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386 GEORGE JOHNSTON GEORGE JOHNSTON Poets cannot avoid allusion, since words, which are their medium, are altogether allusive. Moreover, they elaborate and enlarge and deepen the allusiveness of words, and fetch as much meaning out of it as they can. They use phrases and turns of speech that other writers, and the language of the marketplace, have made meaningful before them. They may do so deliberately, or they may be unaware that this is what they are doing. When they use borrowings deliberately they expect them to be recognized ; they may put them in the form of direct quotations. With a few exceptions, Canadian poets since the Second World War have been shy of such literary allusions, perhaps because many of them have not been made familiar with the great sources, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Pope, the hymn writer Isaac Watts and others, whose handling of English still influences much of what they mean, and from whose writings whole phrases and bare-faced quotations keep rising to the surface of what they say and write. Our poets use the language that has been handed on to them, and even their most radical poetry is relatively conservative in diction,but their acquaintance with its sources may well be slight. Their schools have probably given much attention to current poetry, especially Canadian, inevitably at the expense of the English classics. If any version of the Bible has become part of their knowledge it is unlikely to have been the King James version, for that has been dismissed even from the churches. Whatever arguments may be raised in favour of all this, there can be no question that it entails a loss. As I have said, there are exceptions. Some contemporary Canadian poets do make deliberate use of literary allusions. In Jay Macpherson's The Boatman, we find 'No man alone an island,' which comes, slightly altered, from one of John Donne's sermons. In the same book, 'Saw you not my true love / By the way as you came' is virtually a quotation from a poem attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh. And these are only two of many. Richard Outram is a poet who takes much pleasure in allusions of all kinds. Here are two literary allusions from his book, Man in Love. The first has two sources, Hamlet and In Memoriam, appreciably altered from both, but recognizable: 'it follows as blank night blankest day.' In a later poem comes the familiar inscription from the entry to the Inferno, inverted: 'Do not abandon hope / who cannot enter here.' Al Purdy uses the first line of the hymn, 'Shall we gather at the River?' as the title of a poem in which he almost quotes from an Isaac Watts hymn, 'cowering in the shadow of his throne.' A new, young poet, April Bulmer, seems fond of biblical allusions. Her recent book, A Salve for Every Sore, is divided into seven sections, and as though to underline the significance of this number, each section is given a quotation from the Psalms as epigraph. COMMENTS 387 There is a double-entendre or two in this book, as well. Here is one that gives the epigraph to its section an unexpected meaning. He juggled oranges for that girl, embroidered darkness with gypsy song. He does not know she can grind an organ better than a monkey ... The epigraph is from the 150th Psalm: 'Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.' There are other kinds of allusion besides such obvious literary ones. Mark Abley, in his poem 'The View of Delft,' from Blue Sand, Blue Moon, makes what must be a conscious allusion to Remembrance Day services, and perhaps to the opening of the seventh seal in Revelation. After a disastrous explosion, 'All over Delft the dogs and birds / kept silent for a minute, / as though respectful of the dead.' Louis Dudek brings the abstraction, beauty, to life with a forthright simile, in his long poem Atlantis. 'Even the dirt is necessary. / It's some kind of beauty in ruin, / like a falling rose.' The contrast presented in the lines, their unpretentious rhythm and the reverberations of...

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