Birthright to the Sea: Some Poems of E. J. Pratt

You have accorded me a great privilege in inviting me to give the seventh lecture in honour of E. J. Pratt: I admire him as a man and admire his writing, and welcome this opportunity of saying so.  I also want to thank you for the generous hospitality you have shown me on this visit, and particularly for the pleasure of spending a few days here after an absence of almost thirty years.  To be able to look out to sea across the harbour entrance and go about the country a little and be able to listen to the inflections of Newfoundland speech – all this has called back many memories that I cherish of ships and ship-mates; and I think especially of a ship named Spikenard.

This occasion also allows me to acknowledge in his home port an act of hospitable generosity that Ned Pratt did for me and my son some years ago.  In the early fall of 1962 Christopher had just turned thirteen; he was a member of the ship’s company of the Kingston-built brigantine St Lawrence II and already showed himself well able to hand and reef and haul.  I gave him a copy of the Collected Poems and posted it to Pratt in Toronto asking him to inscribe it, on the pretext that Christopher was also named Gilbert, to honour his descent (on my mother’s side of the family) from the Humphrey Gilbert who in September 1583 ‘was devoured and swallowed up of the sea’ in the Squirrel of ten tons at night in a tempest off the Azores.  After several weeks the book came back inscribed, ‘For Christopher Gilbert whose name is in the noble tradition of the sea.  E. J. Pratt.’  Soon afterwards I heard that Ned Pratt had just died after a long illness.

Pratt knew me only from one or two casual meetings at Queen’s University when he taught summer school there.  My request based on the affinity with Humphrey Gilbert must have touched him in that resonant order of memory that enfolds this New-Found Land.  For ‘the noble tradition of the sea’ that is ravelled up in this island reaches back to embrace not only the unnamed voyagers and fishermen before Cabot, and Gilbert’s first ‘plantation’ here, and the loneliness of the people left behind for the winter when the summer West countrymen turned homeward; but also – like the track of the cachalot – most of the globe and almost its two poles.  For James Cook, who charted with a few hands the whole coast of Newfoundland and part of Labrador too, and wrote Sailing Directions that still guide mariners in these waters, after that went by way of the Horn to Tahiti and then to chart the coast of New Zealand and part of Australia.  On his second voyage around the world he was sent to search for an ill-surmised Southern Continent; and, finding for certain that no such continent existed, three times crossed the Antarctic Circle trying in ships ill-found for the purpose to penetrate the South Ice in search of the polar continent that he was sure must be there.  After their return from that second voyage his principal astronomer, William Wales, was appointed head of the Navigation School at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, and so came to teach mathematics to Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt and Coleridge, and unwittingly left his mark on ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in the lines

                        And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

                        As green as emerald.

No doubt Cook, who was much troubled by the need to find names for the many islands and capes and bays and anchorages that he discovered – in the Pacific, on the west coast of America, and on his attempt to make an easterly traverse of the North-West Passage – carried with him many of the sweet names from this island – Quidi Vidi, Come-by-Chance, Heart’s Content, Heart’s Delight; perhaps some of the names imprinted in Pratt’s life too – Twillingate, Bell Island, Portugal Cove; and surely St John’s, a mean ironbound slot for a navigator to find in foul weather or in bad visibility, yet a snug haven for so many ships in the long struggle with the dangers of the North Atlantic and ‘the violence of the enemy’ that ‘Newfy-John’s’ was a name as much to be conjured with as the Murmansk Run or the Rose Garden, but for very different reasons, being a reminder of the hospitality given by the people whose men are recalled by the foreign name Beaumont Hamel, the men whom this university is a memorial.

It has been said that poetry is made out of poetry.  In a sense, I suppose, that is true: all poetry is somehow a transformation – a transfiguration, it may be – of something into words, and a poet is not likely to get the transformation right if he hasn’t learned from other poets that it can be done and how it may be done: if he hasn’t found out how language – like a ship – once set in motion, has a will of its own and has to be treated with circumspection.  But what is transformed is not poetry, but the feel of life in any of its multitudinous forms, from the visionary exaltation of the mystic to the last incoherence of love inundating the dykes of reason, or grief breaking at the last defences of the heart.  ‘Experience of life,’ or something like it, is the source of poetry: not ‘experience’ in any ordinary sense, for simply to have been there does not make a poet; but harbouring in the mind, in an immediate and sensory manner, the feel of whatever with a certain memorable imprint may have befallen.

I wish to search out a little the specific quality of Pratt’s poetry where it is of greatest intensity and of most complex human and emotional implication.  What gives definition and force to poems is not so much the subject-matter (which is always recurring in any case); but something intrinsic, with its roots in what has been experienced to the bone, its fiber in the taste of the words and names caught up in the events.  For Pratt that was the sea – or, as a Newfoundlander would say, saltwater.^[i]

