Expansive Poetry
& Music Online Review
FORGOTTEN
POEMS:
“THE ICE FLOES” by E. J. PRATT
by
Edward Zuk
Canadian poetry today is
something of an afterthought in the literary world, both for readers in
the United States and, more regrettably, for those in Canada as
well. As a result, its supporters have always put on a slightly
embarrassed air whenever they speak of it, making their advocacy seem
more like an apology. “If evaluation is one’s guiding principle,”
Northrop Frye wrote in what has since become the most famous essay on
the subject, “criticism of Canadian literature would become a poor
naked alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity.”
Frye was anticipated in this opinion by another University of Toronto
professor, E. K. Brown, a supporter of Canadian literature who
nevertheless wrote a long essay explaining why it is mediocre, perhaps
inevitably so. This state of affairs has improved somewhat in
recent years, but for the most part poets from Canada have approached
their national literature with diffidence, partly because modesty is a
very Canadian virtue, and partly because this attitude, strange as it
seems, forms a part of their literary inheritance.
But this modesty is, of course in large part a pose, and so I hope that
I can write an introduction to a Canadian poet without beginning with
an apology. Canadian poetry does not deserve to be as neglected
as it is. While it may be an acquired taste, there are compelling
reasons why any reader of poetry – and admirers of Expansive poetry in
particular – ought to develop at least a passing acquaintance with
it. If Canadian literature can boast no poem to match King Lear or The Prelude, one does not have to
read very deeply to find smaller gems like “At the Cedars” by Duncan
Campbell Scott, which describes a fatal accident during a log run down
a river:
The whole drive was jammed
In that bend at the Cedars,
The rapids were dammed
With the logs tight rammed
And crammed; you might know
The Devil had clinched them below.
We worked three days – not a budge,
‘She’s as tight as a wedge, on the ledge,’
Says our foreman;
‘Mon Dieu! boys, look here,
We must get this thing clear.’
He cursed at the men
And we went for it then;
With our cant-dogs arow,
We just gave he-yo-ho;
When she gave a big shove
From above.
The poem continues for another five stanzas of varying length and rhyme
scheme (Scott produces vers libre
in the original sense of that term – a freedom in the choice of metre
and rhyme, and not an absence of metre and rhyme), but this excerpt is
enough to point out the strengths of Canadian poetry in general.
“At the Cedars” dates from 1893, and I find that it holds up better
than most of the decadent poetry that had become the fashion in England
during the 1890’s. The lines quoted above (not the best in the
poem) possess a vitality that I find far more appealing than the
world-weariness of a stanza like this:
We fling up flowers and laugh, we laugh across the
wine;
With wine we dull our souls and careful
strains of art;
Our cups are polished skulls round which the roses
twine:
None dares to look at Death who leers
and lurks apart.
(Ernest
Dowson, “Carthusians”)
Dowson’s lines are, I think, more accomplished pieces of writing, but
technical prowess is not everything, or even the main thing, in
poetry. “At the Cedars” demonstrates one of the advantages of
writing in a provincial or colonial setting. While the provincial
writer may find it harder to obtain a high polish or to keep up with
literary fashions, he or she has access to simpler pleasures – in this
case a sense a fresh subject matter and first-hand contact with it –
that are difficult for those writing in a cultural capital to acquire.
The ability to retain such older virtues of poetry in an era when they
were neglected is, I think, one of the main reasons to turn to the work
of Canada’s greatest poet, E. J. Pratt (1882-1964). Pratt came of
age as a poet during the 1920’s and 30’s, right at the height of the
Modernist dominance in the arts. Written at the same time as the
major works of Eliot and Joyce, Pratt’s shorter poems, not
surprisingly, show a flirtation with various Modernist modes: the
free verse lyric, Eliotic quatrains, and the Imagist poem among
them. But part of Pratt’s genius was resistant to Modernism, and
the works for which he is best remembered – the works that are most
typical of him – are traditional narratives on nationalistic themes, a
yearning for a modern epic of a kind which finds no counterpart in the
collected works of Eliot, Pound, Williams, or Stevens. For this
reason, Pratt helps to modify our perception of literary history.
