the report of their own actions.
Raymond Souster's For What Time Slays (mimeo-graphed, 24 pp.) shows a more distinctive and unified style than any previous collection of his. There are still too many expendable poems, based on a preoccupation with the process of writing, on a substituting of ready-made moraliz-ing for observation and irony, and, most frequently, on an apparently unshakable conviction that the kind of sexual reverie indigenous to male boarding-houses is invariably poetic material. Such signs of immaturity are the result of too slavish an adherence to the conventions of his kind of poetry. In about every tenth poem he escapes these conven-tions and writes the kind of poem that only he can write. Usually it is an epigram based on observation unified by a single drop of emotional colouring: a type of epigram which for some reason has been more common in Chinese poetry than in our tradition: [54]
I fear this skull-capped priest.
He tells his viewers
Someone must have Authority,
And clearly he is thinking of himself.
Two new series of collections of verse provide some very interesting work in small compass. Emblem Books are tiny little booklets put out by Jay Macpherson with covers by Laurence Hyde. There are three of them to date. Daryl Hine's Five Poems is a remarkable first volume, if one can call five poems a volume. Reading his long meditative lines is like watching heavy traffic at night: a brilliant series of phrases moves across a mysteriously dark background, the central driving force of the poem remaining elusive. It sounds condescending to speak of promise and a future, yet the sense of powerful gathering forces is stronger than any other reaction. The main line of development is probably indicated in such passages as this, from a dialogue of Theseus and the Minotaur (the Minotaur is speaking):
I am Charon, and I wait
beside this lightless river for rny gold;
my boat is paper; I am cold;
the winds upon the water celebrate
the soul's long shadow and the heart's
red beacon; I perceive
the wormy lover wearing on his sleeve
funerals foreshadowed by his art. ...
Jay Macpherson's O Earth Return is almost exactly the opposite in technique, using stanza forms, usually quatrains, with expertly varied timing, and with an interest in myth that classes her with the formal poets. The title indicates a Blakean influence, which is discernible, but the tradition is rather that of the Elizabethan lyric, where -- as in Campion -- the use of a mythical or conventional theme releases the emotion by detaching it from direct experience and containing it within the convention. Thus a poem that might seem at first glance to be only an allusive literary [55] exercise becomes a kind of reservoir of feeling in which one's literary and personal associations mingle and are held in the kind of variable emotional contemplation that it is one of the primary functions of poetry to provide:
Where is your god, Sibylla? where is he
Who came in other days
To lay his bright head on your knee
And learn the secrets of Earth's ways?
Silence: the bat-clogged cave
Lacks breath to sigh.
Sibylla, hung between earth and sky
Sways with the wind in her pendant gave. [?]
There are fewer surprises in the third Emblem Book, Dorothy Livesay's New Poems, where the main impression is of a disciplined and experienced handling of modern poetic idioms. A sense of a lonely pessimism, of the shutting off of communication, of the inevitable victories of winter and darkness, gives the poems a plaintively muted quality: they seem to struggle against a conviction that they cannot say much:
And deeper than flash
Of fin in well
Your thoughts dot, dash --
But never tell.
O when will you freeze
Glassy, clear
Frost-breathing image
On polished air: ...
This survey was originally bibliographical as well as critical, and it may well be thought that a review which mentions twenty-three separate items can have only a bibliographical interest. There is perhaps some point in explaining the critical principle. The ideal reader often visualized by founders of little mags, who is eager to read contemporary poetry but has no ambition to write it, barely exists. Practically everybody who habitually reads poetry [56] habitually writes it as well. That is as it should be: there are many things wrong with the position of the poet in modern society, but this is not one of the wrong things. The cultivated amateur is the backbone of all the arts, especially poetry, as the professional poet who lives by his verse is usually a writer of newspaper doggerel. Criticism concerned primarily with measuring the distance between amateur verse and great poetry is essential, but there will never be any lack of it. Meanwhile, what with an indifferent public, the conscientiously contemptuous critics, and perhaps his own frustrated ambitions, the amateur poet has a hard time of it. Yet in Canada, where there is no sharp line between the regular and the occasional poet, it seems more appropriate to look at a year's output inclusively, as a total power of articulation, shading from a luminous centre to a pleasantly blurred periphery.
In every year in Canada, including 1955, most of the published verse shows the features of occasional amateur writing. Lines will be pumped up with adjectives; rhymes in a sonnet will clang like a typewriter bell; stodgy rhythms will be harried into movement by starting every line with a heavy accent; a sentence will begin in poetry and finish in vague prose; a failure in accurate expression will be concealed by an exclamation, and so on and so on. These faults also occur even in the best poetry, and many of the virtues of the best poetry reappear in the slighter books. Hence while much Canadian verse could be honestly described, by the highest standards of the best twentieth-century poets, as metrical doodling, it could also be described, just as honestly and perhaps more usefully, as the poetic conversation of culti-vated people. After all, there are many who will read detective stories with pleasure even when they have the style of a riveting machine, the characterization of a tombstone, and the plot of a charade: perhaps poetry too might be approached with some tolerance for the convention as well as evaluation for the achievement. ...[57]
Poetry, like painting, has two poles: the pole of content or subject-matter, the thing represented, and the pole of form, the conventional structure of the art. Painting may be very formal, as in geometrical ornament or abstraction, or it may be very representational, as in illusion-painting or trompe l'oeil. Poetry may be representational, as it is in reflective poetry where the poet describes a landscape, his emotions, his thoughts, or his society. When it is formal, the poet seeks metaphor, the language of pure identification that he shares with the lunatic and the lover; he seeks myth, the stories of gods whose actions are not limited by reality, and hence form abstract literary patterns; he is erudite and allusive, for the forms of poetry are conventions and grow out of other poems; and he seeks apocalyptic imagery, the vision of a universe which is humanly as well as divinely intelligible. The representational tendency in poetry is [44] sophisticated and civilized: the formal tendency is primitive, oracular, close to the riddle and the spell. In our day, however, the primitive tendency has been reached through a further refinement of sophistication: "modern" poets use myth, metaphor, and apocalyptic imagery just as "modern" painters use abstract or stylized patterns. In Canada, the Romantic nineteenth-century traditions are reflective and representational: "modern" poets have unconsciously bridged the cultural gap with the Indians,just as the painting of Emily Carr bridges the gap in British Columbia between a culture of totem poles and a culture of power plants.
Two volumes this year illustrate each of these tendencies in our tradition. Sepass Poems (mimeographed, 60 + 12 pp.) is a collection of Okanagan Indian mythical poems, recorded by a chief and translated by Mrs. Street. (They were apparently recorded in 1915 but not published because they conflicted with what scholars then thought they knew about the tribe's origin: an extraordinary reason, but that's what it says here.) They are myths of creation and flood, of the sun-god and his paradisal world, of the evil spirit, an Indian Ogopogo, at the bottom of a stormy lake; they are myths of metamorphosis, of how animals were shaped as they are; myths of Titans revolting against the sky-god and of a box of evils like Pandora's. In short, they are the same myths that we find in our European tradition. In spite of a slightly old-fashioned cast to the translation (the translator was born in 1857), the structural outlines and rhetorical devices of the original, notably repetition, obviously show through. They make fascinating and haunting reading.
The other tendency is illustrated in The Selected Poems of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (Ryerson, xxvi, 100 pp., $3.50), edited with a concise introduction by Desmond Pacey. This book is a companion volume to the selection of Carman by Lorne Pierce, reviewed here last year. Roberts is a subjective and descriptive poet, not a mythical one, and the organizing formal principles which give both intellectual and emotional unity to his work come out of his personal life. The formal basis of his poetry is chiefly in the recollections and associations of his Maritime childhood. Being a late [45] Romantic, this means that his central emotional quality is nostalgia. From there he expands to descriptive landscape poetry, still usually with a nostalgic emotional core, and from there the next logical step would be to intellectualized poetry. Roberts tried hard to attain to this third stage, but had nothing intellectual in his mind, and Mr. Pacey has quite properly omitted the poetic results -- still, the pattern of a representational poet is complete in him.
In 1955 there were four volumes of poetry of particular importance. Two, Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child and Anne Wilkinson's The Hangman Ties the Holly, are highly formalized poetry, making considerable use of relatively primitive forms, such as ballads and nursery rhymes. Miriam Waddington's The Second Silence and Irving Layton's The Cold Green Element are at once more subjective and more objective than the other two. They have very little in common with Roberts and his Romantic nostalgia, but their organizing associative patterns begin in personal experience, which in its turn shapes and colours a direct reaction to the world around them.
Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child (Faber and Faber [British Book Service], 56 pp., $2.00) is typically formal poetry, mythical, metaphorical and apocalyptic, using religious language because it is impossible to avoid religious language in poetry of this kind. The expected influences are present: Hopkins (notably in "I Praise God's Mankind"), Eliot, the later Yeats, and more particularly Dylan Thomas, the most exuberantly apocalyptic poet of our time. (There are two poems on Thomas, an "Admiration" and a "Contempt": the latter seems to deny the apocalyptic element in him, which I find incomprehensible, in spite of the great eloquence of the poem itself.) Such themes and influences are by now familiar, and the familiarity is a challenge to the poet to "make it new," in Pound's phrase. It is an impressive tribute to Mr. Watson's integrity as a poet that he meets this challenge by being simple rather than clever, and a tribute to his ability that he succeeds.
The framework of his ideas and imagery is conventional enough. There is a world that is "real," and another world that [46] is intelligible. The real world is the world of nature, where life and death, love and lust, chase each other around in a closed circle. Its presiding genius is an "old woman crossing and breeding all creatures," the central figure of the haunting "Ballad of Mother and Son." It is true that "the dead wave is pierced by the living reed," a phrase with overtones of Pascal indicating that life is as powerful and as primeval as death. Yet one discovers
That love in its simple essence
Is death mourned to magnificence,
and that the energy of passion is driven by the death-impulse: Tarquin the ravisher is "lit at death's white taper." In "In the Cemetery of the Sun" there is a wonderful evocation of the sense of life and death as simultaneously present: the city of Calgary is "a hill of tombstones" and the flapping clothes on Monday morning suggest the ghosts of the Crucifixion and Ezekiel's valley of dry bones.
The other, the intelligible world, is the world of divine presence revealed by Christ, and its first impact on the world of nature is one of total opposition, the light striking into the uncomprehending darkness, into a world protected from Paradise by "the hard mercy of the flaming sword." The terror inspired by the "windy bishop" -- presumably the Holy Spirit -- "who'd preach our dust home," is the terror of being confronted with something that threatens not death but annihilation -- the same terror that made Eliot's Gerontion speak of "Christ the tiger." Yet there is a stage beyond this at which the world of light becomes simply the world of darkness illuminated, a new earth in a new heaven:
... the exigent
Last moment, when the creature at last comes home
To reason, order, proportion, doom.
The reconciliation of the two worlds and the awakening of life-in-death to life is the theme of the powerful "Canticle of Darkness," typologically the key poem in the book, where [47] we move from creation through the death and resurrection of Christ into a new creation.
Friday's Child is brought out by a well-known British publisher, and the blurb expresses a genuine admiration for the book, along with the faintest trace of polite surprise that lyrical tones more highly organized than a buffalo's mating call should come from the windy plains of Alberta. The present reviewer does not share the surprise, if it is there, but he fully concurs in the admiration. One gets very tired of poets who indicate an impressive subject and then walk quickly away from it, but Mr. Watson never starts anything he can't finish, even an apocalypse. He can describe Emily Carr in a way that reveals not what she painted but what she tried to paint, the vision she staked her life on. We feel that even a line as breath-taking as "When in her side my eyes were but blind seeds," or a phrase like "the tomb egg broken," is merely what fits the poem at that point: brilliant as the imagery is, there is no costume jewellery. A refrain, such as "Stand gentle in my words" in the "Canticle of Darkness," steadily tightens the tension and concentrates the reader's awareness, where a merely facile refrain would put him to sleep. "Friday's child is loving and giving," and the book shows the upsurge of creative energy that obeys the command of the thunder in The Waste Land to give, sympathize, and control. How posterity will sort out and rank the poets of today I do not know, nor much care; but in such poems as "In the Cemetery of the Sun," the "Canticle of Darkness" and perhaps the title poem, one may catch a glimpse of the reasons why, in the course of time, what the poet has to say about his culture becomes so important and what everyone else has to say becomes so much less so.
Anne Wilkinson's The Hangman Ties the Holly (Macmillan, vi, 57 pp., $2.50) is another book of mythical and metaphorical poetry which has many resemblances to Friday's Child. The resemblances would be startling to anyone unaware of the highly stylized nature of such poetry. A poem of Mr. Watson's puns on "gone" and Maud Gonne; a poem of Mrs. Wilkinson's, "Swimming Lesson," a rather painful poem in spite of its crisp organization of narrative [48] and description, speaks of "A good Seamaritan," "the warm gulf seam of love," and a girl who "did not holy believe." The subject of Mr. Watson's "O my Poor Darling" and of Mrs. Wilkinson's "The Pressure of Night" -- very different and very remarkable poems -- is the subject of beauty and the beast. Mr. Watson's "The White Bird" and Mrs. Wilkinson's "Dirge" are both based on the Cock Robin nursery rhyme, though Mr. Watson's bird connects with the Ancient Mariner's albatross and Mrs. Wilkinson's with the turtle-dove of marriage. The other nursery rhyme which gives Mr. Watson his title is quoted in Mrs. Wilkinson's "Once upon a Great Holiday." Mr. Watson's "And Should She Ask" and Mrs. Wilkinson's "I was Born a Boy" are both riddle-poems based on a conceit of reincarnation, like some of the early Welsh poems. Mrs. Wilkinson holds her own very well against this formidable competition -- so well in fact that we must desert the comparative at once for the positive.
Mrs. Wilkinson's most obviously striking quality is a gift for sardonic parody. In brief we have the device of altering a stock phrase, a device that may again owe something to Dylan Thomas. Thus we have "new laid lovers," "a game they know by head," "one of those fly-by-days," and the like. In large we have the parody-poem, in most cases, including the title poem, "Dirge" and parts of "Christmas Eve," a folk song or nursery rhyme gone ingeniously sour. Virginia Woolf is described in the imagery of Ariel's sea song:
From ivory pelvis spring
Her strange sea changeling children;
In sockets deep with six lost layers of sight
The sea fans open.
Not since Leo Kennedy has a Canadian poet done much with the macabre as a theme, but Mrs. Wilkinson is much possessed by death. It would be difficult to put the grotesque futility of our burial customs into fewer syllables than this:
A miser's grace
To fill with lead
The breathing earth
That gave us bread, [49]
or to make a more chillingly logical conclusion to the poet's conversation with two young lovers in a park:
I move'd
To go but death sat down.
His cunning hand
Explored my skeleton.
Mrs. Wilkinson sees nature in sharp outlines -- it is significant that one of her favourite words is "lens" -- and she has a liking for clear colours and conventionalizing forms ("Italian Primitive"). There is also a deeper prophetic sympathy with nature, of the kind that organizes the fine little poem "Tigers Know from Birth," and flashes out a phrase like
I put on my body and go forth
To seek my blood.
