Richard Vallance
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Vallance Review 34, June 2004
"Steeped in Boreal Nature"
Canadian Poetry and the Canadian Sonnet, a National Tradition
INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Eric Linden's contemporary sonnet, "Silent in the Wilderness", is an archetypical Canadian poem that owes as much of its distinctiveness to the heritage bequeathed by the early Confederation Poets [1] of the late Nineteenth Century as it does to the still largely uninhabited environment of Twenty-First Century Canada. It may be seen as representative of not only the "Canadian sonnet" per se, but of an unconsciously felt, nameless, brooding, primeval nature that somehow manages to insinuate itself into so much of Canadian poetry from the era of The Confederation Poets right on down to the present day. One soon observes a remarkable similarity in the subject matter, the cool tonalities, the seeming impartiality and the unfathomable sense of solitude that so characterizes Canadian poetry and sonnets.
Almost all of Eric Linden's sonnets, especially "Silent in the Wilderness", fall fair and square into the tradition of the unique Canadian Sonnet species, not duplicated in the literature of any other nation in the world, not even in American poetry which superficially may be seen as resembling Canadian poetry. Canadian poetry is not, nor ever was American; it is not even merely English poetry. As I have stressed in a previous Vallance Review on Archibald Lampman's biting sonnet, "Winter Uplands", Canadian poetry and sonnets are part and parcel of both English and French Canadian literature, and of their respective cultures, commonly referred to in Canadian literary circles as "The Two Solitudes" [2].
Though solitudes they are, and great ones at that, there is another, more deeply rooted, historical, more often than not primeval Solitude, which swallows up and can entirely engulf the cultural solitudes defining in ambience our two distinct and separate "nations", the English and the French.
Although we Canadians are only too familiar with the refrain about our two linguistic cultures, "And never the twain shall meet", paradoxically, our Two Solitudes are yet inextricably bound up, overlap and even mirror one another in the one much immenser Solitude we cannot escape, come hell or high water. That great cold vastness of our nation can be symbolized in one haunting emblematic word, "Wilderness", a very echo of the impassible Universe it so uncannily reflects through the medium of our minds and our hearts.
The French have a fine word for the cold impassiveness of Nature we Canadians must endure: that word is inabordable, for which the English "unapproachable" is but a pale imitation. Nor is it any accident that Eric Linden should have titled this month's theme sonnet, "Silent in the Wilderness". Adjective and noun together form a synergism which so sharply defines our Canadian "landscape", be it the impersonal natural, geographical, geological or the personal and psychological.
Those quintessential American notions of "The Frontier" and "The Challenge of the Frontier", which clearly imply that we humans can cross over, conquer and even subdue the great beyond, all too often are the familiar rallying cry of American literature and poetry. Yet, for Canadians, the trope, "Frontier", just rings falsely to our ears, as we are diurnally forced to put up with the forbidding, vast emptiness that is known as Canada, like it or lump it.
We instinctively know we cannot conquer Nature; it is indominitable, it victimizes us, we are at its entire mercy. If you are new to Canada, never venture out alone in Winter. You may not live to survive the experience, not even in the year 2004.
As in "real life", so also in the annals of Canlit [3] (Canadian Literature), over and over we find words and phrases such as "wilderness" itself, "mountains", "The Rockies", "innumerable lakes", "The Great Lakes", "tundra", "The Prairies", "The Laurentian Shield" and so many more like them. Such language haunts the pages of so many Canadian poets from the 1870's right on down to the present day. There is simply no escaping it.
Eric Linden's contemporary sonnet seems to echo in so many ways Archibald Lampman's Century-old, "Wayagamack" [4]. He too finds himself gripped in the vice of that Greatest of Solitudes, which he has so keenly visualized in one defining word he invests on his eerily all-Canadian poem. That word is "welkin". It is precise, it is daunting, and it weighs on our frail humanity with all the powers of the Canadian Boreal Nature it invokes, in rain, thunder and raging storms, in scorching sun and bitter cold, in impassibility. Not only has Eric Linden clearly expressed his deep bond with the harsh Canadian "environment" in his autobiography, but he has forced us to acknowledge its awesome power over us in his visceral Canadian sonnet. To any Canadian who takes the time and struggles to grapple with our literary traditions, Canadian poetry of all genres actually does hold up the mirror to the harsh realities of our Boreal environment. This is surely one of the most salient features to contradistinguish the Canadian poetic tradition from those of all other nations.