Ned Pratt lived the first twenty years or more of his life within sight and sound of saltwater, in little communities whose life was the sea, among people for whom the codfish, salmon, lobster, seal, swordfish and whale were creatures of great moment, and the sea a pervasive presence often (like the beating of the heart) below the threshold of awareness: the source of bounty, yet wielding the iron scourge of forces beyond prediction or control, bringing at times the ferocious inexorabilities of storm, ice and fog, and the hallucinations of physical extremity.  Here Pratt would see and touch hands scarred and gnarled from setting hooks, hauling lines, splicing rigging, mending nets, handing kutched storm canvas.  Here he would be among men who could judge the last mortal moment to shorten sail, by how many cables to risk a leeshore, by how many minutes more the top-burden of ice in the upperworks could be endured before taking the enormous hazard of altering downwind.  Young men too, as Cook was a young man on the Newfoundland coast, young at the Barrier Reef, and in the South Ice.  Put a seaman in a duffle-coat and woollen cap and by the end of a dirty middle watch you could find it hard to say whether he was eighteen or thirty or sixty.  Hence in the speech a slow laconic merriment carrying in its body the exact marks of its inheritance, and a certain look to eyes accustomed to scan the horizon, to evolve from slender evidence the gambits of a storm, or piece together the clues of a deceptive landfall.  And the counter-thread of the abrupt transition from the feel of a ship or boat at sea to the feel of her in harbour: the feel of being ashore – another world, domestic, trivial, precious, importunate with its own necessities; secure but for the subliminal recognitions that pluck at a wary instinct at the turn of the tide or a change in the wind’s voice.  And, like a groundswell lifting unseen in the dark, there was in any village one probability to be lived with: that one night, one dawn, it would be known for certain that some man – husband, son, brother – would never come again to lift the latch of the door; and perhaps, by grace, those who loved him would never see what indignity the sea can work upon the body of a drowned man.

That Pratt wrote some good poems about the sea is acknowledged by all who have written about him.  But in what has been written I do not find much firsthand recognition of what Pratt himself so often catches in words: the indifferent beauty and menace of what Dante (no seafarer) called ‘il crudele mar’, and the arcane idiom that is as much of the physique of seafaring as the feel of hemp or frozen canvas is, of the lift of the forefoot to a breaking sea.  This is the ‘unnavigated road’ in criticism that I wish to venture – who can say ‘By what navigator’s sign, / By what vicarious starlight?’  I believe it can provide a baseline for triangulating certain distinctive aspects of the whole body of his work.

Pratt had not himself done very much seafaring; he had not ventured as supercargo in a cockleshell to the Azores as John Donne did, was not a fisherman, had not commanded square-rigged ships as Conrad did, or shipped before the mast like as Melville and Masefield did.  But as a young man he had hauled lines and lobster-pots and had known his moments of anxiety and sheer terror with fog, tide and storm, and knew at first hand much more about salt water than either Coleridge or Gerard Manley Hopkins, both of whom wrote sea-poems that are without peer in the language.  He knew what if felt like for the sea to be an inescapable dimension of life; and, whatever his ‘actual’ experience, it was amplified and given imaginative substance by the speech of the fishermen and the stories they told him in the ancient and arcane idiom peculiar to that way of life.  The liturgy of sea-language and the inflections given to ordinary speech by seafaring – a ‘laconic speech, close-fitting, clean, / And whittled to the ship’s economy’ – that too was part of the actual ‘experience,’ supervening upon and giving edge and body to what the records show or what the witnesses can tell to those who were not present.  What we are looking for is the feel of events, what lies under and beyond the reticent and factual account, what – to use Pratt’s own phrase – lies ‘behind the log’.  That, for a poet, is what – with luck – may claim access to a universal reality.

‘Only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis’ – under the figure of eternity.  The subject-matter does not usually tell us very clearly what is ‘actually loved and known’.  Poetry does not move typically from a subject to the tendering of it, but from a complex feeling that seeks a body, that finds for itself, as a ‘subject’, a physical mode in which the feeling can be articulated in a field of events or discourse proper to it.  When we are asleep, physical sensations embody themselves into visual dramas that so command the sleeper’s attention that he stays asleep to watch the picture.  The same for poetry, a sort of dreamwork; and surely this is the case whether it is Hopkins reading accounts of a shipwreck in the Thames estuary and finding there the body for ‘the echo of a new rhythm’ that ‘I had long had haunting my ear,’ or Milton pondering for years what substance to give to the impulse that he knew had the scope of epic or tragedy, or Rilke waiting in terror for the last of the Duino Elegies to get themselves all made (after the first few) so that the arc of his premonition could be brought to rest.  The impulses – the themes – are few, central and importunate; the subjects manifold.  We come to the heart of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets not by studying mediaeval cosmogonies or scholastic angelology, but by reflecting upon the complex and baffling disorder of love human and divine; and the fact that many of his poems were literary exercises in long-established modes enlarges, rather than diminishes, the ‘reality’ of what he wrote.

Too often we forget the necessary bond between poetry and life – the bond that Aristotle, to our dismay, called mimesis – and, supposing that ‘life’ of the quality that informs durable poetry is easy to come by and that any sort of ‘life’ will serve,  may be surprised to find that the poetry that comes from a ‘real life’ that is empty, diseased or self-preoccupied may well be trivial, pretentious or merely indulgent.  Too often, too, we forget that nobody is likely to be a poet unless he is fascinated with the business of making poems, the logodaedaly, the bold carpentry of song, the fine craft and subtle management of words that depends upon reconciling what is known and wanted with the upwelling of what is at best half-known and beyond bidding, the just correlation of intelligence, habit, concern, will, desire, restraint into a gesture as simple and arrogant as riding a bicycle no-hands (when you know how).