What she emphatically is not is apocalyptic: the death that recurs so often is the guarantee of man's identity with nature: human nature is her metaphor, and she has no use for the religious language that assumes the uniqueness of humanity. Hence what we have is a kind of parody-apocalypse, a union of life and death in nature, and the last image in the book is one of a falling man.
We turn now to the two less formal and more representational poets. In Miriam Waddington's The Second Silence (Ryerson, vi, 57 pp., $2.50), there are no apocalypses or erudite parodies: just as her metaphors are rooted in her own life, so are her myths in the society around her:
The wine we drink is bitter
Compounded of the blood
Of not one Christ but many
Who gained no holihood.
The central images of everyone's life are formed in child-hood: the child's dream world is the world of the "second silence" in which creation begins. Mrs. Waddington's "Poems of Children" (the poems are arranged according to theme) [50] move in the associative exuberance of the world of child-hood, the world where everything is mysteriously linked with everything else. In sharp contrast to the brilliant clear outlines of the two previous poets, Mrs. Waddington's images break up into a kaleidoscopic impressionism:
... Lullabies from an old book
Of apples and nutmegs and peacocks that flew
Ceaselessly circling a golden sea.
(It was dream, it was dream,
Light echoed and keys were lost in the sea.)
In adult life this associative world is driven underground into the subconscious, where the irnagery of adult dreams, with all its guilt-ridden hauntings, collides or coincides with the outer world. This is the subject of the strikingly original "Morning until Night":
... two black dogs dart out
Swift as foxes to confound my eyes,
And all the sudden wolves that had rny drearns
Revolving on fear startle me with their smiles. ...
Mrs. Waddington records both aspects of this conflict equally well. In "Poems of Love," especially "Thou Didst Say Me," the constant turning of the lover's individuality on its axis, so to speak, is expressed by an intense murmuring of repeated sound, and in "Poems of Work" the squalor that a social worker sees in a modern city is recorded with the kind of sympathy that comes from being emotionally involved in everybody else's fate. In the last section, "Poems of Living," something of her earlier "Green World" imagery begins to creep back, like blades of grass rooting in pavement, particularly in the final poem, "Inward Look the Trees," which brings the book to an impressive close. Where she is least successful, the failure is due to intellectual excess, not deficiency, as in the poems to a teacher and a pupil, where there is too much unorganized metrical talk. But she has her own distinctive quality: a gentle intimacy and an. [51] unmediated, though by no means naive, contact between herself and her world.
Irving Layton's The Cold Green Element (Contact Press, unnumbered, $1.50) is also polarized between personal association and a direct reaction to experience, though in a more explosive way than Mrs. Waddington's book. In such poems as "winter fantasy" (his titles are in lower case) and "me, the p.m., and the stars," there is a subjective rearranging of images, of a kind that was called "surrealism" in the fashionable slang of twenty years back, dream poems a little like Chagall paintings. What many surrealists did not sur-realize was that such techniques are of little point without their objective counterpart, the vision of a world which acts in as sex-goaded, as guilt-ridden, as arbitrarily foolish a way as the dream. Mr. Layton's fantasy is not irresponsible or a mere playing with verbal patterns, because the distortions of the poetic imagination are geared to the distortions of society. For this kind of writing a poet needs humour and technical competence, and Mr. Layton appears to have plenty of both. Sometimes the humour becomes sinister and Kafkaesque, as in "the executioner," and sometimes self-mocking, as in the end of "the poet entertains several ladies." In "me, the p.m., and the stars," when the poet is rebuked by the Prime Minister for throwing a snowball through some-body's window, the poet explains that he has met a "sage" -- presumably Zarathustra -- who has given him a motive for doing so:
He also said pity was loss of power.
Someone had to tell the people
what was happening; it's indecent to let
the death of the last god go by unnoticed.
The objective pole takes the form of social caricature -- not satire or invective, for which Mr. Layton has no gift, but the mock-heroic, or, as in the lively "birds at daybreak," the mock-mythical. In "Golfers" he says: [52]
And you see at a glance
among sportsmen they are the metaphysicians,
intent, untalkative, pursuing Unity ...
And that no theory of pessimism is complete
which altogether ignores them. ...
Exactly in the middle between the fantasy poems and the social poems comes the remarkable title poem, an ironic personal myth of the poet as a hanged god or nature spirit torn apart and distributed through the landscape. No quotation can do justice to the intricate unity of the poem, but we can see as soon as we read it that it presents the organizing image of the book. Again we note an odd coincidence: it is the same image as that of the central poem of Mrs. Wilkinson's book, "Carol."
Of the poems mentioned, "Golfers" belongs to a second volume, The Blue Propeller (Contact Press, $1.00), where there are two or three other poems, including "Portrait" and "Mute in the Wind," that are witty and sharply pointed. Otherwise much of the book is an obstacle race for the sympathetic reader, a dark tunnel of noisy dullness. The Cold Green Element is infinitely better on all counts, and in it there are at least a half-dozen poems (including, besides those mentioned, the lilting "for Naomi" at the beginning) which have a rhythmical swing, an urbane humour and a technical finish guaranteed to make the reader's toes curl up in solid contentment.
Louis Dudek's Europe (Laocoo%n [Contact] Press, iv, 139 pp., $2.00) is diary poetry: a sequence of ninety-nine short pieces recounting impressions of a trip to Europe, from England through France, Spain, Italy, and Greece, and ending with the discovery that what Europe, a shattered and demoralized civilization, really reveals to the North American is the virtues of his own culture. The century of meditation is a fatal idea for a facile poet, and although at his best Mr. Dudek escapes being merely facile, I find large stretches of [53] the book unrewarding. In the first place, the influence of Pound is oppressive. Pound is everywhere: the rub-a-dub three-and four-accent line, the trick of snapped-up quota-tions and allusions, the harangues against usura, the toboggan-slide theory of the decline of Europe after the Middle Ages, and so on. In the second place, the conversa-tional style brings the ideas into sharp relief, and the ideas are commonplace, prejudice reinforced by superficial tourism. To be told in rather pedestrian verse that the English are constrained by standards of what is and is not done hardly adds to the variety of one's poetic experience. Things improve however towards the end, where the rhythm firms up and begins to swing and lilt a bit, and where first-hand observation replaces second-hand theorizing. The eighty-first piece, a concise and ironic sketch of a Greek village, is an admirable vignette; and the ninety-fifth, on the sea, achieves the difficult feat of talking beautifully about beauty:
Beauty is ordered in nature
as the wind and sea
shape each other for pleasure; as the just
know, who learn of happiness
from the report of their own actions.
Raymond Souster's For What Time Slays (mimeo-graphed, 24 pp.) shows a more distinctive and unified style than any previous collection of his. There are still too many expendable poems, based on a preoccupation with the process of writing, on a substituting of ready-made moraliz-ing for observation and irony, and, most frequently, on an apparently unshakable conviction that the kind of sexual reverie indigenous to male boarding-houses is invariably poetic material. Such signs of immaturity are the result of too slavish an adherence to the conventions of his kind of poetry. In about every tenth poem he escapes these conven-tions and writes the kind of poem that only he can write. Usually it is an epigram based on observation unified by a single drop of emotional colouring: a type of epigram which for some reason has been more common in Chinese poetry than in our tradition: [54]
I fear this skull-capped priest.
He tells his viewers
Someone must have Authority,
And clearly he is thinking of himself.
Two new series of collections of verse provide some very interesting work in small compass. Emblem Books are tiny little booklets put out by Jay Macpherson with covers by Laurence Hyde. There are three of them to date. Daryl Hine's Five Poems is a remarkable first volume, if one can call five poems a volume. Reading his long meditative lines is like watching heavy traffic at night: a brilliant series of phrases moves across a mysteriously dark background, the central driving force of the poem remaining elusive. It sounds condescending to speak of promise and a future, yet the sense of powerful gathering forces is stronger than any other reaction. The main line of development is probably indicated in such passages as this, from a dialogue of Theseus and the Minotaur (the Minotaur is speaking):
I am Charon, and I wait
beside this lightless river for rny gold;
my boat is paper; I am cold;
the winds upon the water celebrate
the soul's long shadow and the heart's
red beacon; I perceive
the wormy lover wearing on his sleeve
funerals foreshadowed by his art. ...
Jay Macpherson's O Earth Return is almost exactly the opposite in technique, using stanza forms, usually quatrains, with expertly varied timing, and with an interest in myth that classes her with the formal poets. The title indicates a Blakean influence, which is discernible, but the tradition is rather that of the Elizabethan lyric, where -- as in Campion -- the use of a mythical or conventional theme releases the emotion by detaching it from direct experience and containing it within the convention. Thus a poem that might seem at first glance to be only an allusive literary [55] exercise becomes a kind of reservoir of feeling in which one's literary and personal associations mingle and are held in the kind of variable emotional contemplation that it is one of the primary functions of poetry to provide:
Where is your god, Sibylla? where is he
Who came in other days
To lay his bright head on your knee
And learn the secrets of Earth's ways?
Silence: the bat-clogged cave
Lacks breath to sigh.
Sibylla, hung between earth and sky
Sways with the wind in her pendant gave. [?]
There are fewer surprises in the third Emblem Book, Dorothy Livesay's New Poems, where the main impression is of a disciplined and experienced handling of modern poetic idioms. A sense of a lonely pessimism, of the shutting off of communication, of the inevitable victories of winter and darkness, gives the poems a plaintively muted quality: they seem to struggle against a conviction that they cannot say much:
And deeper than flash
Of fin in well
Your thoughts dot, dash --
But never tell.
O when will you freeze
Glassy, clear
Frost-breathing image
On polished air: ...
This survey was originally bibliographical as well as critical, and it may well be thought that a review which mentions twenty-three separate items can have only a bibliographical interest. There is perhaps some point in explaining the critical principle. The ideal reader often visualized by founders of little mags, who is eager to read contemporary poetry but has no ambition to write it, barely exists. Practically everybody who habitually reads poetry [56] habitually writes it as well. That is as it should be: there are many things wrong with the position of the poet in modern society, but this is not one of the wrong things. The cultivated amateur is the backbone of all the arts, especially poetry, as the professional poet who lives by his verse is usually a writer of newspaper doggerel. Criticism concerned primarily with measuring the distance between amateur verse and great poetry is essential, but there will never be any lack of it. Meanwhile, what with an indifferent public, the conscientiously contemptuous critics, and perhaps his own frustrated ambitions, the amateur poet has a hard time of it. Yet in Canada, where there is no sharp line between the regular and the occasional poet, it seems more appropriate to look at a year's output inclusively, as a total power of articulation, shading from a luminous centre to a pleasantly blurred periphery.
In every year in Canada, including 1955, most of the published verse shows the features of occasional amateur writing. Lines will be pumped up with adjectives; rhymes in a sonnet will clang like a typewriter bell; stodgy rhythms will be harried into movement by starting every line with a heavy accent; a sentence will begin in poetry and finish in vague prose; a failure in accurate expression will be concealed by an exclamation, and so on and so on. These faults also occur even in the best poetry, and many of the virtues of the best poetry reappear in the slighter books. Hence while much Canadian verse could be honestly described, by the highest standards of the best twentieth-century poets, as metrical doodling, it could also be described, just as honestly and perhaps more usefully, as the poetic conversation of culti-vated people. After all, there are many who will read detective stories with pleasure even when they have the style of a riveting machine, the characterization of a tombstone, and the plot of a charade: perhaps poetry too might be approached with some tolerance for the convention as well as evaluation for the achievement. ...[57]
from 'Letters in Canada' 1956
from 'Letters in Canada' University of Toronto Quarterly - 1956
Poetry cannot be written by an act of will, and society cannot produce poets by an act of will. There is a strong desire in Canada to have fine poetry written in the country, but the will of society, as expressed in education, can be directed only towards building up a cultivated public for poetry, a public which would be able to recognize fine poetry if it saw it. Otherwise generous words about welcoming new poets will be accompanied by complaints that all the poets who have appeared so far are too "modern," and do not sound like poetry as the reader remembers it to have been when he stopped listening to it in Grade Six. Young people should certainly be encouraged to write, for everyone can learn to write poetry up to a point -- the point of discovering how difficult it is to write it unusually well. To get to that point is no mean achievement, as it is well past the substandard level of naive or doggerel verse which is the usual mode of amateur expression. But the main purpose of such encouragement is to breed a love of poetry, not to breed poets.
First Flowering (Kingswood House, xiv, 210 pp., $3.00), edited by Anthony Frisch, is a collection of poetry and prose in both languages written by young people (twelve to nineteen) in high schools all across Canada. Mr. Frisch has received warm praise, which he assuredly deserves, for the skill and energy with which he has carried out his task. The importance of what he has done is very considerable, though we should realize that the importance is educational and not literary in reference. The book is not an anthology of the Canadian writers of tomorrow: it is evidence of intelligence and cultivated taste among Canadian teen-agers. I imagine that a comparable cross-section of any other age level in Canada would produce much the same literary result, though of course with less freshness and charm. I understand that Mr. Frisch is now busy with a similar anthology taken from an older professional group, which will do much to confirm or refute me on this point. Of the poems in First Flowering, we recognize all the familar conventions of poetry on that [58] level. There is the nostalgic poem, the realistic poem, the di-dactic poem, the parody or comic poem, the poem of observed or remembered beauty, and so on. Here and there something less predictable emerges, as in Charles R. Eisener's delightful "The Planets." But there is no reason to suppose that any of the contributors are about to start out on the lonely, uphill, flinty road of the professional poet. If there were any such, the book, for them, would be better entitled First Deflowering. ...
Three Windows West, by Dick Diespecker (J. M. Dent & Sons, xvi, 160 pp., $3.50) is a strange mixture. Some of it is verse journalism of a type crisply described by W. H. Auden, in one of the better passages of "Under Which Lyre," as designed "For recitation by the yard In filibusters." A poem called "Prayer for Victory" was, the preface tells us, read to a million people in New York by Raymond Massey; it sold 35,000 copies on Canadian newstands and 200,000 more copies were distributed by a bank during a Victory Loan drive; it has reached an estimated total of over half a billion people:
Then, Dear God,
Make us worthy of Victory.
Give us the strength
To keep our pledges
To make a better world ...
So that never again
Will there be a Hitler or a Mussolini,
A Himmler or a Goebbels;
Never again a blitzkrieg;
Never again the bitter treachery
Of Pearl Harbour. ...
It is easier to turn on the mechanism of a conditioned reflex than to shut it off, and Mr. Diespecker has not escaped the fate of the sorcerer's apprentice. The sense of his formidable captive audience has given him a fatal fluency, which he employs in alternately addressing Dear God and summoning memories of the ol' swimmin' hole type: [59]
Betcha Mom's in the kitchen right this minute
Making punkin pie.