ABOUT ERIC LINDEN
Autobiographical Introduction:
Eric Linden
Most of my life has been spent in western Canada, under wide expanses of skies and in the shadows of impressive mountains. My poetry writing began only a few years ago, and my style remains true to the formalist approach of rhyme and metre rather than free verse. There is a challenge in staying inside strictly defined bounds and making one’s words bring joy to a reader.
"Silent in the Wilderness" is my own small tribute to the wonderful outdoors in all its grandeur. Modern man has ruined much in the name of civilization, a fact we cannot escape. Still, finding those special areas where one is in tune with nature is special. While the sonnet itself is not strictly composed in any of the "established" forms (Petrarchan, Shakespearian or English sonnet), it still remains within the parameters of a "true sonnet". Through its medium and its message, life in one of Canada’s two deserts (the other being the Boreal tundra) survives to live in its unique fashion in our human imagination.
We Canadians are all too often "Silent in the Wilderness"
The Sonnet
The chaparral that cloaks the rolling hills
With branches intertwined and evergreen
Is like a tangled tegumental screen,
Protecting sacred sites from evil ills.
Where manzanita guards a narrow trail
And chamisal defends the hinterland,
The poison oak stands ready with its brand
Of punishment for those who would prevail (a).
Beyond the piñon, buckbrush, short scrub oak,
A mesa and its long abandoned cave
Reveal the sacrifices from the brave
Who ventured up with fragrant incense smoke.
The gods, the ancient spirits time forgot
Still dwell in silence near that welkin spot. (b)
© by Eric Linden Penticton B.C. 2004
Local colour vocabulary in the sonnet: (all definitions from Dictionary.com)
1. "chaparral" = "A dense thicket of shrubs and small trees"
Chaparral can be found on dry, hot hillsides and flat areas. Plants in chaparral are frost tolerant and can survive long periods without rain, in dry soil, with baking sun. Chaparral can exist on hillsides with poor, thin soil, where larger plants cannot grow. This habitat is fire-adapted, promotes fire, and requires fire to persist.
Plants associated with chaparral ... include chamise, toyon, coffeeberry, sugar bush, laurel Elderberry sumac, poison oak, yucca, California buckwheat, black sage, holly-leaf cherry, scrub oak, and many species of California lilac. italics mine, see The Canadian Sonnet. 8. below [5]
2. "tegumental" = "A natural outer covering; an integument"
3. "manzanita" = "Any of several evergreen shrubs or small trees of the genus Arctostaphylos of the Pacific coast of North America, especially A. manzanita, bearing white or pink flowers in drooping panicles and producing red berrylike drupes, from Spanish, "manzana" = "apple"
4. "chamisal" = "A California rosaceous shrub (Adenostoma fasciculatum) which often forms an impenetrable chaparral"
5. "piñon" = "Any of several pine trees bearing edible, nutlike seeds, especially Pinus edulis, of the western United States and Mexico. Also called nut pine"
6. "welkin" = "the vault of the heavens, the sky, the upper air"
If you would like to read more of Eric's sonnets of all descriptions, visit: Linden's Lines
Eric is also one of the featured sonneteers in the special Canadian Spring 2004 issue of SONNETTO POESIA, here: SONNETTO POESIA, Vol. 3, no. 2, Spring = le printemps 2004, pg. 2, Eric Linden
Archibald Lampman's Sonnet, "Wayagamack"
Archibald Lampman
Beautiful are thy hills, Wayagamack,
Thy depths of lonely rock, thine endless piles
Of grim birch forest and thy spruce-dark isles,
Thy waters fathomless and pure and black,
But golden where the gravel meets the sun,
And beautiful thy twilight solitude,
The gloom that gathers over lake and wood
A weirder silence when the day is done. (b)
For ever wild, too savage for the plough,
Thine austere beauty canst never lose.
Changes shall not mar thy loneliness, nor tide
Of human trespass trouble thy repose, (a)
The Indian's paddle and the hunter's stride
Shall jar thy dream, and break thy peace enow.