To find the main springs of an author’s work we need to look beyond the subject-matter to consider what, in the field of poetry itself, the poet knew and loved and therefore what in-formed his poems.  In Pratt’s case this is very clear: a taste for a good story well told in the best traditions of the spellbinding storyteller (traditions as old as Homer); a taste for large elemental themes that seldom declare themselves in contemporary events; a boisterous love of words and a taste for the constrained forms of verse that can throw single words into high relief and abrupt interaction; an insatiable taste for technicalities and names – archaeological, electronic – as though these were elements in which could be found the muscle and the detailed articulation of the body of a work by drawing upon a wide range of effects from the hard microscopic precision of the technical term that belongs only in one limited context to the evocative sonority of names of places and mythical persons delivered in liturgical sequence.

In this short list of Pratt’s preoccupations the love of technical terms (noticed as a unique and distinguishing mark of his poetic mentality by everybody who has written about him) may seem out of place, even disruptive of what one might expect of high poetic practice; yet not if those terms are inseparable from the field of what he knows and loves.  (To my ear the most memorable and lyrical passage in the noble but over-scholarised yarn Moby Dick is the detailed account of how you flake down and manage a harpoon-line in an open boat.)  Pratt’s grasp of some of the technicalities he brings into play is variable: his love of them never is.  And there is, I think, a very clear connetion between his fascination with technical detail and his sense of certain primordial imperatives as vital and frightening presences in our lives.  The imagined forces that compel the prehistoric monster, the giant squid, the sperm whale, the migratory bird – these are refracted and intrinsicated in the named intricacies of the machines and devices that we ‘poor forkèd creatures’ contrive as extensions to the pathetic range of hands that can reach out only a score or two of inches from our bodies; and the intricacies impose their own menacing imperatives.

When I consider the unfolding of Pratt’s work and the scope of it, it seems to me that his ‘birthright to the sea’ became in his earliest years so deeply a part of his nature that his removal to Toronto, and his life there, were like a long run ashore from which he never returned.  The detailed circumstances of the villages and havens and harbours moved farther and farther away from his day-to-day consciousness; he did not run away to sea; service in the war was denied him.  Yet always in the darkness of memory, uncalled, the exact feel of salt water kept coming back to haunt him, ‘as life returns upon the drowned’ – in a sudden stillness perhaps, or in an iron savour under the tongue – and would find for itself a body in verse, even when the verse was about something else.  When the ‘experience’ was closest to him, his mastery of verse was not sure-footed enough always to render with complete certainty the feel of the thing.  As the mastery increased and the actual experience receded and other concerns about his craft supervened, he knew that poetry can call forth universal recognitions only through the exact rendering of particulars; he nourished and reinforced the ambience of earlier sensation with a detailed study of ships he has never served in and events which he had not had the privilege of suffering.  He had left the salt water and discovered the sea.[ii]

The poems that take the sea as their setting fall into three kinds: (I) poems that engage directly the way of life of fishermen and their people, a life divided between salt water and the land, the two parts bound together – mostly in the minds and lives of women – by the foreboding menace of the sea; (2) poems that recount memorable events at sea; (3) fables, in which sea-creatures are depicted and celebrated with enormous zest and admiration, as though they alone were proper to the primordial life-giving ocean – men and ships being trifling intruders, their presence impertinent or obscene and supported by a thread whimsically slender.  To the first group many of the early lyrical poems of 1923 belong, and even more memorably a few of the last lyrics.  To the second, the early account of a disastrous sealing-expedition – ‘The Ice Floes’ (1923) – and (in order of publication) ‘The Roosevelt and the Antinoe’ (1930),  ‘The Titanic’ (1935) and ‘Behind the Log’ (1947); perhaps ‘Dunkirk’ (1941) was meant to belong with these.  The class of fables, however, proved especially fertile.  In ‘The Cachalot’ (1926) he discovered his individual style; and that undersea epithalamial fantasy ‘The Witches’ Brew’ (1925) laid massive foundations for the Extravaganzas and also provided the procedural armature for the larger narratives.  With the fables belong also (for example) ‘The Submarine’ (1943), and the enfolding theme of ‘The Titanic’, and that potent but unmaritime poem ‘The 6000’.  ‘The Iron Door’ (1927), one of the few of his poems to be informed by profound personal grief, stands in a transitional position: published after ‘The Cachalot’ but presumably composed earlier, it is still dominantly in the early Newfoundland mode, having in it elements of the salt water lyric and of notable events at sea, and it prefigures some of his most powerful devices of allusion; but – perhaps under the pressure of personal emotion – the elements are ill assimilated into the cloudy and portentous rhetoric that may have been part of his inherited understanding of what an ‘ode’, as a poem of strong feeling, could be expected to be.

If we approach Pratt’s poetry looking for the specific and determinate qualities of the man and his work we do well to set about it in the way we infer the character of a ship by studying the configuration of her hull.  It’s no help to be thinking of Donne, or Hopkins, or Coleridge, or Pound, or Yeats – or even Eliot (who did know a thing or two about offshore sailing).  It is no help to claim for his poetry a refined or penetrating intelligence, a subtle insight into the ways of the heart or the textures of society.  It is not to his discredit to say that he is no more philosopher than lyrist, the spiritual anguish and the desolations and passion of the saint are outside his compass.  His true virtues are other, and (I think) less commonly to be seen in the tradition of our literature.  The sea is immensely powerful but it has some limits: the sea did not make a poet of James Cook, or a philosopher of Humphrey Gilbert, or a saint of Sebastian Cabot.