The years 1920-1980 have been criticized by Expansive poets, on the
whole rightly, for having abandoned longer narrative poetry in favour
of the lyric. Pratt’s work contains several important poems that
were written between 1935 and 1953 which reshape this picture, letting
us see that the narrative impulse, though it was suppressed by many
poets, remained alive in the work of others.
To appreciate Pratt fully, we must first dispel a myth about what
constitutes the attraction of a poet. There are, broadly
speaking, two ways in which a poet’s life can be related to his
art. For some poets, something like a manic energy seems to
propel every facet of existence, so that it becomes impossible to
disentangle the life from the art, or the works of art from the
life. Examples of this type of poet include Christopher Marlowe,
Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath: the same impulse that lent such
vitality to their poems destroyed them as persons, so that one cannot
read their poetry without reference to their biographies. Goethe
provides an example of this type of poet who did not end in
tragedy. This type of poet tends to attract an undue amount of
attention since political intrigue, alcoholism, or suicide are more
immediately arresting than poetry. But there is a second type of
poet, less glamorous perhaps, whose art and biography are not linked in
any obvious way. Instead, the outward existence is calm and
uneventful, and all of the artist’s energies are concentrated into the
art. This type of poet creates an intensely vivid imaginative
life without giving rise to an equally vivid personal one; as a result,
the work has a greater aesthetic purity. Shakespeare (as far as
we can tell), Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens provide examples of
this type. E. J. Pratt was of their number. As far as his
art was concerned, the one notable year in his life occurred in 1920,
when he agreed to join the Department of English at the University of
Toronto and abandoned his earlier plans to become a Methodist minister
in Newfoundland. Pratt appears to have spent the remainder of his
years more or less happily in academia, enjoying the company of younger
colleagues like Northrop Frye and writing his poems.
As if to compensate for this uneventful life, Pratt was drawn to
dramatizing great events of Canadian history, in the process producing
the closest things to a national epic that we Canadians possess.
The sinking of the Titanic 95
miles off the Grand Banks in Newfoundland in 1912 inspired Pratt’s long
poem The Titanic (1935), a
recreation of the disaster written, ironically, in heroic
couplets. A more successful work, his blank verse epic
Brébeuf and his Brethren (1940), depicts a group of French
Catholic missionaries who are captured by hostile Iroquois and are
eventually tortured to death, only to amaze their executioners with the
inner strength granted to them by their faith. Pratt’s most
successful poem is probably another blank verse epic, Towards the Last Spike (1952),
which describes the engineering feats and political scandals that
surrounded the building of the Canadian national railway, the only
historical event that, for various reasons too complex to go into here,
has captured the imagination of the Canadian public. It is the
combination of public spiritedness and the epic impulse that makes
these longer works of Pratt’s oeuvre seem at once modern and
anti-Modernist, a welcome supplement to the lyric experiments that
dominated his era.
As distinguished as Brébeuf
and his Brethren and Towards
the Last Spike are, the work I would like to focus on in this
essay is “The Ice Floes” (1922) from Pratt’s first
professionally-published book,
Newfoundland Verse. This narrative is the most
accessible and entertaining poem that Pratt wrote. In a letter
likely written in April or May 1922 to Arthur Phelps, Pratt complained
of the effort it cost him. This care is reflected in his artful
uses of his sources. “The Ice Floes” is loosely based on a
disaster that killed 25 men on the SS
Greenland in 1898, after 48 of the crew had become lost on the
ice during a seal hunt. Pratt distances the tragedy from its
origin, changing the name of the ship to the Eagle (a well-known sealing vessel
from his youth) and erasing any reference that places the poem in the
past. He also heightens the tragedy, having it claim the lives of
60 men. As a result of his efforts, the poem becomes what
Coleridge once described as being “of no time,” drifting in a kind of
unspecified world near our own.