Archibald Lampman (1841-1899) [4]
Eric Linden's Sonnets and the Canadian Sonnet Tradition
Even the most cursory comparative reading of these two sonnets, the first by Eric Linden and the second, composed over a century earlier by the most renowned of all Canadian sonneteers, Archibald Lampman, reveals striking similarities between them. Even though their geographic loci are thousands of kilometres apart (Linden's being British Columbia and Lampman's being Eastern Ontario), the two poems are so very alike in so many respects that it is almost uncanny... and this in spite of a time lapse of over a century between them.
The two sonnets are structurally almost identical. While Eric Linden falls back on the standard English sonnet rhyme scheme: abba,cddc,effe,gg, Archibald Lampman's rhyme scheme is slightly more original and eccentric, being abba, cddc, efgfge. Still, both sonnets display a strikingly similar rhythmical and tonal quality. The first verse of each sonnet is launched in the same tonal range; the rhythms of several other verses also closely mimic one another. Read aloud Eric Linden's verse:
A mesa and its long abandoned cave
and compare it with the following line in Lampman's sonnet:
A weirder silence when the day is done.
Tonally, the verses seem uncannily to echo one another.
There is more. These two verses in particular, and many more besides, begin with the indefinite article. This would not be particularly significant, were it not for the fact that so many Canadian poems and sonnets are couched in indefinite language reflecting a predilection on the part of Canadian poets for cold, impersonal "landscapes" apt to swallow up human existence in their utter vastness.
You will also no doubt have noticed that I have italicized two sections of each of these sonnets, tagging them sequentially (a) and (b) in Eric Linden's sonnet, and in reverse in Lampman's. It matters less that these two poets, over a century apart, should have composed such similar passages (though in reverse order) as they have resorted to naturalistic imagery contextually framed almost to the same effect. Where it not for Archibald Lampman's slightly archaic language and the differences in geographical locales these sonnets portray, one could be forgiven for having the impression the sonnets could have been composed by the same persona. I say persona, and not "person", because in fact, there does appear to be a remarkably homogenous persona invested in the genius of Canadian poets from at least 1870 to the present day. And it is that persona which defines our national identity as Canadian poets, and characterizes Canadian poetry as Canlit, a species immediately recognizable to any Canadian reader, even folks who do not usually read poetry. I would even go so far as to venture many Canadians, who would otherwise have little or no interest in poetry, would at least be able relate to the natural environment of Canadian poetry, i.e. their environment, however harsh it may be. Some of us might even be intrigued by Canadian sonnets, while others might even be passionate about them, because they are in our blood.
I will not belabour the point by picking apart these two great Canadian sonnets. The point, I believe, has been amply illustrated. The silent wilderness haunts both these sonnets by two highly imaginative Canadian poets a full century apart, and many other Canadian sonnets besides.
An Invitation to Draw your own Comparisons
Keeping the two sonnets we have just visited uppermost in mind, I would like to invite you to draw your own comparisons based on two more sonnets by Eric Linden and Archibald Lampman. On the surface of things, the specific theme of these additional sonnets is different from the two we have just cited. In both sonnets, the poet finds himself, his persona, as it were, immersed in the Canadian Winter, impersonal and harsh as it is. Yet, once again, not surprisingly, both of the Winter sonnets draw their inspiration from the same tradition, the Canadian natural environment. I venture to bet you will more than likely be as surprised by the stylistic similarities between the two Winter Sonnets, Eric Linden's Snowfall, January 2004 and Archibald Lampman's Winter Uplands (1899), as I myself was drawing the parallels between the sonnets I have just highlighted in this review. I have taken this unconventional approach, not only because I wish to allow the Winter sonnets to speak for themselves, but also because I wish to allow you, the reader, to form your own opinions independently of my own. All too often, poetry critics and reviewers simply draw their own conclusions, assuming their readers to be a passive audience not only of the poems reviewed, but of the review itself. That is the traditional historic approach to the process of critical reviewing. In the Twenty-First Century, however, we are living in an open-ended, multi-media, Internet driven world, where opinions are as diversified and as coloured as the people who hold them. Poetry critics can no longer claim to stand aloof from their increasingly well-educated, well-informed and erudite readers.