My threefold classification is indicative, not complete.  But I am sure that any typology of Pratt’s poems needs to take account less of subject-matter and overt theme than of verbal tone and articulation.  It seems to me that there are very few of his poems that do not fall within one of these three kinds, or on the functional fringes of one or more of them.  His two largest stories – epics, it may be – deal with large-scale episodes in the history of Canada: ‘Brébeuf and his Brethren’ (1940) on the fate of the Jesuits who sought to bring the Catholic faith into the lives of native Indians; and ‘Towards the Last Spike’ (1952) on the overmastering of geographical, financial and human improbabilities in order to unite the country with a railroad.  Both these historical narratives, like the sea-narratives, serve to evince certain radical human qualities of an exceptional order – heroism and indomitability.  In ‘Brébeuf’ he appreciates the zeal, endurance, appalling suffering of his central figure, but he cannot enter into the obsessive spiritual passion of Brébeuf, has a less secure imaginative understanding of the impulse of martyrdom than (say) Crashaw in his monologue portrait of St Teresa in ‘The Flaming Heart’.  In the story of the transcontinental railroad (a theme since vulgarised) there are heroes sure enough, but they are the engineers, surveyors and workers; for all his good intentions, Pratt finds it difficult to ascribe grandeur to the politicians and financiers but for whom there would have been no incidental heroism.  He assumes a good Ontario admiration for the self-made man, the shrewd politician, the ruthless tycoon, but he has too active a sense of humour to have much enthusiasm for that part of his theme.  He is unassimilably a Newfoundlander; and it’s my guess that it will be a very long time before Newfoundland merges into the grey and groping materialism that seems to be the fate of Canada between wars.

Those two poems are anomalies in the canon – splendid, confident and impressive, yet drifting away from his home center.  As we trace the development of his work we can see how vulnerable his poetic resources were – as indeed all poetic capacity is, depending for its good health always as it always does upon a certain innocence of intent.  As time went on – and we see this in the long narrative poems – the subject began to dominate the impulse, the argument began to stand in for the themes that at best had flowed in from the darkness; technical intricacies could become ornament, cadenzas, providing at times – and this had always been a temptation – an opportunity for a dazzling performance.  He seeks subjects that will embody large themes, and the authority of events is taken to lie in their factuality, down to the last discoverable detail, rather than in the quality of perceiving them or the way by selection and arrangement they are transfigured.  In these conditions, critical judgments based on subject and theme find a specious and deceptive reliability at the cost of neglecting the less accessible heart of the matter.

The Extravaganzas, however, for all their apparent variety and their restraint from openly serious intent, lie very close to home.  In these he sets vibrating a string of peculiar timbre, a sound of distinctive potency.  This is the quality most easily recognisable when he deals with ships and their people and the creatures that live in the sea; it always touches upon the nerve of what is most personal in his work, calling forth like a primordial memory the sense of a baffling cosmic order and a noble vision of man.

‘The Great Feud’ (1926), a palaeological fantasy not innocent of marine and oceanic concerns, is as long as ‘The Titanic’ was to be, but faster paced and written in a shorter breath-length; and ‘The Witches’ Brew’ is emphatically submarine.  But ‘The Depression Ends’ (1927) and ‘The Truant’ (1943), though they have nothing maritime about them at all, declare the indomitable dignity of man and the grace of a large generosity that we know Pratt practised and that he regarded as one of the distinctive virtues of the seafaring man.  These poems of fancy are gratuitous and guileless outpourings of exuberant language and fertile wit.  They are the work of a practised raconteur who can hold an audience spellbound with Rabelais’s cumulativeness and Grock’s insolence; they have the sheer copiousness of genius.  In these poems particularly he discovers a favourite measure in the rhymed tetrameter and achieves his most consistent mastery in it.  Once this measure is comfortable to his ear, he can sustain below a sparkling and often comic surface a flickering undercurrent of sharp-edged irony; at times, especially in ‘The Depression Ends’, it becomes an instrument of pure delight.  Here there is nothing nautical except the sheer daring of it: as the wording unfolds it can hover between bathos and meiosis with as complete composure as Blondin frying himself an egg on a tightrope halfway across Niagara Falls.