If this were all his book contained, there would be no occasion for mentioning it in this survey. But here and there one finds, if not always genuine poetry, at least a genuine effort to write it, and a poem called "Return to Labour," which would be good anywhere, is, in this context, shock-ingly good. The opening poem, with a South African setting, is also, in spite of a persistent misspelling of "its" and a somewhat discouraging first line ("A bok-ma-kerri scolds the lagging stars"), both honest and attractive. It is a disturbing thought that the writing of such stuff as "Prayer for Victory" and its congeners may have required the self-destruction of an authentic poet.
The Poetry of E. J. Pratt, by John Sutherland (Ryerson, x, 109 pp., $3.75) is one of the few pieces of sustained Canadian criticism that I have read slowly, marking passages with a pencil. Pratt is a genuinely popular poet, and hence a difficult subject for criticism: most of his readers read him for other values, and for many of the remainder, a poet with all those editions, honorary degrees, and medals (one could almost call him a gong-tormented poet) is too obfuscated by another kind of recognition. Mr. Sutherland's book is of importance, not only because it takes Pratt seriously, but because it takes poetry seriously, and accepts Pratt as a genuine and valid kind of poetic experience. It is important also as the only major work of a critic whose premature death has deprived the country of one of its most selfless and dedicated literary citizens.
Much of what he says about the relation of man to nature in Pratt, the ambivalence of Pratt's moral attitudes, and the point of identity between the slayer and the slain in his heroic narratives, is both new and sound. The symbolic expansion of Pratt's characters into Christian archetypes may not please every Pratt reader: granted the premises of this type of criticism, he does not falsify Pratt's meaning, but he does give the impression of straining his text. The reason for this may be that he seems to assume that Pratt is a poet who, [60] through his background and also through some inner bent in poetry itself, absorbed a great deal of Christian symbolism more unconsciously than deliberately. I imagine that Christianity means something quite as positive to the poet as it does to his critic, and something rather more mature and complex. I feel that Mr. Sutherland misinterprets "The Truant," which is the central poem in the Pratt canon as far as belief is concerned: the "great Panjandrum" in that poem is not God, and the attitude of the man to him is not "secular," otherwise he could hardly swear allegiance to the "rood" in the last line. But with these minor reservations the book is a fine and eloquent study, as worthy of its author as it is of its subject.
The editor of The Selected Poems, by Raymond Souster (Contact Press, 135 pp., $2.00) is Louis Dudek, and he has done a good job, perhaps intended, as the rather odd title suggests, to be definitive. Mr. Souster is revealed as a most prolific poet: ten collections of his work are in existence, of which I have seen only six, and the selections from the four I have not seen have given me a quite new idea of him. Mr. Souster is a genuine poet whose qualities are subtlety and humour, but he often spoils his subtlety with repetition and his humour with moralizing. Mr. Dudek's introduction approves of the moralist, but his critical taste does not, and his selection disentangles Mr. Souster's genuine poems from the straggly excelsior packed around them in the original collections. Subtlety and humour are also the qualities needed for epigram, and epigram is the genre to which the poet has, wisely, devoted himself. The effects of his epigrams are made chiefly by theme: verbal wit and metrical dexterity, the normal characteristics of epigram, are both rare. Occasionally there is a punch line, either conventionally at the end ("The Bourgeois Child") or at the beginning, as in the study of the "Drummer Man" which flows easily out of its fine opening "Sooner or later he was bound to put his sticks by." Mr. Dudek quotes Whitman on the "perfect [61] candour" to which the poet is entitled, but the essential, or creative, candour in Mr. Souster is that of the candid camera. For in the main his method is photographic, a sharply focussed observation of life in the fourmillante cite/ and his moralizing is akin to the photographer's sentimental caption.
There are still a few captions, but there is also a respectable body of serious and subtle verse. I like very much the snapshot of "Girls Playing Softball":
But it doesn't quite come off.
The voices are a little too high, the ball
Never seems to behave properly, the bats
Heavy and awkward.
There is a study of "Nice People," in which a poet Sits gravely in the back kitchen, arguing with the negro maid (almost an intellectual herself) the pros and cons of sterilizing the family cat now curled in the centre of the floor. There are some sombre but admirable hospital scenes, and "Old Man Leaning on a Fence" and "Bridge over the Don" catch another big-city vignette: the gloomy stare into darkness which seems to mean only a vacant mind but actually means that the will to live is ebbing:
Haven't you seen
The river before, don't you know it runs, smells like a sewer?
And there are some poems that are just good fun, like "The Opener" and the poem which concludes the book, "Flight of the Roller Coaster."
In this kind of poetry all freshness and novelty come from the choice of subject: the whole creative energy is expended in looking for appropriate scenes and getting them into focus. Reflection and comment are left to habit, and habit produces only the commonplace: in Mr. Souster's poetry it produces mainly grousing. Mr. Dudek's poetry is a contrast in subject-matter, but the same general principle holds. Mr. Dudek is introverted and emotional: what takes [62] fresh and novel shape in his poetry is a sensuous reaction. In The Transparent Sea (Contact Press, 117 pp., $2.00), a retrospective collection, the best pieces are songs conveying an immediate mood, such as the one beginning "A bird who sits over my door"; or studies in the movement and sound of words, like "Tree in a Snowstorm"; or ideas that suddenly twist round into paradoxes, like the admirable opening poem on the pineal gland, or his comparison of the universe to a watch which makes religion a search "for larger regions of clockwise justice"; or quick vivid sketches like "Late Winter" or "Lines for a Bamboo Stick," the latter with an Oriental reference; or a study of swift movement, like his picture of a little girl skipping called "The Child."
One of his favourite adjectives is "wet," and some of his best poems have the quality of the wet water-colour that is done quickly and makes its point all at once. Sometimes an image strikes him in a grotesque form, as in the astonishingly successful "Mouths"; sometimes as a muttering and brooding anxiety, as in the near-prose fantasy "The Dead." One often feels that a poem is inconclusive, but then one often feels too that the inconclusiveness is part of the effect, as it is in a sketch. An example is one of the few photographic poems, "To an Unknown in a Restaurant." In such poetry the ideas or comments have to be equally unpremeditated. When they are, they break out with the oracular tone appropriate to ideas that are not hooked on to others:
What we call nature is nothing else than
the triumph of life other than our own --
In short, I feel that when the poet says
The world I see (this poem)
I make out of the fragments of my pain
and out of the pleasures of my trembling senses
he is telling us the exact truth about his poetic process.
It follows that he is working against his best qualities when he writes in a sequence, whether of description or [63] thought. Here he is dependent on habit, and produces the cliche/s of habit. In the "Provincetown" sequence there is the same kind of maunderlust that filled so much of Europe. Sexual imagery is also a trap for him, for sex is something he feels self-conscious and explanatory about. At other times he is not satisfied with inconclusiveness, and some of the poems sag into platitude in an effort to round off, as in "On Sudden Death" and elsewhere. Yet, as the examples above have made clear, there is much to be grateful for in Mr. Dudek's book, and a great variety of pleasant and melodious writing.
Phyllis Webb's Even your Right Eye (McClelland & Stewart, 64 pp., $2.75) in the Indian File series, is contemporary in technique: one senses Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens respectively in a pair of poems called "Poetry" and "In Situ," though of course this may be general idiom rather than actual derivation. But it is not the technique but the combination of decorative elegance in the diction and melancholy in the mood that marks her affinities. Such poems as "Standing" and "Double Entendre" are almost a kind of verbal embroidery, making one wonder about the role of the typewriter carriage in the twentieth-century poetic process, or, as she says:
shapes fall in a torrent of design
and over the violent space
assume a convention. . . .
The attitude which corresponds to such diction is one of amused detachment. She has a talent, not fully exploited, for sophisticated light verse, and the concluding "Earth Descending," which appeared in Trio two years ago and is like an adult version of the "Planets" poem in First Flowering, is still perhaps her best single poem. But the general principle holds that her most sharply realized writing comes in moods of doubt, loneliness, and unhappiness. When such writing occurs, the reader feels that he is no longer listening in on an educated monologue, but being directly spoken to: [64]
where does it dwell, that virtuous land
where one can die without a second birth:
There are some uncertainties in the style. Strained is the syntax in "sensed is the green grape pulse" and "Sprouts the bitter grain," and the latter poem, for all its eloquence, has not quite sifted the allegorical ash from the metaphorical flame. On the other hand, "The Second Hand" seems to me successful all through, and "Sacrament of Spring," based on an April-is-the-cruellest-month theme, is something more than successful, with its haunting refrain and its line "The flower and the whip are wed." "Incidental," with its admirable final couplet, is brief enough to quote in full:
In that indelible year
when the soldiers came
and the dogs and harpies visited churches
the creatures of my infant dreams
rose up in agony and fear
and splayed the air with foetal screams
and left the year uncompromised.
The year then knew its form and fled
into the cities of the dead.
A Window on the North, by R. A. D. Ford (Ryerson, v1, 48 pp., $2.50) is the work of a poet who has been in the diplomatic service in Brazil and in Russia. The poems include two translated from Brazilian poets, one, "Confidences of an Itabirano," being a remarkable poem which makes one wish for more such translations. Six poems are translated or adapted from modern Russian poets. Four of them are from Sergei Yessenin, who, like Mayakovsky, committed suicide in the early years of the Communist re/gime. The implied contrast in imagery between the brilliant and turbulent south and the grey mechanized north enters the Canadian poems too, and is brought into focus in the long concluding poem, "Luis Medias Pontual in Red Square." This poem depicts the hollow ache in the soul of a disillusioned Spanish refugee in Moscow, who notes that Russia and Spain have both been touched by the Orient, and are alien to both East and West. [65]
I have seldom read a book of poems so uniformly bleak and desolate in their imagery, yet bleakness, especially to a reader brought up in Canada, is a very appealing imaginative mood. Mr. Ford is in the tradition of Carman, Campbell, D.C. Scott and others who have communicated the sense of the lonely winter afternoons, the struggling sun, the lynx and wolf lurking in the black woods, the long white expanses of fields. and the resulting fear in the mind of the beholder who feels, so to speak, spiritually responsible for the landscape, stretching as it does "to the Arctic ends of the earth." It is essential that the mind should set itself against such a world, otherwise the world will move in and reduce the mind to its own level of merciless terror and death. This has already happened in a grim poem called "Roadside near Moscow," where the poet sees, but dares not look too closely at:
the almost human-like
Column of prisoners, waiting for the snow
To fill in their tracks.
His favourite pattern is an extension of his south-and-north imagery, the contrast between the brilliant reds and yellows of autumn and the black and white winter. The symbol of the hunter, pursuing death in his red coat across the stubble fields, seems to reflect the world of the middle twentieth century, fading from its past heritage into its future dispossession. Sometimes a symbolism of fertile valley and bare hill is used instead, with the same meaning. In "A Delusion of Reference" the "delusion" is an instant of pattern or design, perceived a moment before "the universe Settles into its usual disarray." Mr. Ford's style is lucid and sober, qualities especially valuable in translators: it can be dull but is thoughtful and not sloppy, and his cosmopolitan influences and settings give his book unusual claims on our attention.
Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies (McGill Poetry Series, Contact Press, 79 pp., $2.00) is the first in a series of books featuring McGill poets, which we owe, as we [66] owe so much, to the generous enthusiasm of Louis Dudek. The poems are of very unequal merit, but the book as a whole is a remarkable production. The erotic poems follow the usual convention of stacking up thighs like a Rockette chorus line, and for them Mr. Cohen's own phrase, "obligations, the formalities of passion," is comment enough. But it is an excess of energy rather than a deficiency of it that is his main technical obstacle. Sometimes moods and images get tangled up with each other and fail to come through to the reader, or allusions to books or paintings distract the attention and muffle the climax, as in "Jingle." In short, this book has the normal characteristics of a good first volume.
To come to his positive qualities, his chief interest, as indicated in his title, is mythopoeic. The mythologies are Jewish, Christian, and Hellenistic. The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god in the tradition of the martyred Jew ("Saviors"), and Hellenism is the alien society which Christianity has come to terms with and Judaism has not. The mythical patterns of the Bible provide some of the paradigms of his imagery:
The sun is tangled
in black branches
raving like Absalom
between sky and water,
struggling through the dark terebinth
to commit its daily suicide.
Other mythical figures, such as the femme fatale at the centre of "Letter," "Story," and "Song of Patience," and the dying god of "Elegy," are of white-goddess and golden-bough provenance. Mr. Cohen's outstanding poetic quality, so far, is a gift for macabre ballad reminding one of Auden, but thoroughly original, in which the chronicles of tabloids are celebrated in the limpid rhythms of folksong. The grisly "Halloween Poem," with its muttering prose glosses, is perhaps the most striking of these, but there is also a fine mythopoeic "Ballad" beginning "My lady was found mutilated," which starts with a loose free verse idiom and at [67] the end suddenly concentrates into quatrains. The song beginning "My lover Peterson" is simpler but equally effective, and so is another disturbing news item called "Warning." In "Lovers" he achieves the improbable feat of making a fine dry sardonic ballad out of the theme of a pogrom. No other Canadian poet known to me is doing anything like this, and I hope to see more of it -- from Mr. Cohen, that is.
The year 1956 is certainly Irving Layton's year, as far as English Canadian poetry is concerned. Three collections of his work have appeared. The Improved Binoculars (Jonathan Williams, 106 pp.) is a selection of his poems, mainly from the collections of the last three years, with an introduction by William Carlos Williams. Dr. Williams writes with com-mendable enthusiasm, and I find only his epithet "backwoodsman" difficult -- perhaps that is how Montreal looks from the perspective of Paterson, N.J. The collection is strongly recommended to those who are becoming curious about this poet, and who have missed the individual volumes from which it has been made. This is also the third year that Mr. Layton has issued two books of verse, one containing most of his more serious poems, the other devoted chiefly to expressions of his poetic personality. The latter group comprise The Long Pea-Shooter, The Blue Propeller, and now Music on a Kazoo (Contact Press, 59 pp.). Mr. Layton's poetic personality is entertaining enough, but is altogether a more stereotyped and predictable character than the actual poet. Music on a Kazoo is chiefly remarkable for "The Dwarf," a Kafkaesque murder trial which brings out such evidence as this:
The manufacturer excused
himself, saying he had loved her, that he was
not a sentimental philistine but a poet: he
had provided the money.
There is perhaps nothing of major importance in The Bull Calf and Other Poems (Contact Press, 49 pp.), at least nothing with the excitement of the title poem of The Cold [68] Green Element or the better poems in In the Midst of My Fever. But there are some excellent poems, which emphasize the growing serenity and precision in Mr. Layton's best work and his power of telling the whole disinterested imaginative truth about his subject, free of both querulousness and posing. These are qualities which the more self-advertising poems give little hint of. Mr. Layton has spoken of the influence of D. H. Lawrence, and there are certainly signs of that influence. There is the same sacramental conception of sex in "The Dark Nest," "Sacrament by the Water," and elsewhere, and the same ability to humanize the animal world in the title poem (about a newborn bull calf killed because he is unprofitable), and in a poem about a mosquito.
with a queer sort
of dignity clinging to its inert legs.