Characteristics of the Canadian Sonnet as Canadian Poetry
Now that some of you have taken the opportunity to draw your own conclusions about the two Winter sonnets I have proposed for your reading leisure, allow me to summarize the singular features of the Canadian sonnet, which shares many traits in common with Canadian poetry in general from around 1870 to the present day. We have already highlighted some of those features which distinguish Canadian sonnets, English and French alike, from those of all other cultures and nations. Let us revisit these, in light of the distinctly "national" character we will have discerned in both of the sonnets here reviewed, and in the Winter sonnets you may have already read yourself.
The Canadian Sonnet is...
1. Typically, the "Canadian sonnet" is focused on the wild, untamed natural environment, historical, prehistoric and primeval, of the vast nation we call Canada, whose great impassible tracts of multiform geological lands seem ironically to have derived their name from the Stadacona Amerindian word for "village" or simply "settlement", if you can believe anything so preposterous. [6]
2. Where the Canadian sonnet does fall back on historic tradition, the thematic context is either that of the irresolvable conflict between our two distinct cultures, the English and the French, the Two Solitudes, or more significantly, it delves the ancient and prehistoric lore of our forbears, the native inhabitants of the North American continent we share with our smaller geographic neighbour to the South, the United States. Archibald Lampman's sonnet, "Wayagamack", is an explicit early example of the ancient Amerindian mythology and historical traditions that define so much of our "national" poetry.
In his sonnet, "Silent in the Wilderness", Eric Linden has implicitly kept that same tradition very much alive. In his elliptical allusion to some long-since forgotten tribe, whose hopeless defiance against the European invaders "Reveal the sacrifices from the brave...", his indictment is harsh. The hordes of hairy-faced invaders drove these nameless lost tribes into a "long abandoned cave". There were so few survivors left that they were all crammed in just one cave. The implication is clear enough: we "shaganash" [7] drove them to extinction. Or did we? Perhaps not entirely, for he concludes, on a particularly bitter note:
The poison oak stands ready with its brand
Of punishment for those who would prevail
3. This brings us to another hallmark of the Canadian sonnet, the great sense of loss and despair, the insignificance of humanity in the impassive face of the Canadian natural environment. This we have variously characterized by such emblematic words as "tundra", "The Prairies", "the Canadian Shield", "Boreal", "Wilderness". They all ring a harsh note of that uncompromising natural reality which even our modern Canadian civilization and our great cities have never managed to overcome.... and perhaps never will.
The awesome power of the wilderness is almost mercilessly driven home in all four of the sonnets we have cited. Eric Linden's pointed reference to the punishment of the poison oak could not be a more explicit metaphor for the nameless, haunting revenge of the decimated Amerindian nations against the successive waves of invaders, first the French and afterwards the English, who dared trespass on the pristine integrity of their sacred ancestral lands. No wonder the poet so poignantly laments, "Modern man has ruined much in the name of civilization, a fact we cannot escape." Someday, according to almost all prophetic Amerindian legends without exception, Nature (and we know what that means in the Canadian context) will have her revenge. The chickens will come home to roost.
If Eric Linden's reference to poison oak serves as warning enough, he merely echoes Lampman's stark admonition in "Wayagamack", over a century earlier:
For ever wild, too savage for the plough,
Thine austere beauty canst never lose.
Hearkening back to Archibald Lampman's "Winter Uplands", the very last sonnet he composed before his untimely death at the age of 38 in 1899, the great Confederation poet speaks ominously of "The loneliness of this forsaken ground,..." Does Eric Linden echo this same sentiment in 2004? Naturally enough, he does. Dawn, he says, "finds that endless clouds had come by night/and tinged the valley skies with cheerless shades.". We Canadians live on "forsaken ground" beneath "skies with cheerless shades". What could be more metaphorically descriptive?
4. Historically, Canadian sonneteers have heavily relied on sensory perceptions, especially sights of vast, open spaces and "weird" natural sounds they as mere individuals cannot identify, alien cries savagely proclaiming, "We are Wilderness". This reliance, this unwitting dependence on the hard impact our cold, objective natural world has on our frail human senses frequently underscores the Canadian sonnet tradition.