Very few of Pratt’s poems are in any ordinary sense ‘personal’; ‘The Empty Room’ (1937) is, to my ear, a muted exception.  There were some things he preferred not to set to verse.  Most often, as he approaches (for he seldom embraces) a theme close to his own life – love, wife, children, companionship – the feeling is not bodied forth directly but is refracted into another mode – into fancy, or literary allusion, or figurative conceit.  ‘The Iron Door’ (1927), which we know belonged to an event of personal desolation, is an early instance of this process; elsewhere he draws more confidently upon his untiring love of the extended or fanciful parallel, the broad conspective glance into a sweep of geographical possibilities, or into history, whether literary, geological, anthropological, biological, human, technological.  In ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter’ (1937), the literary-classical fantasy that makes up at least half the poem sets the emotional dimension for this most delightful of poems – a little in the manner of Yeats but less trenchant.  Here there is nothing confessional and the intimacy of it is in its delicate restraint.  ‘Come Away, Death’ (1943), by contrast, seems to hover on the fringes of some more personal disclosure, but even the intended allusiveness of it is blurred by its elaborately literate opening section.  Among the few open declarations of personal feeling – in ‘To Angelina, an Old Nurse’ (1932) or ‘A Reverie on a Dog’ (1932) – we find the only touches of sentimentality, the feeling not rendered with definitive accuracy; if there is failure in the wording of it, it must be that out of unguarded open-heartedness he has been less wary than he usually is in securing the distance that self-contained poetry seems always to demand; and both were left out of the second edition of Collected Poems.

There are very few persons in his poems, but there are many human figures with names; these are often figures of heroic stature of mien, emblems of certain root-like human qualities – the silent dignity of those who suffer and know no comfort, of those who – like the ship’s captains – live in the solitude of their skilled and mortal destiny.  Yet in these poems the emotional light seldom darkens, because of the continuous presence of the man who speaks, the poet himself – variously puckish, ironic, exuberant, of a dionysiac and generous temperament this side of brawling, of a deep compassionate sympathy, yet learned in the high-spirited way of a person who searches the encyclopaedia like a jackdaw.  I think Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land and David Jones’s Anathemata could have been favourite books of his.

In poetry every gain in clarity and direction is won at the expense of some preclusive loss.  No poet can do everything, and it is often what a poet does not attempt (for whatever reason) that gives distinction to what he does do.  Pratt’s dominant vision is of man in a heroic mold, enfolded in a lost memory of past happenings and past imperatives that reach back to the beginnings of unrecorded time.  His vision tends naturally to hold in single compass all time, all events, all creatures, all circumstances.  But how can one embody such a view?  Pratt found it, on the whole, not in the condensed economy of the lyric, but in the largeness of epic narrative; he would invent a story that disposed the universal elements as he wanted them, or would take an actual story and from that firm center of fact elaborate the figurative parentheses that often impart the true momentum to his verse and the compelling theme of the story.  The origins and voyagings of a whale call up the origins of other creatures and the voyagings of explorers and of those who go about the ocean on their ‘lawful occasions’; creatures and geological objects – an iceberg, a headland, a reef, the sea itself – assume human character and even a quasi-human history; and (as is the way of fable) men and women can assume the characteristics of animals (the contemptuous rejection of a challenge is the same for the big dog and the strong man); and ships take on the subtle characters of women and sometimes the tough endurance of men, are their own persons and change the men that serve them to their own character.  Machines and great engineering-constructions are for Pratt not things of an order different from or contrary to men, but extensions of them, projections of man’s capacities and senses, instruments too that affirm, and often betray, the delight or desire or pride of the man who devise them.  (Hence the ease with which Pratt introduces machines and technicalities; unlike the pylons that megawatt across the landscape of indignant early Marxist English verse, they are indigenous to the universe of his imagination.)  He can see the whale as a marvellous piece of engineering, the submarine as a biological masterpiece, the steam locomotive as an apocalyptic bull its sense of purpose blindly but beautifully disposed, the Titanic as a vast organism wired for life – and death.  Fishermen and seafaring men bear in their faces and in their eyes the imprint of the swift inexorable decisions that the sea lays upon them, and the marks of the losses that by an unaccountable irony they suffer: and women bear in their faces the imprint of their uttermost desolations.  Human suffering can be represented as a geological or glacial event that obliterates a person’s features.

Even in most of the Extravaganzas – poems primarily exploring the limits of sustained fancy – Pratt conveys a sense of single events of extreme intensity that open our gaze, if only for a moment, to our fellowship with an order of life that is inevitably shaped by our past on this planet, by things that we were and that happened to us long before we received the definition that could even remotely be called ‘human’.  ‘The Shark’, a very early poem, is an imagist poem in motion, the motion being a premonitory gesture unexplained; and it may be that that single vision, standing simply for what it is, is more potent in implication than the later rhetorical identification of a submarine with a shark – an identity that works only for one side in the conflict, when we forget about submariners and their ways on either party.  ‘Silences’ is about hatred; yet the most memorable image of that memorable poem is the closing glimpse of the undersea:

For only such culture could grow in a climate of silence, –

Away back before the emergence of fur or feather, back to the unvocal

            sea and down deep where the darkness spills its wash on the threshold

            of light, where the lids never close upon the eyes, where the inhabitants

            slay in silence and are as silently slain.

The sea is the commanding presence in Pratt’s poetry and in his mind, symbolising life and death, standing for an inscrutable primitive value, like the salt carried ashore in the blood long before the evolution of primates and still persisting, a fact of life that leaves indelible marks if we embrace it, and brings us to betrayal if we renounce it.

The figure that haunts the earliest collection, Newfoundland Verse (1923), is the drowned man.  In ‘Lantern Light’,

                        I could not paint nor could I draw

                           The look that searched the night;

                        The bleak refinement of the face I saw

                           In lantern light.

                        A cunning hand might seize the crag,

                           Or stay the flight of a gull,

                        Or the rocket’s flash; or more – the lightning jag

                           That lit the hull.