The poem is, at its most basic level, a story of human greed and the
terrible justice that the natural world can bring. The Eagle is a sealing vessel,
transporting its men to the ice floes off the island of Labrador to
slaughter infant seals (the ‘harps’ of the poem) for their pelts.
The men approach their work with enthusiasm, even though they are in
awe of the seals’ ability to adapt to the Arctic landscape. The
narrator recounts that:
. . . unimaginable thing
That sealers talk of every spring –
The ‘bobbing-holes’ within the floes
That neither wind nor frost could close;
Through every hold a seal would dive,
And search, to keep her brood alive,
A hundred miles it well might be,
For food beneath that frozen sea.
The amazing thing is that each mother seal “would turn and find her way
/ Back to the hold, without the help / Of compass or log.” This
description, which is stretched over seventeen lines, may appear to be
overly long at first, but it is vital to the unfolding of the
poem. The ambivalence of the narrator’s stance – his
barely-concealed love for the seals combined with a willingness to
slaughter them for profit – is one of the lifesprings of the
poem. The contradiction is at once understandable and, at a
deeper level, inexplicable, and it lends a sense of realism to “The
Ice-Floes” by humanizing the narrator and the other sealers before the
tragedy. This passage is also an obvious foreshadowing as the
unnaturalness of the sealers’ greed and their inability to adapt to
their environment will lead to their deaths.
At first the slaughter of the seals goes well, and the crew of the Eagle is able to harvest nine
thousand pelts in a single afternoon, forming “pyramids” of carcasses
in Pratt’s discomforting image. But the men soon become too
caught up in the frenzy of slaughter and, reckoning that “an added
thousand or more” will help them “make the last record pan,” they head
back to the herds of seals and miss the Eagle’s signal to return.
Their greed is punished swiftly and mercilessly. A storm sweeps
in as the men harvest the last round of seals, and by the time
they realize their mistake, they have lost contact with the ship and
are stranded on the floes. Blinded by snow, the sealers cannot
find their way back to the ship or determine in which direction it
lies. The men soon break up into small groups and wander helter
skelter, dazed and hallucinating, unable to understand what they are
facing or what they should do:
Here one would fall as hunger took hold
Of his step; here one would sleep as the cold
Crept into his blood, and another would kneel
Athwart the body of some dead seal,
And with knife and nails would tear it apart,
To flesh his teeth in its frozen heart.
Meanwhile, the ice floes begin to break apart in the wind. The
irony of the situation, of course, is that the men lack the homing
instincts of the seals, who are unaffected by the storm which revenges
their slaughter. Here Pratt touches on a theme that saturates
Canadian poetry and which arises in virtually every discussion of
it. Nature contains a sense of right and wrong in “The Ice
Floes,” but one that does not act according to human concerns. It
is moral and indifferent, just and cruel. As a result, by the
time the storm clears, sixty men have either frozen to death or fallen
through the cracks of the ice into the Atlantic and drowned.
At this point, I am tempted to pause my analysis and simply admire the
many felicities of the poem. There is, for example, the image of
the sealers as hounds running down a caribou (line 46) which later
changes to an image of huddled sheep (line 114), charting their
transformation from hunters to hunted. There is also the
heartbreaking and violent image, quoted above, of the sealers who spend
their last moments eviscerating the dead seals in a final attempt to
reassert control over their situation. I also admire Pratt’s use
of nautical jargon, especially near the beginning of the poem, to
establish the realism of the narrative. Then there are the depths
of thought and questioning that the poem reaches. Pratt suffered
a crisis of faith during the writing of the poem, and “The Ice Floes”
reveals a deep ambivalence towards Christianity. The poem is in
one sense a Christian one as the men are punished for their pride,
greed, and failure to show a proper stewardship of Nature. But
Nature in the poem is a moral force that is not explicitly linked to
God or Christ, and Pratt at least leaves open the possibility that the
physical universe is a self-correcting entity, one capable of acting
independently of any deity.
