37. Selected Poems by E. J. Pratt
Edwin John Pratt is perhaps the most important Canadian poet of the 20th century. He began by writing ballads and lyrics about his native Newfoundland (the gems “The Ice Floes” and “Newfoundland” are highly readable today). He then tried to out-Eliot Eliot with the quatrains of “From Stone to Steel” and “The Prize Cat,” then turned to writing free verse and long blank verse narratives about Canadian history. The most notable of the narratives are “Brébeuf and His Brethren,” about a French-Canadian priest who is captured and tortured by Natives, and “Toward the Last Spike,” about the construction of a trans-Canada railway.
I should also mention that he was a friend and colleague of Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto.
As a sample, here’s the ending to “The Ice-Floes,” about a seal hunting expedition that ended in tragedy:
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;
Of twenty thousand seals that were killed
. . . To help to lower the price of bread;
Of the muffled beat . . . of a drum . . . that filled
. . . A nave . . . at our count of sixty dead.
|