                        But as a man born blind must steal

                           His colours from the night

                        By hand, I had to touch that face to feel

                           It marble white.

The point of the poem is the horrifying tactile sense of the fact of death; the point would perhaps have been made more forcefully – certainly more laconically and with no loss of directness – by omitting the second stanza.  But the allusiveness is an aspect of reticence, a direct function of the strength of feeling, the intolerable shock of stunned incredulity.  In ‘The Drag Irons’, on the indignity of death by drowning, he was to make the same point by a different sort of obliquity – through sardonic wit, epigrammatic detachment, a touch of racy dialect.

                        He who had learned for thirty years to ride

                        The seas and storms in punt and skiff and brig,

                        Would hardly scorn to take before he died

                        His final lap in Neptune’s whirligig.

                        But with his Captain’s blood he did resent,

                        With livid silence and with glassy look,

                        This fishy treatment when his eyes were spent –

                        To come up dead upon a grapnel hook.

In the same volume, Many Moods (1932), he crystallised in final form a theme that he had several times ventured before and that he would never leave: the wound that sudden death at sea inflicts upon the person most intimately connected with him.  The final image – the face as rock suddenly stricken with a geological process that should be infinitesimally slow – appears and reappears in many other settings; it is the sort of change that only human beings can suffer; the iceberg that sank the Titanic is too brutal to suffer such a change.

                                                               EROSION

                                                It took the sea a thousand years,

                                                A thousand years to trace

                                                The granite features of this cliff,

                                                In crag and scarp and base.

                                                It took the sea an hour one night,

                                                An hour of storm to place

                                                The sculpture of these granite seams

                                                Upon a woman’s face.

In a very early poem we see the same instant recognition of disaster from within: that from this moment, nothing – not the wind, not even the hand of God – can ‘lift a door-latch up / That a lad may enter in’ (‘Great Tides’).  Underneath the brutality of fact is a hint of the mockery of sunlight and quiet water when the murderous storm has died down.  The truth is inscrutable; it cannot be seen; perhaps it can be grasped in the way a blind man knows.

                                    I wondered by what navigator’s sign,

                                    By what vicarious starlight, you could trace

                                    Horizons which were never yours nor mine,

                                    Until your wistful fingers sought my face.

                                                                                                (‘Blind’)

In ‘The Titanic’ and ‘Behind the Log’ a dense accumulation of actual detail is an essential element in the construction.  There are, I feel, defects of judgment in the disposition of the episodic masses in both these poems, and in ‘Behind the Log’ the naval detail is not fully enough assimilated to consort justly with the precision and eloquence of naval dialect; in both poems – as more noticeably in ‘Dunkirk’ – there are a few dismaying touches of the journalist’s superficial rhetoric, in the choice of personal names and in the idiom of class-inflected dialogue; this may be from expecting too amiable or impressionable an audience.  Nevertheless, both poems have passages remarkable for their precise rendering of the way of the sea – remarkable, that is, not simply for descriptive accuracy but for their symbolic embodying of the feel of the thing.  This quality was present in some of the earliest poems.  Consider the fog in the poem of that name in Newfoundland Verse, already ingenious and grimly playful:

                                    It stole in on us like a foot-pad,

                                    Somewhere out of the sea and air,

                                    Heavy with rifling Polaris

                                    And the Seven Stars.

                                    It left our eyes untouched,

                                    But took our sight,

                                    And then,

                                    Silently,

                                    It drew the song from our throats,

                                    And the supple bend from our ash-blades;

                                    For the bandit,

                                    With occult fingering,

                                    Had tangled up

                                    The four threads of the compass,

                                    And fouled the snarl around our dory.

In a much later poem – ‘The Radio in the Ivory Tower’ (1943) – the sea and fog are a single pervasive presence in the lighthouse.

            But only ferrets of sound

            Came out of the fog

            To worm themselves through the cracks in the cobbles.

            The waters leaped at the splayed bastions –

            The might of the waters

            Against the strength of the steel –

            But only the dull reverberation of their paws

            Disturbed the insulation of the tower;

            Only the faintest echoes seeped through the copper roof

            As the gulls screamed around the weather-vane.

In ‘Behind the Log’ three Irish hands in a merchantman would, he says, have plenty to say about the action of the doomed convoy when their ship made port –

                                    but somehow

                        The water and the salt got in their throats

                        The moment when the Stargard took them under.

In ‘The Titanic’, Pratt’s words at times have the clarity of an obsessive nightmare – as when the sea is inexorably invading the vitals of the huge ship and the indolent water laps in darkness up the long sloping foredeck:

                        The fo’c’sle had gone under the creep

                        Of the water.  Though without a wind, a lop

                        Was forming on the wells now fathoms deep.

                        The seventy feet – the boat deck’s normal drop –

                        Was down to ten.  Rising, falling, and waiting,

                        Rising again, the swell that edged and curled.

                        Around the second bridge, over the top

                        Of the air-shafts, backed, resurged and whirled

                        Into the stokehold through the fiddley grating.

At the end of that poem, the ominous precision that has embraced the stricken ship and her people in their long passion drifts with no sense of transition outward to the occasion of the disaster – the iceberg, as brutal as the sea itself, being of the sea’s nature, without history, brainless, inscrutable, inert, powerful beyond imagining.

