Poetry

288 THE UNIVERS1TY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY I. POETRY E.K.BROWN Last year it was with Mr Pratt's Brebeuf and His Brethren1 that the survey of Poetry began. No one will dispute the claim of his Dunkirk to the place -of honour this year. Dunkirk is not one of his principal works; it takes its place rather as a brilliant experiment which suggests widening and deepening power and points to something in the future grander and bigger than itself. It is doubtful, however, if in the whole history of our poetry any volume has had so wide a distribution and such an immediate effect. From the popular recognition that the poem has had it would be foolish to deduce that our poetic taste has improved: verses about the wistaria by the verandah, and the moon through the pines, and violet eyes, are as likely as ever to win places in scrap-books-and poetic competitions -closed to Mr A. J. M. Smith and Mr Abraham Klein. Still, it may be hoped that a poem read often for purely extraliterary reasons may bring some of its readers to a purer taste. It may be hoped that they will be affected for longer than a moment by such lines as: Children of oaths and madrigals.•• If pierced they do not feel the cut, And if they die, they do not suffer death. In the former, a summing up of the English .people, Mr Pratt has quietly achieved one of those jarring juxtapositions which give one of its principal beauties to modern verse; and in the latter, with equal quietness, he ends a passage in which, after a rough mass of mechanical terms, he voices the feeling of desperate men pitted against the panzers, a feeling in which awe and infinite fatigue blend with an inarticulate questioning of the essential nature of things. The subject was perfect for the poet. His preoccupation with the huge and powerful, with great ships and great primeval beasts, makes him sensitive to the force of German machines. His evergrowing sympathy with man, which has given to his recent works a sense for the tragic formerly lacking to his approach, enables him to communicate pity and terror together, in the section where the English wait helpless on the beaches. The savoury incon.gruities of human contacts abound as the makeshift flotillas of rescue set out from the English shore. The reader remembers the passages in 1The Governor-General's medal for poetry was awarded t~ this work, and seldom has a committee's decision been so obviously right. LETTERS IN CANADA: 1941 289 The Titanic which described the life on that ship just before the iceberg crashed into her; but in Dunkirk there is a sharper naturalism in the dialogue and in the brief descriptive comments, and there is a frankly comic quality·in the rhymes. The comment made last year that in Brebeuf Mr Pratt held his comic and ·humorous powers in restraint does not apply to Dunkirk1 in which humour and tragedy> the heroic and the pathetic jostle one another with rugged effectiveness. The final note is, as always with Mr Pratt, the heroic. The sea becomes a deus ex machina; fog and fleet combine to rescue those who had appeared irreclaimably lost. After the varied excitements of the piece a calm ·sets in with the fog; the worn-out men, the motley ships, move in silence towards the white shores, up the hidden harbours and the quiet rivers. The calm is not one of exhaustion: it is the calm following upon triumph. As one reads the last lines, different as they are in rhythm and diction from the close of Brebeuj, -it is of that noble epilogue that one thinks, with its perfect final line: And prayers ascend, and the Holy Bread is broken. II In 1941, far more than in 1940, the theme of the war was running through our poetry: the increased emphasis shows how closely and quickly Canadian poetry catches the surface, and some of the depth, of. Canadian life. After Dunkirk the most impressive of the poems related to the conflict was Mr Ralph Gustafson's Epithalamium in Time of...