There may be some Lawrence, too, in his sacrificial symbolism, which enters the bull calf poem and crops up elsewhere, as in a poem about chokecherries where the caterpillar-ridden leaves are a sacrifice for the cherries. But he has, for one thing, a sense of ethical reality that Lawrence lacked. He notes the "stale melodrama of guilt" in the brooding resentments of the inner mind; he notes the curious parody of self-sacrifice which will make a man deliberately undercut himself in order to maintain his good opinion of himself; he notes the alliance of morality and desire in sexual relations when he advises a seducer to make a wife feel that she is lying with her husband. This shrewd insight into the self-satisfactions of evil brings him closer to Kafka, even to Eliot, particularly in an extraordinary "hollow men" poem called "Letter from a Straw Man" and another called "Halos at Lac Marie Louise," where the skilful use of assonance-rhyme indicates an unobtrusive mastery of technique:
It was a white skeleton
Of a tree orninously gnarled;
And around the singular crow
The stark crows whirled. [69]
In short, Mr. Layton appears to be gathering together the powers and range of what is certainly the most considerable Canadian poet of his generation, and may soon become something more. ...
Poetry cannot be written by an act of will, and society cannot produce poets by an act of will. There is a strong desire in Canada to have fine poetry written in the country, but the will of society, as expressed in education, can be directed only towards building up a cultivated public for poetry, a public which would be able to recognize fine poetry if it saw it. Otherwise generous words about welcoming new poets will be accompanied by complaints that all the poets who have appeared so far are too "modern," and do not sound like poetry as the reader remembers it to have been when he stopped listening to it in Grade Six. Young people should certainly be encouraged to write, for everyone can learn to write poetry up to a point -- the point of discovering how difficult it is to write it unusually well. To get to that point is no mean achievement, as it is well past the substandard level of naive or doggerel verse which is the usual mode of amateur expression. But the main purpose of such encouragement is to breed a love of poetry, not to breed poets.
First Flowering (Kingswood House, xiv, 210 pp., $3.00), edited by Anthony Frisch, is a collection of poetry and prose in both languages written by young people (twelve to nineteen) in high schools all across Canada. Mr. Frisch has received warm praise, which he assuredly deserves, for the skill and energy with which he has carried out his task. The importance of what he has done is very considerable, though we should realize that the importance is educational and not literary in reference. The book is not an anthology of the Canadian writers of tomorrow: it is evidence of intelligence and cultivated taste among Canadian teen-agers. I imagine that a comparable cross-section of any other age level in Canada would produce much the same literary result, though of course with less freshness and charm. I understand that Mr. Frisch is now busy with a similar anthology taken from an older professional group, which will do much to confirm or refute me on this point. Of the poems in First Flowering, we recognize all the familar conventions of poetry on that [58] level. There is the nostalgic poem, the realistic poem, the di-dactic poem, the parody or comic poem, the poem of observed or remembered beauty, and so on. Here and there something less predictable emerges, as in Charles R. Eisener's delightful "The Planets." But there is no reason to suppose that any of the contributors are about to start out on the lonely, uphill, flinty road of the professional poet. If there were any such, the book, for them, would be better entitled First Deflowering. ...
Three Windows West, by Dick Diespecker (J. M. Dent & Sons, xvi, 160 pp., $3.50) is a strange mixture. Some of it is verse journalism of a type crisply described by W. H. Auden, in one of the better passages of "Under Which Lyre," as designed "For recitation by the yard In filibusters." A poem called "Prayer for Victory" was, the preface tells us, read to a million people in New York by Raymond Massey; it sold 35,000 copies on Canadian newstands and 200,000 more copies were distributed by a bank during a Victory Loan drive; it has reached an estimated total of over half a billion people:
Then, Dear God,
Make us worthy of Victory.
Give us the strength
To keep our pledges
To make a better world ...
So that never again
Will there be a Hitler or a Mussolini,
A Himmler or a Goebbels;
Never again a blitzkrieg;
Never again the bitter treachery
Of Pearl Harbour. ...
It is easier to turn on the mechanism of a conditioned reflex than to shut it off, and Mr. Diespecker has not escaped the fate of the sorcerer's apprentice. The sense of his formidable captive audience has given him a fatal fluency, which he employs in alternately addressing Dear God and summoning memories of the ol' swimmin' hole type: [59]
Betcha Mom's in the kitchen right this minute
Making punkin pie.
If this were all his book contained, there would be no occasion for mentioning it in this survey. But here and there one finds, if not always genuine poetry, at least a genuine effort to write it, and a poem called "Return to Labour," which would be good anywhere, is, in this context, shock-ingly good. The opening poem, with a South African setting, is also, in spite of a persistent misspelling of "its" and a somewhat discouraging first line ("A bok-ma-kerri scolds the lagging stars"), both honest and attractive. It is a disturbing thought that the writing of such stuff as "Prayer for Victory" and its congeners may have required the self-destruction of an authentic poet.
The Poetry of E. J. Pratt, by John Sutherland (Ryerson, x, 109 pp., $3.75) is one of the few pieces of sustained Canadian criticism that I have read slowly, marking passages with a pencil. Pratt is a genuinely popular poet, and hence a difficult subject for criticism: most of his readers read him for other values, and for many of the remainder, a poet with all those editions, honorary degrees, and medals (one could almost call him a gong-tormented poet) is too obfuscated by another kind of recognition. Mr. Sutherland's book is of importance, not only because it takes Pratt seriously, but because it takes poetry seriously, and accepts Pratt as a genuine and valid kind of poetic experience. It is important also as the only major work of a critic whose premature death has deprived the country of one of its most selfless and dedicated literary citizens.
Much of what he says about the relation of man to nature in Pratt, the ambivalence of Pratt's moral attitudes, and the point of identity between the slayer and the slain in his heroic narratives, is both new and sound. The symbolic expansion of Pratt's characters into Christian archetypes may not please every Pratt reader: granted the premises of this type of criticism, he does not falsify Pratt's meaning, but he does give the impression of straining his text. The reason for this may be that he seems to assume that Pratt is a poet who, [60] through his background and also through some inner bent in poetry itself, absorbed a great deal of Christian symbolism more unconsciously than deliberately. I imagine that Christianity means something quite as positive to the poet as it does to his critic, and something rather more mature and complex. I feel that Mr. Sutherland misinterprets "The Truant," which is the central poem in the Pratt canon as far as belief is concerned: the "great Panjandrum" in that poem is not God, and the attitude of the man to him is not "secular," otherwise he could hardly swear allegiance to the "rood" in the last line. But with these minor reservations the book is a fine and eloquent study, as worthy of its author as it is of its subject.
The editor of The Selected Poems, by Raymond Souster (Contact Press, 135 pp., $2.00) is Louis Dudek, and he has done a good job, perhaps intended, as the rather odd title suggests, to be definitive. Mr. Souster is revealed as a most prolific poet: ten collections of his work are in existence, of which I have seen only six, and the selections from the four I have not seen have given me a quite new idea of him. Mr. Souster is a genuine poet whose qualities are subtlety and humour, but he often spoils his subtlety with repetition and his humour with moralizing. Mr. Dudek's introduction approves of the moralist, but his critical taste does not, and his selection disentangles Mr. Souster's genuine poems from the straggly excelsior packed around them in the original collections. Subtlety and humour are also the qualities needed for epigram, and epigram is the genre to which the poet has, wisely, devoted himself. The effects of his epigrams are made chiefly by theme: verbal wit and metrical dexterity, the normal characteristics of epigram, are both rare. Occasionally there is a punch line, either conventionally at the end ("The Bourgeois Child") or at the beginning, as in the study of the "Drummer Man" which flows easily out of its fine opening "Sooner or later he was bound to put his sticks by." Mr. Dudek quotes Whitman on the "perfect [61] candour" to which the poet is entitled, but the essential, or creative, candour in Mr. Souster is that of the candid camera. For in the main his method is photographic, a sharply focussed observation of life in the fourmillante cite/ and his moralizing is akin to the photographer's sentimental caption.
There are still a few captions, but there is also a respectable body of serious and subtle verse. I like very much the snapshot of "Girls Playing Softball":
But it doesn't quite come off.
The voices are a little too high, the ball
Never seems to behave properly, the bats
Heavy and awkward.
There is a study of "Nice People," in which a poet Sits gravely in the back kitchen, arguing with the negro maid (almost an intellectual herself) the pros and cons of sterilizing the family cat now curled in the centre of the floor. There are some sombre but admirable hospital scenes, and "Old Man Leaning on a Fence" and "Bridge over the Don" catch another big-city vignette: the gloomy stare into darkness which seems to mean only a vacant mind but actually means that the will to live is ebbing:
Haven't you seen
The river before, don't you know it runs, smells like a sewer?
And there are some poems that are just good fun, like "The Opener" and the poem which concludes the book, "Flight of the Roller Coaster."
In this kind of poetry all freshness and novelty come from the choice of subject: the whole creative energy is expended in looking for appropriate scenes and getting them into focus. Reflection and comment are left to habit, and habit produces only the commonplace: in Mr. Souster's poetry it produces mainly grousing. Mr. Dudek's poetry is a contrast in subject-matter, but the same general principle holds. Mr. Dudek is introverted and emotional: what takes [62] fresh and novel shape in his poetry is a sensuous reaction. In The Transparent Sea (Contact Press, 117 pp., $2.00), a retrospective collection, the best pieces are songs conveying an immediate mood, such as the one beginning "A bird who sits over my door"; or studies in the movement and sound of words, like "Tree in a Snowstorm"; or ideas that suddenly twist round into paradoxes, like the admirable opening poem on the pineal gland, or his comparison of the universe to a watch which makes religion a search "for larger regions of clockwise justice"; or quick vivid sketches like "Late Winter" or "Lines for a Bamboo Stick," the latter with an Oriental reference; or a study of swift movement, like his picture of a little girl skipping called "The Child."
One of his favourite adjectives is "wet," and some of his best poems have the quality of the wet water-colour that is done quickly and makes its point all at once. Sometimes an image strikes him in a grotesque form, as in the astonishingly successful "Mouths"; sometimes as a muttering and brooding anxiety, as in the near-prose fantasy "The Dead." One often feels that a poem is inconclusive, but then one often feels too that the inconclusiveness is part of the effect, as it is in a sketch. An example is one of the few photographic poems, "To an Unknown in a Restaurant." In such poetry the ideas or comments have to be equally unpremeditated. When they are, they break out with the oracular tone appropriate to ideas that are not hooked on to others:
What we call nature is nothing else than
the triumph of life other than our own --
In short, I feel that when the poet says
The world I see (this poem)
I make out of the fragments of my pain
and out of the pleasures of my trembling senses
he is telling us the exact truth about his poetic process.
It follows that he is working against his best qualities when he writes in a sequence, whether of description or [63] thought. Here he is dependent on habit, and produces the cliche/s of habit. In the "Provincetown" sequence there is the same kind of maunderlust that filled so much of Europe. Sexual imagery is also a trap for him, for sex is something he feels self-conscious and explanatory about. At other times he is not satisfied with inconclusiveness, and some of the poems sag into platitude in an effort to round off, as in "On Sudden Death" and elsewhere. Yet, as the examples above have made clear, there is much to be grateful for in Mr. Dudek's book, and a great variety of pleasant and melodious writing.
Phyllis Webb's Even your Right Eye (McClelland & Stewart, 64 pp., $2.75) in the Indian File series, is contemporary in technique: one senses Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens respectively in a pair of poems called "Poetry" and "In Situ," though of course this may be general idiom rather than actual derivation. But it is not the technique but the combination of decorative elegance in the diction and melancholy in the mood that marks her affinities. Such poems as "Standing" and "Double Entendre" are almost a kind of verbal embroidery, making one wonder about the role of the typewriter carriage in the twentieth-century poetic process, or, as she says:
shapes fall in a torrent of design
and over the violent space
assume a convention. . . .
The attitude which corresponds to such diction is one of amused detachment. She has a talent, not fully exploited, for sophisticated light verse, and the concluding "Earth Descending," which appeared in Trio two years ago and is like an adult version of the "Planets" poem in First Flowering, is still perhaps her best single poem. But the general principle holds that her most sharply realized writing comes in moods of doubt, loneliness, and unhappiness. When such writing occurs, the reader feels that he is no longer listening in on an educated monologue, but being directly spoken to: [64]
where does it dwell, that virtuous land
where one can die without a second birth:
There are some uncertainties in the style. Strained is the syntax in "sensed is the green grape pulse" and "Sprouts the bitter grain," and the latter poem, for all its eloquence, has not quite sifted the allegorical ash from the metaphorical flame. On the other hand, "The Second Hand" seems to me successful all through, and "Sacrament of Spring," based on an April-is-the-cruellest-month theme, is something more than successful, with its haunting refrain and its line "The flower and the whip are wed." "Incidental," with its admirable final couplet, is brief enough to quote in full:
In that indelible year
when the soldiers came
and the dogs and harpies visited churches
the creatures of my infant dreams
rose up in agony and fear
and splayed the air with foetal screams
and left the year uncompromised.
The year then knew its form and fled
into the cities of the dead.
A Window on the North, by R. A. D. Ford (Ryerson, v1, 48 pp., $2.50) is the work of a poet who has been in the diplomatic service in Brazil and in Russia. The poems include two translated from Brazilian poets, one, "Confidences of an Itabirano," being a remarkable poem which makes one wish for more such translations. Six poems are translated or adapted from modern Russian poets. Four of them are from Sergei Yessenin, who, like Mayakovsky, committed suicide in the early years of the Communist re/gime. The implied contrast in imagery between the brilliant and turbulent south and the grey mechanized north enters the Canadian poems too, and is brought into focus in the long concluding poem, "Luis Medias Pontual in Red Square." This poem depicts the hollow ache in the soul of a disillusioned Spanish refugee in Moscow, who notes that Russia and Spain have both been touched by the Orient, and are alien to both East and West. [65]
I have seldom read a book of poems so uniformly bleak and desolate in their imagery, yet bleakness, especially to a reader brought up in Canada, is a very appealing imaginative mood. Mr. Ford is in the tradition of Carman, Campbell, D.C. Scott and others who have communicated the sense of the lonely winter afternoons, the struggling sun, the lynx and wolf lurking in the black woods, the long white expanses of fields. and the resulting fear in the mind of the beholder who feels, so to speak, spiritually responsible for the landscape, stretching as it does "to the Arctic ends of the earth." It is essential that the mind should set itself against such a world, otherwise the world will move in and reduce the mind to its own level of merciless terror and death. This has already happened in a grim poem called "Roadside near Moscow," where the poet sees, but dares not look too closely at:
the almost human-like
Column of prisoners, waiting for the snow
To fill in their tracks.
His favourite pattern is an extension of his south-and-north imagery, the contrast between the brilliant reds and yellows of autumn and the black and white winter. The symbol of the hunter, pursuing death in his red coat across the stubble fields, seems to reflect the world of the middle twentieth century, fading from its past heritage into its future dispossession. Sometimes a symbolism of fertile valley and bare hill is used instead, with the same meaning. In "A Delusion of Reference" the "delusion" is an instant of pattern or design, perceived a moment before "the universe Settles into its usual disarray." Mr. Ford's style is lucid and sober, qualities especially valuable in translators: it can be dull but is thoughtful and not sloppy, and his cosmopolitan influences and settings give his book unusual claims on our attention.
Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies (McGill Poetry Series, Contact Press, 79 pp., $2.00) is the first in a series of books featuring McGill poets, which we owe, as we [66] owe so much, to the generous enthusiasm of Louis Dudek. The poems are of very unequal merit, but the book as a whole is a remarkable production. The erotic poems follow the usual convention of stacking up thighs like a Rockette chorus line, and for them Mr. Cohen's own phrase, "obligations, the formalities of passion," is comment enough. But it is an excess of energy rather than a deficiency of it that is his main technical obstacle. Sometimes moods and images get tangled up with each other and fail to come through to the reader, or allusions to books or paintings distract the attention and muffle the climax, as in "Jingle." In short, this book has the normal characteristics of a good first volume.
To come to his positive qualities, his chief interest, as indicated in his title, is mythopoeic. The mythologies are Jewish, Christian, and Hellenistic. The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god in the tradition of the martyred Jew ("Saviors"), and Hellenism is the alien society which Christianity has come to terms with and Judaism has not. The mythical patterns of the Bible provide some of the paradigms of his imagery:
The sun is tangled
in black branches
raving like Absalom
between sky and water,
struggling through the dark terebinth
to commit its daily suicide.
Other mythical figures, such as the femme fatale at the centre of "Letter," "Story," and "Song of Patience," and the dying god of "Elegy," are of white-goddess and golden-bough provenance. Mr. Cohen's outstanding poetic quality, so far, is a gift for macabre ballad reminding one of Auden, but thoroughly original, in which the chronicles of tabloids are celebrated in the limpid rhythms of folksong. The grisly "Halloween Poem," with its muttering prose glosses, is perhaps the most striking of these, but there is also a fine mythopoeic "Ballad" beginning "My lady was found mutilated," which starts with a loose free verse idiom and at [67] the end suddenly concentrates into quatrains. The song beginning "My lover Peterson" is simpler but equally effective, and so is another disturbing news item called "Warning." In "Lovers" he achieves the improbable feat of making a fine dry sardonic ballad out of the theme of a pogrom. No other Canadian poet known to me is doing anything like this, and I hope to see more of it -- from Mr. Cohen, that is.
The year 1956 is certainly Irving Layton's year, as far as English Canadian poetry is concerned. Three collections of his work have appeared. The Improved Binoculars (Jonathan Williams, 106 pp.) is a selection of his poems, mainly from the collections of the last three years, with an introduction by William Carlos Williams. Dr. Williams writes with com-mendable enthusiasm, and I find only his epithet "backwoodsman" difficult -- perhaps that is how Montreal looks from the perspective of Paterson, N.J. The collection is strongly recommended to those who are becoming curious about this poet, and who have missed the individual volumes from which it has been made. This is also the third year that Mr. Layton has issued two books of verse, one containing most of his more serious poems, the other devoted chiefly to expressions of his poetic personality. The latter group comprise The Long Pea-Shooter, The Blue Propeller, and now Music on a Kazoo (Contact Press, 59 pp.). Mr. Layton's poetic personality is entertaining enough, but is altogether a more stereotyped and predictable character than the actual poet. Music on a Kazoo is chiefly remarkable for "The Dwarf," a Kafkaesque murder trial which brings out such evidence as this:
The manufacturer excused
himself, saying he had loved her, that he was
not a sentimental philistine but a poet: he
had provided the money.
There is perhaps nothing of major importance in The Bull Calf and Other Poems (Contact Press, 49 pp.), at least nothing with the excitement of the title poem of The Cold [68] Green Element or the better poems in In the Midst of My Fever. But there are some excellent poems, which emphasize the growing serenity and precision in Mr. Layton's best work and his power of telling the whole disinterested imaginative truth about his subject, free of both querulousness and posing. These are qualities which the more self-advertising poems give little hint of. Mr. Layton has spoken of the influence of D. H. Lawrence, and there are certainly signs of that influence. There is the same sacramental conception of sex in "The Dark Nest," "Sacrament by the Water," and elsewhere, and the same ability to humanize the animal world in the title poem (about a newborn bull calf killed because he is unprofitable), and in a poem about a mosquito.
with a queer sort
of dignity clinging to its inert legs.
There may be some Lawrence, too, in his sacrificial symbolism, which enters the bull calf poem and crops up elsewhere, as in a poem about chokecherries where the caterpillar-ridden leaves are a sacrifice for the cherries. But he has, for one thing, a sense of ethical reality that Lawrence lacked. He notes the "stale melodrama of guilt" in the brooding resentments of the inner mind; he notes the curious parody of self-sacrifice which will make a man deliberately undercut himself in order to maintain his good opinion of himself; he notes the alliance of morality and desire in sexual relations when he advises a seducer to make a wife feel that she is lying with her husband. This shrewd insight into the self-satisfactions of evil brings him closer to Kafka, even to Eliot, particularly in an extraordinary "hollow men" poem called "Letter from a Straw Man" and another called "Halos at Lac Marie Louise," where the skilful use of assonance-rhyme indicates an unobtrusive mastery of technique:
It was a white skeleton
Of a tree orninously gnarled;
And around the singular crow
The stark crows whirled. [69]
In short, Mr. Layton appears to be gathering together the powers and range of what is certainly the most considerable Canadian poet of his generation, and may soon become something more. ...
from 'Letters in Canada' 1957
from 'Letters in Canada' University of Toronto Quarterly - 1957
This is an unusually thin year: one good book, two promising ones, and a miscellaneous assortment of what the Elizabethans might politely have called a paradise of dainty devices, though it would be more accurate to speak of an amusement park of rhythmical gadgets. Some of these latter are pleasant and readable enough: with others, one is strongly tempted to take the plangent tone of a couplet which appears on the opening page of one of the year's few published volumes:
Last of the mighty oaks nurtured in freedom!
Brambles and briars now supersede treedom.
However, here goes. The good book, of course, as the Governor General's committee has this time recognized, is Jay Macpherson's The Boatman (Oxford, x, 70 pp., $2.50). The book itself is one of the few physically attractive objects on my Canadian poetry shelves, and the fact is an appropriate tribute to its contents, for The Boatman is the most carefully planned and unified book of poems that has yet appeared in these surveys. It is divided into six parts. The first, "Poor Child," contains poems that appeared in a small pamphlet reviewed here some years ago: they form a series of tentative explorations of poetic experience, ranging in tone from the macabre "The Ill Wind" to the plaintive "The Third Eye." The next two sections are called "O Earth Return" and "The Plowman in Darkness." The titles come from two poems of Blake that deal with "Earth" as the whole of fallen nature in female form, and the subjects are chiefly the more common [70] mythical figures connected with this "Earth," including Eve, Eurynome, the Cumaean Sibyl, Mary Magdalene, and the bride of the Song of Songs, identified with the Queen of Sheba. Hence the subtitle, "A Speculum for Fallen Women." The two parts are, like Blake's lyrics, matched by contrast against each other, the relation often being marked by identical titles. The contrast is not so much Blake's innocence and experience, though related to it, as a contrast between a theme idealized by a kind of aesthetic distance and the same theme made colloquial and familiar. "Sibylla," whose fate is described in the motto to Eliot's The Waste Land, appears in "O Earth Return" thus:
Silence: the bat-clogged cave
Lacks breath to sigh.
Sibylla, hung between earth and sky,
Sways with the wind in her pendant grave.
and in "The Plowman in Darkness" thus:
I'm mercifully rid of youth,
No callers plague me ever;
I'm virtuous, I tell the truth --
And you can see I'm clever:
In the last two sections the corresponding male figures appear. "The Sleepers," intensely pastoral in tone, is focussed on Endymion and his moon-loved daze, with overtones of Adonis and Adam. Then the figures of Noah and his ark emerge, expanding until they become identified with God and his creation respectively. The creation is inside its creator, and the ark similarly attempts to explain to Noah, in a series of epigrams in double quatrains, that it is really inside him, as Eve was once inside Adam:
When the four quarters shall
Turn in and make one whole,
Then I who wall your body,
Which is to me a soul, [71]
Shall swim circled by you
And cradled on your tide,
Who was not even, not ever,
Taken from your side.
As the ark expands into the flooded world, the body of the Biblical leviathan, and the order of nature, the design of the whole book begins to take shape. The Boatman begins with a poem called "Ordinary People in the Last Days," a wistful poem about an apocalypse that happens to everyone except the poet, and ends with a vision of a "Fisherman" who, more enterprising than Eliot's gloomy and luckless shore-sitter, catches "myriad forms," eats them, drinks the lake they are in, and is caught in his turn by God.
Such myths as the flood and the apocalypse appear less for religious than for poetic reasons: the book moves from a "poor child" at the centre of a hostile and mysterious world to an adult child who has regained the paradisal innocent vision and is at the circumference of a world of identical forms. In the title poem the reader is urged to follow this process as best he may:
Then you take the tender creature
-- You remember, that's the reader --
And you pull hirn through his navel inside out.
The wonderland of this Noah's ark inside Noah, where the phoenix and the abominable snowman have equal rights with books and eggs and the sun and moon, is explored in the final section: "The Fisherman: A Book of Riddles." The riddles are not difficult, the solutions being thoughtfully provided in the title, and, like so many of the Anglo-Saxon riddles, they are circumferential rather than simply elliptical descriptions, hence the riddle on "Egg" symbolizes the poet's relation to her reader as well:
Reader, in your hand you hold
A silver case, a box of gold.
I have no door, however small,
Unless you pierce rny tender wall, [72]
And there's no skill in healing then
Shall ever make me whole again.
Show pity, Reader, for my plight:
Let be, or else consume me quite.
Miss Macpherson chooses strict metres and small frames:
she is, as the blurb says, melodious, but her melody is of that shaped and epigrammatic quality which in music is called tune. Within her self-imposed limits there is an extraordinary tonal variety, from the delicate ritardando of "The Caverned Woman" to the punning knittelvers of "The Boatman," and from the whispered pianissimo of "Aiaia" (the island of Circe) to the alliterative thundering of "Storm." She can -- a noticeable feat in Canada -- write a sexual poem without breaking into adolescent pimples and cackles; she can deal with religious themes without making any reed-organ wheezes about the dilemma of modern man; she has a wit and an erudition that are free of wisecracks and pedantry; she can modulate in eight lines from "Philomel's unmeasured grief" to the human jay who
Chatters, gabbles, all the day
Raises both Cain and Babel.
The elegiac poems are the most resonant, and they make the strongest initial impression, though the lighter ones have equal staying power. There are few dying falls: usually a poem ends with a quiet authority that has a ring of finality about it, leaving the reader nothing to do but accept the poem -- "Reader, take," as the riddle on "Book" says.
There is little use looking for bad lines or lapses in taste: The Boatman is completely successful within the conventions it adopts, and anyone dissatisfied with the book must quarrel with the conventions. Among these are the use of a great variety of echoes, some of them direct quotations from other poems, and an interest in myth, both Biblical and Classical, that may make some readers wonder uneasily if they should not be reading it with a mythological handbook.
One should notice in the first place that the echoes are almost invariably from the simplest and most popular types [73] of poetry. They include Elizabethan lyrics ("While Philomel's unmeasured grief' sounds like the opening of a madrigal); the lyrics of Blake; hymns ("Take not that Spirit from me"); Anglo-Saxon riddles; Christmas carols ("The Natural Mother"); nursery rhymes ("Sheba"); ballads and newspaper verse ("Mary of Egypt" and the second "Sibylla"). The use made of these echoes is to create a kind of timeless style, in which everything from the tags of mediaeval ballad to modern slang can fit. One has a sense of rereading as well as reading, of meeting new poems with a recognition that is integrally and specifically linked with the rest of one's poetic experience. The echoes also enable the poet to achieve the most transparent simplicity of diction. There is little of the "density" of more intellectualized poetry, and ambiguities and ironies are carried very lightly:
In a far-off former time
And a green and gentle clime,
Mamma was a lively lass,
Liked to watch the tall ships pass,
Loved to hear the sailors sing
Of sun and wind and voyaging,
Felt a wild desire to be
On the bleak and unplowed sea.
The flat conventional phrases here, including the Homeric tag in the last line, would seem commonplace or affected if their context had not been so skilfully worked out for them. It is true that for many readers there is nothing so baffling as simplicity, but Miss Macpherson's simplicity is uncompromising.
As for mythology, that is one of poetry's indispensable languages: most of the major English poets, including the best poets of today, demand and expect a considerable knowledge of myth, and although Douglas LePan calls Canada a country without a mythology, the same thing is increasingly true even of Canadian poets. Miss Macpherson's myths, like her allusions, flow into the poems: the poems do not point to them. Knowing who Adam and Eve and Noah are will get one through most of the book, and although a [74] glance at the opening page of Robert Graves's Penguin book on Greek myth might help with Eurynome, I find no poem that has the key to its meaning outside itself.
Oh wake him not until he please,
Lest he should rise to weep:
For flocks and birds and streams and trees
Are golden in his silver sleep.
For thousands of years poetry has been ringing the changes on a sleeper whom it is dangerous to waken, and the myths of Endymion, of the bridegroom in the Song of Songs, of Adam, of Blake's Albion, of Joyce's Finnegan, are a few of the by-products. Such myths in the background enrich the suggestiveness of the above four lines, but the lines are not dependent on the echoes, either for their meaning or for their poetic value. Or again:
The woman meanwhile sits apart and weaves
Red rosy garlands to dress her joy and fear.
But all to no purpose; for petals and leaves
Fall everlastingly, and the small swords stand clear.
The reader who remembers his Milton, however vaguely, will see how the fall of sex from love to lust belongs in a complex which includes the first efforts at clothing, the appearance of thorns on the rose, the coming of winter after fall, the angelic swords over Paradise, and the aggressive use of sex which the phallic image of "small swords" suggests. But none of this would have any point if the quatrain itself did not carry its own meaning.
I have glanced at the critical issues raised by The Boatman because it seems to me a conspicuous example of a tendency that I have seen growing since I began this survey eight years ago. With the proviso that "professional" in this context has nothing to do with earning a living, the younger Canadian poets have become steadily more professional in the last few years, more concerned with poetry as a craft with its own traditions and discipline. The babble of unshaped free verse and the obscurities of private association [75] are inseparable from amateurish poetry, but they are em-phatically not "modern" qualities: serious modern poets in Canada struggle hard for clarity of expression and tightness of structure. The second volumes of Douglas LePan, P.K. Page, and James Reaney (of whom more next year) show this markedly, as do the first volumes of Wilfred Watson and Anne Wilkinson, and all the volumes of Irving Layton since In the midst of My Fever. It is consistent with this that the more amateurish approach which tries to write up emotional experiences as they arise in life or memory has given way to an emphasis on the formal elements of poetry, on myth, metaphor, symbol, image, even metrics. The development is precisely parallel to the development in Canadian painting from deliberately naive landscape to abstraction and con-centration on pictorial form. As in 1890 with the Scott-Lampman-Roberts group, and again in the New Provinces generation, there seems to be once more in Canadian poetry, on a much bigger scale, a "school" in its proper sense of a number of poets united only by a common respect for poetry.