                                    And out there in the starlight, with no trace

                                    Upon it of its deed but the last wave

                                    From the Titanic fretting at its base,

                                    Silent, composed, ringed by its icy broods,

                                    The grey shape with the paleolithic face

                                    Was still the master of the longitudes.

In ‘The Titanic’, however, Pratt may have ventured too daringly in trying to combine the overt moral of ‘the ancient hybris in the dreams of men’ with the copious records of circumstantial detail that has survived.  Perhaps he had moved a little too far from the looms of the ash-blades to a theme oceanic, social, cosmopolitan.  For in this poem the sea – the omen to which his pulse always stirs, as Vaughan Williams’s did to the tune of Dives and Lazarus – the sea has lost definitive control and other concerns have supervened: not least his fascination with technical minutiae – in which, paradoxically, his strength lies – and with his sheer astonishment at some of the things that actually happened and are of record.

If much of the strength of his poetry lies in a certain disarming naïveté, both intellectual and technical, so also there is a source of weakness in his failure at times to master the dramatic order of language and its disposition in psychic space as distinct from the dramatic order of events.  For example, in the impressive early narrative poem The Ice Floes – in many respects a unique piece of ‘polar’ writing, set to a tune so compelling that it can even submerge the nagging demands of dactylic verse – he devotes nineteen lines to an account of the ‘bobbing-holes’ of the seals – that is, almost as much as to the killing of the seals, and a quarter as much as the final disastrous dénouement of the blizzard.  What does a poet do with what he knows?  How can he make special knowledge as familiar and accessible to the novice as to the old hand?  Poets are by nature not detached and uninformed spectators, but ‘insiders’; in the end, in the poem, everything must be ‘inside’, known to the marrow and so below the threshold of recognition.  In the matter of the bobbing-holes, Pratt’s passionate curiosity overrides the cognitive inwardness that elsewhere marks the poem, and tempts him into digressive elaboration.  So it is in the fantasy of the wireless waves in ‘The Roosevelt and the Antinoe’ and in the shorthand history of acoustics that supports the Asdic set in ‘Behind the Log’.  I think of Masefield’s ‘Dauber’, a marvel of nautical precision, the whole naming and working of a four-masted barque coming to his call as simple as a breath, as direct as an oath, and none of it explained.  Once there is any loss of precision an infective rhetoric may enter.  In ‘The Titanic’ a ‘knot’ sometimes becomes a measure of distance, not of speed; in ‘The Submarine’ the search is carried out and the attack conducted in a manner that would surely bring the submariners home with their torpedoes unexpended; in ‘The Cachalot’ (in which a touch of exaggeration may be venial) there is a whaling-ship that crosses royals and sky-sails, and she sets studding-sails to sail ten miles in pursuit of a whale.  Minor flaws, no doubt; yet true poetry is nothing if not an instrument of verniered and infinitesimal precision.

The outstanding sea-poem, to my mind, is ‘The Roosevelt and the Antinoe’.  As in ‘The Titanic’ there may be a little awkwardness in setting the action in motion; since there is no need, as in ‘The Titanic’, to dispose resources for ‘a study in irony – the web of Fate,’ a swifter entrance would have helped.  But, once the elements of the story are set, the whole thing moves with an ineluctable and compelling fascination to give an account of the sea at its most merciless, and of what is demanded of men who ‘go down to the sea in ships’.  Especially, he calls forth his dominant figure of man as coming to his full stature (master or man) in the face of death, matching himself with physical courage and endurance to what is inevitable by drawing upon that ‘unexplored residuum’, ‘the bone-and-marrow judgment of a sailor’.

                                    The final manner native to the breed

                                    Of men forging decision into deed –

                                    Of getting down again into the sea,

                                    And testing rowlocks in an open boat,

                                    Of grappling with the storm-king bodily,

                                    And placing Northern fingers on his throat.

The Roosevelt, hearing the Antinoe’s interrupted called of distress in the hurricane, finds her, against all odds and reason,

                                    With Jack reversed, the freighter like a lone

                                    Sea-mallard with a broken wing was seen

                                    Ahead, lee-rail awash, taking it green

                                    At the bow.

With judgment and resolution beyond human limits, and at mortal risk, the Roosevelt maintains contact with the Antinoe; for, when life is at issue, the sea recognises no limit to the call of duty.  After four days of struggle, in which the Roosevelt loses some of her own men, all the Antinoe’s people are finally taken aboard and the sinking ship abandoned.  The survivors find themselves

                        Where men are shepherded in the old way

                        Of the sea, where drowned men come to life, they say,

                        Under such calls to breathe as never come

                        To those that roam the uplands of this earth.

If it can be difficult to begin a poem, it can be just as difficult to end it.  This one ends with a brief cadence that restores the rhythm of life and sanity.  The survivors are put ashore at the nearest harbour, and the Roosevelt

                        Swung out the Sound, with her day’s work well done,

                        And in an hour was on the Channel sea.[iii]

The mind arches back, through the recovery of the Antinoe’s people to the figure of the drowned man, and another poem lamenting the loss of a proud ship and her people – Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Eurydice’.

                                                O his nimble finger, his gnarled grip!