But instead of pursuing these ideas further, I would like to devote the
remainder of this essay to discuss one of the main wellsprings of the
vitality of “The Ice Floes”: its roots in the ballad
tradition. The ballad represents one of the oldest and strongest
musics in English, and whenever it has been successfully revived, there
is a quickening in the lines, a true vigour that lends new life to the
poem. It is one of a handful of literary forms which has been
adopted spontaneously without the help of any literary authority,
though it informs several of the monuments of English verse. The
earliest ballads reach back to the age of Chaucer and therefore the
beginnings of our poetry, and they certainly provide an alternative to
the more literary couplets or stanzaic forms that Chaucer imported from
Italy. The ballad flourished when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, that most English of
the tragedies, which draws heavily from the ballad’s spirit and its
versification in the famous scenes on the heath and its moral universe,
while the form’s prominence during the Romantic era reveals the depth
and strength of the sources of that remarkable period.
“The Ice Floes” is a novel adaptation of the ballad to modern poetry,
though the versification of the poem hides the debt somewhat.
Pratt writes in a very loose 4-beat iambic line, most often in
couplets, which may seem distant from the familiar 4-3-4-3 pattern of
the ballad. But several early ballads were composed in four-beat
lines:
‘O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son!
I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man!’
‘O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
down.’ (“Lord Randal”)
In others, the three-beat lines are clearly filler, so that the verse
is carried wholly by the four-beat ones:
There was three ladies playd at the ba’,
With a hey ho and a lillie gay
There came a knight and played o’er them a’,
As the primrose spreads so sweetly
The eldest was baith tall and fair,
With a hey ho and a lillie gay
But the youngest lookd like beautie’s queen
As the primrose spreads so sweetly
The knight bowd low to a’ the three,
With a hey ho and a lillie gay
But to the youngest he bent his knee
As the primrose spreads so sweetly . .
. (“The Cruel Brother”)
The ballad is in reality a highly flexible form, and the addition of
extra nonsense lines can stretch the stanzas to five and six lines or
more. To participate in this tradition, a poem needs to be
written in lines of four stresses (usually alternated with lines of 3
stresses) with a rhythm which is loose enough to capture common, as
opposed to formal, speech. “The Ice Floes” fits these criteria
easily, and in spirit it is pure ballad.
But the influence of the ballad goes deeper than the rhythm.
Whenever I reread Pratt’s poem, I find myself being drawn into the
ballad’s familiar universe. The ballad is not only a literary
form, but also an entire aesthetic and world-view, and Pratt seems to
relish, in this work at least, the entire tradition which it
invokes. The poem’s ease in describing action and its variety of
narrative modes are ballad-like. Take, for instance, the stanza
that ends the poem:
And the rest is as a story told,
Or a dream that belonged to a dim, mad
past,
Of a March night and north wind’s cold,
Of a voyage home with a flag half-mast
. . .
The retrospective view of these lines and the finality of the deaths
makes them resemble the ending of “Sir Patrick Spens” and dozens of
other ballads:
Half o’er, half o’er to Aberdour
It’s fifty fathom deep,
And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.
The sparse and objective description of the action (this in spite of
the first-person narrator, who remains an unrealized figure) and the
refusal to make the narrative psychological or subjective are also
hallmarks of the ballad. The moral universe which the poem
inhabits also derives from this source. Whenever I reread “The
Ice Floes,” I find myself being drawn into a familiar country in its
evocation of vast forces of good and evil, the links it forges between
character and fate, its belief in the inevitability of tragedy, its
demotic language, and its delight in describing physical action for its
own sake.
What “The Ice Floes” proves is the durability and flexibility of the
ballad, even if one takes liberties with its form, if such a proof is
needed. Yet I read few modern ballads in my favourite literary
journals (at least compared to the scores of sonnets or dramatic
monologues or even sestinas that litter their pages), and so Pratt’s
work may act as a timely reminder that there is an older and deeper
tradition of narrative in English verse than light comedies written in
elaborate stanzas or short stories transferred to blank verse.
Certainly, as the popular revival of narrative poetry proceeds apace,
the ballad deserves to recapture its honoured place as one of the
wellsprings of our literature.