The title of Daryl Hine's The Carnal and the Crane (McGill Poetry Series, 52 pp., $1.50) comes from a ballad in which two birds (carnal in this context means comeille, crow) discuss the Incarnation. The double entendre in the word "carnal" suggests the theme of the dialogue of soul and body as well, and in connection with "crane" one very astute critic, Mr. Milton Wilson, has murmured the name of Hart Crane. Abandoning speculation, we find The Camal and the Crane also a carefully planned book, leading up to and moving away from a central poem called "The Return from Unlikeness," a group of three dialogues on the Nativity. I take it that "unlikeness" is here used in its Augustinian sense of remoteness from God, by way of the conclusion of Auden's For the Time Being, so that a return from it, which the Incarnation makes possible, would be the achieving of a total identity, a universal homecoming in which everyone, including Judas Iscariot, goes to his own place.
We begin with the three kings, representing the three aspects of wisdom: wonder, trust in love, and distrust of [76]
unaided reason, confronting Herod. Herod agrees on the importance of finding
... the silent centre of private wars
of blind men who can't imagine all the stars.
But for himself he himself occupies that centre and cannot move out: in other words he is spiritual pride, the demonic centre in Everyman whose vision is despair. The second part deals with the shepherds, who by a most ingenious modulation are identified with the Corydon and Alexis of Virgil's second eclogue. Virgil is traditionally a prophet of the Incarnation, but it is a very different eclogue that has made him so. Corydon and Alexis are also associated with Cain and Abel, destructive passion and its shepherd victim, and with the warning "armed head" of the witches' vision in Macbeth, which we remember was followed by a bloody child and a crowned one. The third dialogue deals with the Annunciation and the jealousy of Joseph. Against the invisible appearance of the Child is set the collapse of earthly power, symbolized by the recent assassination of Caesar, a theme developed later in a fine series of sonnets called "At Pompey's Statua."
The climax of the book is a series of three poems, of which the first two concern a "fat boy," a poet, seen first from the outside by his friends who bury him, and then from the inside as an unconscious denizen of Eden. The poet dies
declaring that the universe was tandem,
not single, quod erat demonstrandum.
Tandem means among other things fallen, and we hear a great deal about the "January apple," the twisting of love into lust, the fatality of the "father," and similar topoi. Mr. Hine's fallen world is an underworld of death and rebirth, many of its features derived from the sixth book of the Aeneid. It is associated with autumn and winter, the hunting season and "The air grown perilous with falconry," when Orion, the hunter and the winter constellation, lover of Aurora and type [77] of cyclical rebirth opposed to the dialectic of resurrection, presides over both love and death. It is the world of "Avernus," where Aeneas, in one of the most eloquent poems in the book, wanders talking to the shadow of the silent Dido, and where sex is represented by the wound of Adonis. It is a world full of ferocious birds and beasts of prey, a "flood of animals" like those Dante fled from, including the wolf who "is time," and which in the aggregate are Cerberus, the watchdog of death, whom the friends of the fat boy assume to have swallowed him. We reach this world by being ferried over the Styx by Charon, who also haunted Mr. Hine's earlier Five Poems. But a more concentrated look shows that Avernus is really a water-world under the Styx, the world that has never recovered from the deluge. In "The Boat" and "The Lake" (a frozen lake, modulating the water symbol to ice) this water-world expands into what Mr. D. G. Jones, of whom more in a moment, calls the more frequented and practical pool of Narcissus.
This world, then, is the pool of Narcissus: what goes on in it is the dreamy reflection of reality into which Adam fell, the hypnotized imitation of life by the ego. Marriage, for instance (see "Epithalamium," one of the most equivocal poems in that genre I have ever read), introduces lovers to an Elysium which is the reflection of Eden, but full of serpents and bitter fruits. What the flood did the fire shall overthrow, and the redemption of this world by Christ is usually symbolized by fire, the fiery furnace and the burning bush that burn without destroying, and in which reflections find their own true forms: "Lent's end in Easter, water's in ice that shone."
There are great inequalities in the success with which Mr. Hine expresses all this. "The Return from Unlikeness" seems to me a poetic exercise, not a realized poem, and I have no hesitation in calling "The Entombment" a positively bad poem, because no mediocre poet can be positively bad. I doubt if any Canadian poet has potentially greater talents than Mr. Hine, and few in recent years have struck out more vivid and haunting lines, lines that can become part of one's permanent reading. As we eavesdrop on the murmuring [78] dialogues going on in the poet's mind, every so often a voice speaks, like Friar Bacon's head, with oracular simplicity and power. But these lines are often embedded, like Jack Horner's plums, in a context of rather soggy verbiage. Thus:
... hero turns
to Christmas Eve where Southwell's infant burns --
heat as continence! fire as innocence!
and the offended eye goes dark in marvels,
while the heart asks of its thorns
the sort of alchemy that transfigures peril.
The reference to Southwell's Burning Babe is creaky but passable; the next line is a fine comment on it; the third line is superb; the fourth and fifth are blither. One still, in speaking of The Carnal and the Crane, has to speak of expendable poems, of great advance, of promise and future achievement. These are not, to be sure, small things to speak of.
It is disturbing to find that, after the "fat boy" poems have reached some kind of synthesis, the final poem, "The Farewell," is still muscle-bound and squirming, and one feels the truth of the poet's remark:
Only gargoyles leaning out of dogma,
elements of doubt in faith's alloy,
deny the gravitation of belief,
defy the forts and pass the last frontiers.
But it is not the gravitation of belief that is the difficulty of using religion as metaphors for poetry: it is rather (apart, of course, from the superficial temptation to easy resonance) the rigidity of the construct from which the gargoyles lean. Christianity is held together by doctrine, compelling the poet to the struggle of digesting abstractions. One feels that the decentralized mythology in Miss Macpherson (to whom The Carnal and the Crane is dedicated) at any rate permits of a more relaxed and spontaneous poetic process. However, that is a technical obstacle only, and one that Mr. Hine is well equipped to surmount. More important, the modern religious poet is apt to confuse inspiration with a state of grace, and [79] feel that it is safer to renounce the full authority of poetry and keep ironically swimming around with all us other poor fish. See Eliot and Auden, more or less passim. Facilis descensus Averno, and Mr. Hine clearly has no interest in being facile. He has a grotesque wit, of a kind that takes the stock example of vulgarity, the replica of the Venus of Milo with a clock in her stomach, and expands it into "Venus big with time," and we may look forward to a poetry of released powers and flying gargoyles.
D. G. Jones's Frost on the Sun (Contact Press, 46 pp., $1.50) shows a talent of considerable force emerging from some undistinguished competence. There are a few rather laboured conceits, like "Public Figure," "Death of a Hornet," and "Clothesline"; the rare allusions to myth, in striking contrast to the two previous poets, are not made with much conviction, and an occasional flash of wit, like the descrip-tion of a "Faculty Party" as "a matter of oral adventure" does not always prevent a poem from sagging into common-place. These peripheral points noted, what remains is for the most part an intensely pictorial poetry, with reference to Marin, Klee, Hokusai, and the Chinese, the favourite subject being birds, which Canadian poetry seems to be strongly for this year. "Do poems too have backbones?" the poet asks in a poem called "John Marin," and he clearly knows the answer. In "A Problem of Space" he speaks of the power that a poem, like a picture, can gain by sketching in the essentials only, "Leaving all the rest to space." Poetry of course has the problem of rhythm in addition to that of pattern, and I think Mr. Jones succeeds most completely in his economical and disinterested ambitions when he is less preoccupied with visual design and lets his rhythm work itself out. In "Request" and "Soliloquy" a lilting variable rhythm sustains itself to the end -- a notable achievement in free verse, which is so apt to cripple itself by cutting off its feet, like the dancer in Andersen's fairy tale. In "The Phoebe" the rhythm follows the fluttering movements of the bird, and in "The Time of the Fictitious "I' " it follows the subject: [80]
Sometimes we are shattered. The
coherence gone, the planets of our brain
sail loosely in their microcosrnic air.
Sometimes we can
pick up nothing, start nothing;
poise lost, stance lost,
neither in the wind nor out of it
we must wait, on choppy seas,
till the wind turn,
till the moon come round,
and wind and tide, again, draw on.
To write like this a poet has to be indifferent to his own cleverness, and achieve the kind of higher detachment in which genuine sympathy and insight become possible. There are deeper tones in the book, in "Desire is Not Lust," in "Strange Characters for Christmas," in "At Twilight in the Park," which make one hope that eventually such words as serenity and wisdom may be appropriate for this poet. "Strange Characters for Christmas" has a fine haunting phrase about "the silent bleeding of small human lives," and is written in quatrains in which the first and third lines rhyme and the second and fourth do not, giving the effect of a precise twist:
And remember now the falling night
And the years of the darkening Lord of Love
And the illusive April of Platonic Light
And the fiery winter of mechanic power.
"At Twilight in the Park" shows that it is possible to be delicate without being sentimental, and "November, Gananoque," despite a bad line or two, that it is possible to make something out of ugliness and boredom -- no poet in this century can avoid that technical problem -- without being cute.
Alfred W. Purdy's Emu, Remember! (Fredericton, Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1956, 16 pp.) is conversational lyrical verse, less formally precise than his earlier work. It is quite skilful in the use of slant rhymes in "Poem" and "Elegy for a Grandfather," if more hampered by stock phrases of the [81] "forest of always Sunday" type. The tone is strongly personal, as the poet tends to see nature as a wilderness of self-reflecting mirrors, whether it presents "halls of trembling glass" on shipboard or "vectors of light" at sunrise. In this situation one is in danger of going backward into the pure narcissism of nostalgia. The poet's distrust of this is marked in the phrase:
... time is a wound
Delivered when new things can't strike flame
and in the self-discoveries of "Cantos" and "Contraband." The forward direction is the subject of two of the best poems, "Post Script" and "The Cave Painters." The cave painters, we are told:
Having discovered an ache in the loins
A clarity of colour, shores beyond their shores,
Become inhabitants of loneliness and applicants
To leave the mind-prison, be dissolved
In the myth's creation and absorbed.
We may assume that this indicates the direction that Mr. Purdy's future writing will take, perhaps in fiction, as the biographical note suggests, where he will have a chance to recapture the more objective and dramatic qualities of his earlier work that are largely missing from this collection.
Three Dozen Poems, by R. G. Everson (Montreal, Cambridge Press, 51 pp., illus., $3.00), illustrated by Colin Haworth, with drawings "done with lamp black and a dry hog's hair brush," is amateur verse at its best -- limited in its objectives, amused and amusing, unfailingly urbane, and with the primary aim of being pleasant to a reader. All the poems are brief epigrams in a cultivated speech in which life and literature meet on equal terms. Thus a vision of "Lovers under Parliament Hill," ending with the reflection that "lovers possess the world while overthrown," suggests Themistocles and Landor by contrast. Sometimes the wit increases to brilliance: [82]
In a dark house that they passed
A telephone hunted with magical empty sounds,
the context of this being a crowd leaving a theatre after a performance of The Tempest. More deeply disturbing tones than this do occur, as in "Comical Sun," but they are rare. There is a conventional but nicely turned irony in "Coming Home in Winter" and "The Fishermen," and vigorously sketched imagery in "Late-August Breeze":
A belly-low wolf breeze
pursued a thistledown whose untied hair
and white face curved above the cattle-bellowing
lawn chairs. The leaves like fishes
turned death-white undersides. We later found
nothing was hurt except the feel of Summer. ...
The other publications of the year are retrospective. The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse (Macmillan, xx, 138 pp., $3.50), is edited by F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith. It is no surprise to readers of Canadian poetry that so unusually large a proportion of it should be satire and light verse. Canada's place on the revolutionary sidelines of the United States, and its status as a small nation between huge empires, determined that bent in our genius long ago. But still it took very expert scholarship and critical judgment to produce a book like this, which not only features such regular satirists as McLachlan, Glendinning, O'Grady, Leacock, and Hiebert, and such largely satiric poets of our day as Birney, Louis MacKay, Souster, Layton, Dudek, and Klein, but also isolates a most lively element from Pratt, Lampman, Wilson Macdonald, and many others, including of course the two editors. A few non-Canadian poems are included, notably Samuel Butler's "A Psalm of Montreal." Some questions suggest themselves. Are there no satiric folk songs? No poetic wits born of political controversy in the newspapers, especially in the previous century? Why is the religious satire exclusively Protestant: don't Canadian Catholics ever laugh at themselves? Is it editorial predilection or Canadian poetry [83] that admits so little right-wing satire? Where is Pamela Vining Yule, that engaging discovery of the first edition of Mr. Smith's anthology? Meanwhile the book we have is delightful.
The Eye of the Needle (Contact Press, 71 pp., $2.50) is a collection of F. R. Scott's "satires, sorties and sundries," i.e., the light verse of one of our best light verse writers. There are a few new poems, but the majority are well known to readers of Canadian poetry. It is good to have them together. Many of them were inspired by the depression and allied events, and, appearing now in the full tide of the capitalist counter-reformation, with the political principles they support obviously heading for the limbo that swallows all political principle on this continent, they have an oddly desperate air. But they are not, as the poet himself notes, out of date: rather they remind us of all the things that we are zealously trying to forget: unemployment, exploitation, social and cultural snobbery, the unscrupulousness of the press, the middle-class hypocrisy that asserts that only striking workers are being selfish, the helplessness of the intellectual, and the fact that most of the guardians of our destinies are exactly as stupid and ill-informed as they appear to be.
Dorothy Livesay is a poet who has remained within a single convention, though with modulations. Selected Poems 1926 - 1956 (Ryerson, xxii, 82 pp., $3.50) is a retrospective exhibition of Miss Livesay's five volumes of verse, with an introduction by Professor Pacey. The book is really her collected poems, with some omissions: I do not know, for example, why the epilogue to "The Outriders" is simply called "Epilogue." Miss Livesay is an imagist who started off, in Green Pitcher (1929), in the Amy Lowell idiom:
I remember long veils of green rain
Feathered like the shawl of my grandmother --
Green from the half-green of the spring trees
Waving in the valley.
The virtues of this idiom are not those of sharp observation and precise rhythm that the imagists thought they were [84] producing: its virtues are those of gentle reverie and a relaxed circling movement. With Day and Night (1944) a social passion begins to fuse the diction, tighten the rhythm, and concentrate the imagery:
Day and night rising and falling
Night and day shift gears and slip rattling
Down the runway, shot into storerooms
Where only eyes and a notebook remember
The record of evil, the surn of commitments.
From "Prelude for Spring" on, the original imagist texture gradually returns, and is fully re-established by the end of the book:
I dream of California, never seen:
Gold globes of oranges, lantern lemons,
Grapefruit moving in slow moons,
Saucers of roundness
Catapulting colour.