                                                Leagues, leagues of seamanship

                                                   Slumber in these forsaken

                                                Bones, this sinew, and will not waken.

The theme of nautical virtue, undemonstrative in its recognition of a shared nature and a shared fate, Pratt embodied in ‘The Roosevelt and the Antinoe’.  He was to utter it again but in a different mode, in one of the last poems he wrote, a poem in which he celebrates the masters of that virtue, the Newfoundland seamen.

                        This is their culture, this – their master passion

                        Of giving shelter and of sharing bread,

                        Of answering rocket signals in the fashion

                        Of losing life to save it; in the spread

                        Of time – the Gilbert-Grenfell-Bartlett span –

                        The headlines cannot dim their daily story,

                        Nor calls like London! Gander! Teheran!

                        Outplay the drama of the sled and dory.

                        The wonders fade.  There overhead a mile,

                        Planes bank like gulls: like curlews scream the jets.

                        The caravans move on in radar file

                        Scarce noticed by the sailors at their nets,

                        Bracing their bodies to their tasks, as when,

                        Centuries before Argentina’s smoking funnels,

                        That small ancestral band of Devon men

                        Red-boned their knuckles on the Squirrel gunwales.

                        As old as it is new, as new as old,

                        Enduring as a cape, as fresh as dulse,

                        This is the Terra Nova record told

                        Of uncontractual blood behind the pulse

                        On sea or land....

Pratt’s Collected Poems were published in 1946, and again in an extended and rearranged edition in 1958; he had a considerable reputation in Canada and the United States.  The last of his larger poems had been published at a time when other concerns were afoot in Canadian poetry – endeavors rather more self-conscious than his, more deliberately cosmopolitan, at times determined to spin poetry out of poetry and to entwine learned allusion with a contemporary realism in a way that might suggest cosmic irony.  Pratt was not dismayed or deflected by any of that, even though a mounting wave of Canadian self-preoccupation was soon to canonise other masters claiming a higher degree of sophistication and was also soon to bring to bear upon the writing of some minor practitioners a detailed critical scrutiny that it can ill withstand.  If Pratt, as a poet in the public eye, had consistently sought safety in irony or had been more fastidious (as Yeats was) in deciding how best to arrange each of his collections, his work might have established itself more securely than it has and with readers other than Canadian.  But to have done so – and it was not his way – could only have accentuated the enormous energy that informs his work; and energy has a very long rhythm of survival.  When the next edition of his Collected Poems is prepared, Pratt’s virtues as a poet would be more clearly seen if the general arrangement of 1958 collection-by-collection were followed, but collecting the Extravaganzas together, as they were in 1946, and the narrative poems as (with two intrusions) they were in 1958.  Each of Pratt’s smaller collections (except 1937) closed with a narrative poem or an Extravaganza because there was no place else to put a poem of such extent; but that accident of arrangement need not be canonised.  It is well to read the Extravaganzas together, and it would be well to take back ‘The Fable of the Goats’: though that is now as improbable a fable for our times as it was when Pratt wrote it, let us hope that it is not inconceivable that some day the lamb will be able to lie down by the lion, and the goat with the goat.  And the Narrative Poems should open with ‘The Ice Floes’.

Some Canadian poetry may now have achieved a scope and subtlety – a stature and intelligence, even – that Pratt could hardly have forseen.  Yet much of it – even much that is widely acclaimed – if attenuated in a way that the muscles and thews of Pratt’s verse put to shame.  If some later poetry is daintier, it is not necessarily more profound; and, if some of it is aggressively hirsute in manner, very little of it is masculine in the way Pratt’s verse is.  For he wrote with open-handed enjoyment, for friends, for those who knew how to listen companionably.  What he has bequeathed is strong and sane.

Near the end of his life, Pratt was intrigued by the thought of bouncing radar-waves off the moon.  He did not live to see (at a remove) the landings on the moon, or hear the grotesque banalities of speech with which that remarkable event was celebrated.  In his own lifetime he knew by touch the bond between a man and a ship, between the hunter and the hunted, between action and suffering, between the act of anonymous self-sacrifice and the fruits of that act.  I wonder whether he would now feel that that bond has dissolved: that there is little connetion between a computer and the mind, between a Mach 2 fighter and a ship, between a homing missile and the art of naval gunnery.  Once machines cease to be extensions of man, they can become pitiless instruments that take on the deceitful appearance of man’s purpose while they lapse into the stupor of a sinister autonomy, swift, immoral, brainless, drawing us down (if we allow it) into their own nature, as cruelty can make a shark of a man.  Against that betrayal, Pratt’s affirmation, charged with his sense of wonder, stands in the memorable patterns of his words.

For to be masculine in the character that he disclosed to us is not only to be courageous, enduring, strong, and skilful, but also to be compassionate, patient, self-sacrificing, unassuming, hospitable, reticent, knowing that we share at times delight and accomplishment, and certainly that we share suffering and loss.  Whenever he wrote, whether with a light heart and with outrageous panache, or with a premonitory sense of dread, he prepared himself meticulously for the task; and in carrying it out declared his own virtues and the virtues of the people he had grown up among.  From them he learned to keep a weather ear lifting for the subtle inflections of speech; and from them came that deep imprint upon his character and upon the dark places of his memory that his poetry so often sprang from – his ‘birthright to the sea’.