Imagism tends to descriptive or landscape poetry, on which the moods of the poet are projected, either directly or by contrast. The basis of Miss Livesay's imagery is the association between winter and the human death-impulse and between spring and the human capacity for life. Cutting across this is the irony of the fact that spring tends to obliterate the memory of winter, whereas human beings enjoying love and peace retain an uneasy sense of the horrors of hatred and war. That man cannot and should not forget his dark past as easily as nature I take to be the theme of "London Revisited," and it is expressed more explicitly in "Of Mourners":
Not on the lovely body of the world
But on man's building heart, his shaping soul.
Mourn, with me, the intolerant, hater of sun:
Child's mind maimed before he learns to run.
The dangers of imagism are facility and slackness, and one reads through this book with mixed feelings. But it is one [85] of the few rewards of writing poetry that the poet takes his ranking from his best work. Miss Livesay's most distinctive quality, I think, is her power of observing how other people observe, especially children. Too often her own observation goes out of focus, making the love poems elusive and the descriptive ones prolix, but in the gentle humour of "The Traveller," in "The Child Looks Out," in "On Seeing," in the nursery-rhyme rhythm of "Abracadabra," and in many other places, we can see what Professor Pacey means by "a voice we delight to hear."
The Selected Poems of Marjorie Pickthall (McClelland & Stewart, 104 pp., $3.00) has an introduction by Dr. Lorne Pierce. The introduction is written with much sympathy, but tends to confirm the usual view of this poet as a diaphanous late romantic whose tradition died with her. "With Marjorie Pickthall the old poetic tradition in Canada may be said to have come to its foreordained end. It came to its end at Victoria College. With a young student, E. J. Pratt, who borrowed books from the Library where Marjorie pickthall was assistant, the new tradition began." Dr. Pierce knows far more about Marjorie Pickthall than I do, but still I have some reservations about this. She died at thirty-nine: if Yeats had died at the same age, in 1904, we should have had an overwhelming impression of the end of a road to Miltown that we now realize would have been pretty inadequate.
Marjorie Pickthall was, of course, no Yeats, but her Biblical- Oriental pastiches were not so unlike the kind of thing that Ezra pound was producing at about the same time, and there are many signs of undeveloped possibilities in this book. For some reason I had not read her little play, The Wood Carver's Wife, before, and I expected to find it Celtic twilight with a lot of early Yeats in it. It turned out to be a violent, almost brutal melodrama with a lot of Browning in it. Also, it is an example of a very common type of critical fallacy which ascribes to vagueness in her theoretical grasp of religion what is really, at worst, second-hand Swinburne, and, at best, the requirements of her genre. When she writes of Pe\re Lalemant she is subtle and elusive, not because her religion was fuzzy, but because she was writing lyric; when Pratt writes of [86] Brébeuf he is dry and hard, not because his religion is dogmatic, but because he is writing narrative. Anyway, I think she handed rather more over to Pratt, besides library books, than simply her own resignation. ...
This is an unusually thin year: one good book, two promising ones, and a miscellaneous assortment of what the Elizabethans might politely have called a paradise of dainty devices, though it would be more accurate to speak of an amusement park of rhythmical gadgets. Some of these latter are pleasant and readable enough: with others, one is strongly tempted to take the plangent tone of a couplet which appears on the opening page of one of the year's few published volumes:
Last of the mighty oaks nurtured in freedom!
Brambles and briars now supersede treedom.
However, here goes. The good book, of course, as the Governor General's committee has this time recognized, is Jay Macpherson's The Boatman (Oxford, x, 70 pp., $2.50). The book itself is one of the few physically attractive objects on my Canadian poetry shelves, and the fact is an appropriate tribute to its contents, for The Boatman is the most carefully planned and unified book of poems that has yet appeared in these surveys. It is divided into six parts. The first, "Poor Child," contains poems that appeared in a small pamphlet reviewed here some years ago: they form a series of tentative explorations of poetic experience, ranging in tone from the macabre "The Ill Wind" to the plaintive "The Third Eye." The next two sections are called "O Earth Return" and "The Plowman in Darkness." The titles come from two poems of Blake that deal with "Earth" as the whole of fallen nature in female form, and the subjects are chiefly the more common [70] mythical figures connected with this "Earth," including Eve, Eurynome, the Cumaean Sibyl, Mary Magdalene, and the bride of the Song of Songs, identified with the Queen of Sheba. Hence the subtitle, "A Speculum for Fallen Women." The two parts are, like Blake's lyrics, matched by contrast against each other, the relation often being marked by identical titles. The contrast is not so much Blake's innocence and experience, though related to it, as a contrast between a theme idealized by a kind of aesthetic distance and the same theme made colloquial and familiar. "Sibylla," whose fate is described in the motto to Eliot's The Waste Land, appears in "O Earth Return" thus:
Silence: the bat-clogged cave
Lacks breath to sigh.
Sibylla, hung between earth and sky,
Sways with the wind in her pendant grave.
and in "The Plowman in Darkness" thus:
I'm mercifully rid of youth,
No callers plague me ever;
I'm virtuous, I tell the truth --
And you can see I'm clever:
In the last two sections the corresponding male figures appear. "The Sleepers," intensely pastoral in tone, is focussed on Endymion and his moon-loved daze, with overtones of Adonis and Adam. Then the figures of Noah and his ark emerge, expanding until they become identified with God and his creation respectively. The creation is inside its creator, and the ark similarly attempts to explain to Noah, in a series of epigrams in double quatrains, that it is really inside him, as Eve was once inside Adam:
When the four quarters shall
Turn in and make one whole,
Then I who wall your body,
Which is to me a soul, [71]
Shall swim circled by you
And cradled on your tide,
Who was not even, not ever,
Taken from your side.
As the ark expands into the flooded world, the body of the Biblical leviathan, and the order of nature, the design of the whole book begins to take shape. The Boatman begins with a poem called "Ordinary People in the Last Days," a wistful poem about an apocalypse that happens to everyone except the poet, and ends with a vision of a "Fisherman" who, more enterprising than Eliot's gloomy and luckless shore-sitter, catches "myriad forms," eats them, drinks the lake they are in, and is caught in his turn by God.
Such myths as the flood and the apocalypse appear less for religious than for poetic reasons: the book moves from a "poor child" at the centre of a hostile and mysterious world to an adult child who has regained the paradisal innocent vision and is at the circumference of a world of identical forms. In the title poem the reader is urged to follow this process as best he may:
Then you take the tender creature
-- You remember, that's the reader --
And you pull hirn through his navel inside out.
The wonderland of this Noah's ark inside Noah, where the phoenix and the abominable snowman have equal rights with books and eggs and the sun and moon, is explored in the final section: "The Fisherman: A Book of Riddles." The riddles are not difficult, the solutions being thoughtfully provided in the title, and, like so many of the Anglo-Saxon riddles, they are circumferential rather than simply elliptical descriptions, hence the riddle on "Egg" symbolizes the poet's relation to her reader as well:
Reader, in your hand you hold
A silver case, a box of gold.
I have no door, however small,
Unless you pierce rny tender wall, [72]
And there's no skill in healing then
Shall ever make me whole again.
Show pity, Reader, for my plight:
Let be, or else consume me quite.
Miss Macpherson chooses strict metres and small frames:
she is, as the blurb says, melodious, but her melody is of that shaped and epigrammatic quality which in music is called tune. Within her self-imposed limits there is an extraordinary tonal variety, from the delicate ritardando of "The Caverned Woman" to the punning knittelvers of "The Boatman," and from the whispered pianissimo of "Aiaia" (the island of Circe) to the alliterative thundering of "Storm." She can -- a noticeable feat in Canada -- write a sexual poem without breaking into adolescent pimples and cackles; she can deal with religious themes without making any reed-organ wheezes about the dilemma of modern man; she has a wit and an erudition that are free of wisecracks and pedantry; she can modulate in eight lines from "Philomel's unmeasured grief" to the human jay who
Chatters, gabbles, all the day
Raises both Cain and Babel.
The elegiac poems are the most resonant, and they make the strongest initial impression, though the lighter ones have equal staying power. There are few dying falls: usually a poem ends with a quiet authority that has a ring of finality about it, leaving the reader nothing to do but accept the poem -- "Reader, take," as the riddle on "Book" says.
There is little use looking for bad lines or lapses in taste: The Boatman is completely successful within the conventions it adopts, and anyone dissatisfied with the book must quarrel with the conventions. Among these are the use of a great variety of echoes, some of them direct quotations from other poems, and an interest in myth, both Biblical and Classical, that may make some readers wonder uneasily if they should not be reading it with a mythological handbook.
One should notice in the first place that the echoes are almost invariably from the simplest and most popular types [73] of poetry. They include Elizabethan lyrics ("While Philomel's unmeasured grief' sounds like the opening of a madrigal); the lyrics of Blake; hymns ("Take not that Spirit from me"); Anglo-Saxon riddles; Christmas carols ("The Natural Mother"); nursery rhymes ("Sheba"); ballads and newspaper verse ("Mary of Egypt" and the second "Sibylla"). The use made of these echoes is to create a kind of timeless style, in which everything from the tags of mediaeval ballad to modern slang can fit. One has a sense of rereading as well as reading, of meeting new poems with a recognition that is integrally and specifically linked with the rest of one's poetic experience. The echoes also enable the poet to achieve the most transparent simplicity of diction. There is little of the "density" of more intellectualized poetry, and ambiguities and ironies are carried very lightly:
In a far-off former time
And a green and gentle clime,
Mamma was a lively lass,
Liked to watch the tall ships pass,
Loved to hear the sailors sing
Of sun and wind and voyaging,
Felt a wild desire to be
On the bleak and unplowed sea.
The flat conventional phrases here, including the Homeric tag in the last line, would seem commonplace or affected if their context had not been so skilfully worked out for them. It is true that for many readers there is nothing so baffling as simplicity, but Miss Macpherson's simplicity is uncompromising.
As for mythology, that is one of poetry's indispensable languages: most of the major English poets, including the best poets of today, demand and expect a considerable knowledge of myth, and although Douglas LePan calls Canada a country without a mythology, the same thing is increasingly true even of Canadian poets. Miss Macpherson's myths, like her allusions, flow into the poems: the poems do not point to them. Knowing who Adam and Eve and Noah are will get one through most of the book, and although a [74] glance at the opening page of Robert Graves's Penguin book on Greek myth might help with Eurynome, I find no poem that has the key to its meaning outside itself.
Oh wake him not until he please,
Lest he should rise to weep:
For flocks and birds and streams and trees
Are golden in his silver sleep.
For thousands of years poetry has been ringing the changes on a sleeper whom it is dangerous to waken, and the myths of Endymion, of the bridegroom in the Song of Songs, of Adam, of Blake's Albion, of Joyce's Finnegan, are a few of the by-products. Such myths in the background enrich the suggestiveness of the above four lines, but the lines are not dependent on the echoes, either for their meaning or for their poetic value. Or again:
The woman meanwhile sits apart and weaves
Red rosy garlands to dress her joy and fear.
But all to no purpose; for petals and leaves
Fall everlastingly, and the small swords stand clear.
The reader who remembers his Milton, however vaguely, will see how the fall of sex from love to lust belongs in a complex which includes the first efforts at clothing, the appearance of thorns on the rose, the coming of winter after fall, the angelic swords over Paradise, and the aggressive use of sex which the phallic image of "small swords" suggests. But none of this would have any point if the quatrain itself did not carry its own meaning.
I have glanced at the critical issues raised by The Boatman because it seems to me a conspicuous example of a tendency that I have seen growing since I began this survey eight years ago. With the proviso that "professional" in this context has nothing to do with earning a living, the younger Canadian poets have become steadily more professional in the last few years, more concerned with poetry as a craft with its own traditions and discipline. The babble of unshaped free verse and the obscurities of private association [75] are inseparable from amateurish poetry, but they are em-phatically not "modern" qualities: serious modern poets in Canada struggle hard for clarity of expression and tightness of structure. The second volumes of Douglas LePan, P.K. Page, and James Reaney (of whom more next year) show this markedly, as do the first volumes of Wilfred Watson and Anne Wilkinson, and all the volumes of Irving Layton since In the midst of My Fever. It is consistent with this that the more amateurish approach which tries to write up emotional experiences as they arise in life or memory has given way to an emphasis on the formal elements of poetry, on myth, metaphor, symbol, image, even metrics. The development is precisely parallel to the development in Canadian painting from deliberately naive landscape to abstraction and con-centration on pictorial form. As in 1890 with the Scott-Lampman-Roberts group, and again in the New Provinces generation, there seems to be once more in Canadian poetry, on a much bigger scale, a "school" in its proper sense of a number of poets united only by a common respect for poetry.
The title of Daryl Hine's The Carnal and the Crane (McGill Poetry Series, 52 pp., $1.50) comes from a ballad in which two birds (carnal in this context means comeille, crow) discuss the Incarnation. The double entendre in the word "carnal" suggests the theme of the dialogue of soul and body as well, and in connection with "crane" one very astute critic, Mr. Milton Wilson, has murmured the name of Hart Crane. Abandoning speculation, we find The Camal and the Crane also a carefully planned book, leading up to and moving away from a central poem called "The Return from Unlikeness," a group of three dialogues on the Nativity. I take it that "unlikeness" is here used in its Augustinian sense of remoteness from God, by way of the conclusion of Auden's For the Time Being, so that a return from it, which the Incarnation makes possible, would be the achieving of a total identity, a universal homecoming in which everyone, including Judas Iscariot, goes to his own place.
We begin with the three kings, representing the three aspects of wisdom: wonder, trust in love, and distrust of [76]
unaided reason, confronting Herod. Herod agrees on the importance of finding
... the silent centre of private wars
of blind men who can't imagine all the stars.
But for himself he himself occupies that centre and cannot move out: in other words he is spiritual pride, the demonic centre in Everyman whose vision is despair. The second part deals with the shepherds, who by a most ingenious modulation are identified with the Corydon and Alexis of Virgil's second eclogue. Virgil is traditionally a prophet of the Incarnation, but it is a very different eclogue that has made him so. Corydon and Alexis are also associated with Cain and Abel, destructive passion and its shepherd victim, and with the warning "armed head" of the witches' vision in Macbeth, which we remember was followed by a bloody child and a crowned one. The third dialogue deals with the Annunciation and the jealousy of Joseph. Against the invisible appearance of the Child is set the collapse of earthly power, symbolized by the recent assassination of Caesar, a theme developed later in a fine series of sonnets called "At Pompey's Statua."
The climax of the book is a series of three poems, of which the first two concern a "fat boy," a poet, seen first from the outside by his friends who bury him, and then from the inside as an unconscious denizen of Eden. The poet dies
declaring that the universe was tandem,
not single, quod erat demonstrandum.
Tandem means among other things fallen, and we hear a great deal about the "January apple," the twisting of love into lust, the fatality of the "father," and similar topoi. Mr. Hine's fallen world is an underworld of death and rebirth, many of its features derived from the sixth book of the Aeneid. It is associated with autumn and winter, the hunting season and "The air grown perilous with falconry," when Orion, the hunter and the winter constellation, lover of Aurora and type [77] of cyclical rebirth opposed to the dialectic of resurrection, presides over both love and death. It is the world of "Avernus," where Aeneas, in one of the most eloquent poems in the book, wanders talking to the shadow of the silent Dido, and where sex is represented by the wound of Adonis. It is a world full of ferocious birds and beasts of prey, a "flood of animals" like those Dante fled from, including the wolf who "is time," and which in the aggregate are Cerberus, the watchdog of death, whom the friends of the fat boy assume to have swallowed him. We reach this world by being ferried over the Styx by Charon, who also haunted Mr. Hine's earlier Five Poems. But a more concentrated look shows that Avernus is really a water-world under the Styx, the world that has never recovered from the deluge. In "The Boat" and "The Lake" (a frozen lake, modulating the water symbol to ice) this water-world expands into what Mr. D. G. Jones, of whom more in a moment, calls the more frequented and practical pool of Narcissus.
This world, then, is the pool of Narcissus: what goes on in it is the dreamy reflection of reality into which Adam fell, the hypnotized imitation of life by the ego. Marriage, for instance (see "Epithalamium," one of the most equivocal poems in that genre I have ever read), introduces lovers to an Elysium which is the reflection of Eden, but full of serpents and bitter fruits. What the flood did the fire shall overthrow, and the redemption of this world by Christ is usually symbolized by fire, the fiery furnace and the burning bush that burn without destroying, and in which reflections find their own true forms: "Lent's end in Easter, water's in ice that shone."
There are great inequalities in the success with which Mr. Hine expresses all this. "The Return from Unlikeness" seems to me a poetic exercise, not a realized poem, and I have no hesitation in calling "The Entombment" a positively bad poem, because no mediocre poet can be positively bad. I doubt if any Canadian poet has potentially greater talents than Mr. Hine, and few in recent years have struck out more vivid and haunting lines, lines that can become part of one's permanent reading. As we eavesdrop on the murmuring [78] dialogues going on in the poet's mind, every so often a voice speaks, like Friar Bacon's head, with oracular simplicity and power. But these lines are often embedded, like Jack Horner's plums, in a context of rather soggy verbiage. Thus:
... hero turns
to Christmas Eve where Southwell's infant burns --
heat as continence! fire as innocence!
and the offended eye goes dark in marvels,
while the heart asks of its thorns
the sort of alchemy that transfigures peril.
The reference to Southwell's Burning Babe is creaky but passable; the next line is a fine comment on it; the third line is superb; the fourth and fifth are blither. One still, in speaking of The Carnal and the Crane, has to speak of expendable poems, of great advance, of promise and future achievement. These are not, to be sure, small things to speak of.
It is disturbing to find that, after the "fat boy" poems have reached some kind of synthesis, the final poem, "The Farewell," is still muscle-bound and squirming, and one feels the truth of the poet's remark:
Only gargoyles leaning out of dogma,
elements of doubt in faith's alloy,
deny the gravitation of belief,
defy the forts and pass the last frontiers.
But it is not the gravitation of belief that is the difficulty of using religion as metaphors for poetry: it is rather (apart, of course, from the superficial temptation to easy resonance) the rigidity of the construct from which the gargoyles lean. Christianity is held together by doctrine, compelling the poet to the struggle of digesting abstractions. One feels that the decentralized mythology in Miss Macpherson (to whom The Carnal and the Crane is dedicated) at any rate permits of a more relaxed and spontaneous poetic process. However, that is a technical obstacle only, and one that Mr. Hine is well equipped to surmount. More important, the modern religious poet is apt to confuse inspiration with a state of grace, and [79] feel that it is safer to renounce the full authority of poetry and keep ironically swimming around with all us other poor fish. See Eliot and Auden, more or less passim. Facilis descensus Averno, and Mr. Hine clearly has no interest in being facile. He has a grotesque wit, of a kind that takes the stock example of vulgarity, the replica of the Venus of Milo with a clock in her stomach, and expands it into "Venus big with time," and we may look forward to a poetry of released powers and flying gargoyles.
D. G. Jones's Frost on the Sun (Contact Press, 46 pp., $1.50) shows a talent of considerable force emerging from some undistinguished competence. There are a few rather laboured conceits, like "Public Figure," "Death of a Hornet," and "Clothesline"; the rare allusions to myth, in striking contrast to the two previous poets, are not made with much conviction, and an occasional flash of wit, like the descrip-tion of a "Faculty Party" as "a matter of oral adventure" does not always prevent a poem from sagging into common-place. These peripheral points noted, what remains is for the most part an intensely pictorial poetry, with reference to Marin, Klee, Hokusai, and the Chinese, the favourite subject being birds, which Canadian poetry seems to be strongly for this year. "Do poems too have backbones?" the poet asks in a poem called "John Marin," and he clearly knows the answer. In "A Problem of Space" he speaks of the power that a poem, like a picture, can gain by sketching in the essentials only, "Leaving all the rest to space." Poetry of course has the problem of rhythm in addition to that of pattern, and I think Mr. Jones succeeds most completely in his economical and disinterested ambitions when he is less preoccupied with visual design and lets his rhythm work itself out. In "Request" and "Soliloquy" a lilting variable rhythm sustains itself to the end -- a notable achievement in free verse, which is so apt to cripple itself by cutting off its feet, like the dancer in Andersen's fairy tale. In "The Phoebe" the rhythm follows the fluttering movements of the bird, and in "The Time of the Fictitious "I' " it follows the subject: [80]
Sometimes we are shattered. The
coherence gone, the planets of our brain
sail loosely in their microcosrnic air.
Sometimes we can
pick up nothing, start nothing;
poise lost, stance lost,
neither in the wind nor out of it
we must wait, on choppy seas,
till the wind turn,
till the moon come round,
and wind and tide, again, draw on.
To write like this a poet has to be indifferent to his own cleverness, and achieve the kind of higher detachment in which genuine sympathy and insight become possible. There are deeper tones in the book, in "Desire is Not Lust," in "Strange Characters for Christmas," in "At Twilight in the Park," which make one hope that eventually such words as serenity and wisdom may be appropriate for this poet. "Strange Characters for Christmas" has a fine haunting phrase about "the silent bleeding of small human lives," and is written in quatrains in which the first and third lines rhyme and the second and fourth do not, giving the effect of a precise twist:
And remember now the falling night
And the years of the darkening Lord of Love
And the illusive April of Platonic Light
And the fiery winter of mechanic power.
"At Twilight in the Park" shows that it is possible to be delicate without being sentimental, and "November, Gananoque," despite a bad line or two, that it is possible to make something out of ugliness and boredom -- no poet in this century can avoid that technical problem -- without being cute.
Alfred W. Purdy's Emu, Remember! (Fredericton, Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1956, 16 pp.) is conversational lyrical verse, less formally precise than his earlier work. It is quite skilful in the use of slant rhymes in "Poem" and "Elegy for a Grandfather," if more hampered by stock phrases of the [81] "forest of always Sunday" type. The tone is strongly personal, as the poet tends to see nature as a wilderness of self-reflecting mirrors, whether it presents "halls of trembling glass" on shipboard or "vectors of light" at sunrise. In this situation one is in danger of going backward into the pure narcissism of nostalgia. The poet's distrust of this is marked in the phrase:
... time is a wound
Delivered when new things can't strike flame
and in the self-discoveries of "Cantos" and "Contraband." The forward direction is the subject of two of the best poems, "Post Script" and "The Cave Painters." The cave painters, we are told:
Having discovered an ache in the loins
A clarity of colour, shores beyond their shores,
Become inhabitants of loneliness and applicants
To leave the mind-prison, be dissolved
In the myth's creation and absorbed.
We may assume that this indicates the direction that Mr. Purdy's future writing will take, perhaps in fiction, as the biographical note suggests, where he will have a chance to recapture the more objective and dramatic qualities of his earlier work that are largely missing from this collection.
Three Dozen Poems, by R. G. Everson (Montreal, Cambridge Press, 51 pp., illus., $3.00), illustrated by Colin Haworth, with drawings "done with lamp black and a dry hog's hair brush," is amateur verse at its best -- limited in its objectives, amused and amusing, unfailingly urbane, and with the primary aim of being pleasant to a reader. All the poems are brief epigrams in a cultivated speech in which life and literature meet on equal terms. Thus a vision of "Lovers under Parliament Hill," ending with the reflection that "lovers possess the world while overthrown," suggests Themistocles and Landor by contrast. Sometimes the wit increases to brilliance: [82]
In a dark house that they passed
A telephone hunted with magical empty sounds,
the context of this being a crowd leaving a theatre after a performance of The Tempest. More deeply disturbing tones than this do occur, as in "Comical Sun," but they are rare. There is a conventional but nicely turned irony in "Coming Home in Winter" and "The Fishermen," and vigorously sketched imagery in "Late-August Breeze":
A belly-low wolf breeze
pursued a thistledown whose untied hair
and white face curved above the cattle-bellowing
lawn chairs. The leaves like fishes
turned death-white undersides. We later found
nothing was hurt except the feel of Summer. ...
The other publications of the year are retrospective. The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse (Macmillan, xx, 138 pp., $3.50), is edited by F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith. It is no surprise to readers of Canadian poetry that so unusually large a proportion of it should be satire and light verse. Canada's place on the revolutionary sidelines of the United States, and its status as a small nation between huge empires, determined that bent in our genius long ago. But still it took very expert scholarship and critical judgment to produce a book like this, which not only features such regular satirists as McLachlan, Glendinning, O'Grady, Leacock, and Hiebert, and such largely satiric poets of our day as Birney, Louis MacKay, Souster, Layton, Dudek, and Klein, but also isolates a most lively element from Pratt, Lampman, Wilson Macdonald, and many others, including of course the two editors. A few non-Canadian poems are included, notably Samuel Butler's "A Psalm of Montreal." Some questions suggest themselves. Are there no satiric folk songs? No poetic wits born of political controversy in the newspapers, especially in the previous century? Why is the religious satire exclusively Protestant: don't Canadian Catholics ever laugh at themselves? Is it editorial predilection or Canadian poetry [83] that admits so little right-wing satire? Where is Pamela Vining Yule, that engaging discovery of the first edition of Mr. Smith's anthology? Meanwhile the book we have is delightful.
The Eye of the Needle (Contact Press, 71 pp., $2.50) is a collection of F. R. Scott's "satires, sorties and sundries," i.e., the light verse of one of our best light verse writers. There are a few new poems, but the majority are well known to readers of Canadian poetry. It is good to have them together. Many of them were inspired by the depression and allied events, and, appearing now in the full tide of the capitalist counter-reformation, with the political principles they support obviously heading for the limbo that swallows all political principle on this continent, they have an oddly desperate air. But they are not, as the poet himself notes, out of date: rather they remind us of all the things that we are zealously trying to forget: unemployment, exploitation, social and cultural snobbery, the unscrupulousness of the press, the middle-class hypocrisy that asserts that only striking workers are being selfish, the helplessness of the intellectual, and the fact that most of the guardians of our destinies are exactly as stupid and ill-informed as they appear to be.
Dorothy Livesay is a poet who has remained within a single convention, though with modulations. Selected Poems 1926 - 1956 (Ryerson, xxii, 82 pp., $3.50) is a retrospective exhibition of Miss Livesay's five volumes of verse, with an introduction by Professor Pacey. The book is really her collected poems, with some omissions: I do not know, for example, why the epilogue to "The Outriders" is simply called "Epilogue." Miss Livesay is an imagist who started off, in Green Pitcher (1929), in the Amy Lowell idiom:
I remember long veils of green rain
Feathered like the shawl of my grandmother --
Green from the half-green of the spring trees
Waving in the valley.
The virtues of this idiom are not those of sharp observation and precise rhythm that the imagists thought they were [84] producing: its virtues are those of gentle reverie and a relaxed circling movement. With Day and Night (1944) a social passion begins to fuse the diction, tighten the rhythm, and concentrate the imagery:
Day and night rising and falling
Night and day shift gears and slip rattling
Down the runway, shot into storerooms
Where only eyes and a notebook remember
The record of evil, the surn of commitments.
From "Prelude for Spring" on, the original imagist texture gradually returns, and is fully re-established by the end of the book:
I dream of California, never seen:
Gold globes of oranges, lantern lemons,
Grapefruit moving in slow moons,
Saucers of roundness
Catapulting colour.
Imagism tends to descriptive or landscape poetry, on which the moods of the poet are projected, either directly or by contrast. The basis of Miss Livesay's imagery is the association between winter and the human death-impulse and between spring and the human capacity for life. Cutting across this is the irony of the fact that spring tends to obliterate the memory of winter, whereas human beings enjoying love and peace retain an uneasy sense of the horrors of hatred and war. That man cannot and should not forget his dark past as easily as nature I take to be the theme of "London Revisited," and it is expressed more explicitly in "Of Mourners":
Not on the lovely body of the world
But on man's building heart, his shaping soul.
Mourn, with me, the intolerant, hater of sun:
Child's mind maimed before he learns to run.
The dangers of imagism are facility and slackness, and one reads through this book with mixed feelings. But it is one [85] of the few rewards of writing poetry that the poet takes his ranking from his best work. Miss Livesay's most distinctive quality, I think, is her power of observing how other people observe, especially children. Too often her own observation goes out of focus, making the love poems elusive and the descriptive ones prolix, but in the gentle humour of "The Traveller," in "The Child Looks Out," in "On Seeing," in the nursery-rhyme rhythm of "Abracadabra," and in many other places, we can see what Professor Pacey means by "a voice we delight to hear."
The Selected Poems of Marjorie Pickthall (McClelland & Stewart, 104 pp., $3.00) has an introduction by Dr. Lorne Pierce. The introduction is written with much sympathy, but tends to confirm the usual view of this poet as a diaphanous late romantic whose tradition died with her. "With Marjorie Pickthall the old poetic tradition in Canada may be said to have come to its foreordained end. It came to its end at Victoria College. With a young student, E. J. Pratt, who borrowed books from the Library where Marjorie pickthall was assistant, the new tradition began." Dr. Pierce knows far more about Marjorie Pickthall than I do, but still I have some reservations about this. She died at thirty-nine: if Yeats had died at the same age, in 1904, we should have had an overwhelming impression of the end of a road to Miltown that we now realize would have been pretty inadequate.
Marjorie Pickthall was, of course, no Yeats, but her Biblical- Oriental pastiches were not so unlike the kind of thing that Ezra pound was producing at about the same time, and there are many signs of undeveloped possibilities in this book. For some reason I had not read her little play, The Wood Carver's Wife, before, and I expected to find it Celtic twilight with a lot of early Yeats in it. It turned out to be a violent, almost brutal melodrama with a lot of Browning in it. Also, it is an example of a very common type of critical fallacy which ascribes to vagueness in her theoretical grasp of religion what is really, at worst, second-hand Swinburne, and, at best, the requirements of her genre. When she writes of Pe\re Lalemant she is subtle and elusive, not because her religion was fuzzy, but because she was writing lyric; when Pratt writes of [86] Brébeuf he is dry and hard, not because his religion is dogmatic, but because he is writing narrative. Anyway, I think she handed rather more over to Pratt, besides library books, than simply her own resignation. ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