5. Almost all Canadian sonnets are "landscape" poems, though the landscapes they portray are not merely physical or geological. They are personal, subjective experiences of lonely individuals, who just happen to be a few odd poets, widely scattered souls engulfed by the Boreal Canadian Wilderness landscape they can never really grasp. [8] Why? They are not meant to. The Canadian "landscape" has always been and always shall be beyond the reach of the frail human intellect. All four sonnets we have referenced here bear undeniable witness to this harsh reality. This is what it means to be a Canadian poet, and to be a Canadian, and it explains more fully why many Canadians who do not normally read poetry, will read Canadian poetry, because we identify so intimately with it, however remote it may seem. This is our world, after all, take it or leave it.
6. In the introduction to The Poems of Archibald Lampman, Margaret Coulby asserts, appropriately enough, "Lampman's love of nature and his sensitive, accurate descriptions of Canada's flora and fauna... gave his poems a striking originality and national character rarely found in Canadian poetry." [9] That same observation, which applies to Archibald Lampman's Confederation Sonnets, can also be seen as characteristic of Eric Linden's "Nature" sonnets at the beginning of the Third Millennium. The tradition, it seems, is very much alive. It is as persistent as the uncompromising natural world which continually inspires it.
7. Canadian sonneteers are very apt to express their deep concerns over the interlocking tension that exists between the Great Outdoors or the Boreal Wilderness and the City, or as we feebly call it, "civilization."
As Eric Linden himself posits, "Silent in the Wilderness" is a tribute to the wonderful outdoors in all its grandeur. "Modern man has ruined much in the name of civilization, a fact we cannot escape. Still, finding those special areas where one is in tune with nature is special."
This echoes Margaret Coulby's assertion that, "Lampman was one of the first Canadian poets to be obsessed by the theme of man's isolation and alienation from society. There is a tension in his work resulting from the uneasy balance between fear and resignation; between his two great enemies, the towering city and the lightless north; between delight and the pain of loss and even between heat and cold." [10]
But Eric Linden, who benefits from greater historical hindsight into Canada's dim, primeval past, goes much further than his ancestor, Archibald Lampman, stressing in unequivocal terms his strongly held belief that, "The ecosystem need not be disrupted completely, and washed to the sea in coastal rains. The ancients had a method, and while they have their faults too, they did not rape the land as the modern man is doing. There was more respect. The time will come - the gods will have their revenge." If anything, the Canadian tradition in our sonnet literature has gained even further momentum over the past century.
8. Last though far from least and perhaps most surprisingly, the intrinsic tension between Wilderness and City, between the forbidding landscape that is Canada and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of it, all this and more, is even more plainly underscored by the extremes defining our Canadian climate, in the metaphorical and psychological as well as meteorological senses of that term. We refer, of course, to the extremes of heat and cold. These inexorably define the outermost boundaries of so much of Canadian sonnet literature. The cold and the heat are extremes with which we as Canadians have always identified not only our environment, but ourselves, our national identity, our psyche. Either it is scorching hot, as in Eric Linden's "Silent in the Wilderness" and even more so in his sonnet, The Burnt Field, "Where flames along the fallen grass set sail,..."
I will be explicit. Wild fires can devastate thousands of square kilometres of forest and grasslands in Canada every Summer, and in the summer of 2003, they did, in British Columbia and Alberta, all to devastating effect. Here again, human lives were struck hard; people suffered. Once again, the Great North, Canadian Nature, prevails, and humanity is left helpless against its bitter onslaughts.
As heat is to Summer, so cold, bitter, bitter cold, is to Winter. Archibald Lampman's "Winter Uplands" (1899) makes that all too clear. The Winter of 1899 was to be the death of him, and he knew it. There is no escaping either the heat or the cold. It is always with us. Both kill and maim. This is Canada's natural environment. And there is precious little "Romantic" about it. The Summer heat is occasion for great suffering and privation; the Winter cold occasions depression, seasonal-affective disorder, in a word, despair.
9. You would be forgiven for thinking we Canadians are a helpless, despairing lot, at the entire mercy of the harsh natural environment that might seem entirely capable of crushing us. Paradoxically, it does not, not in the least. Canadian poets are among the toughest literary creatures in the world. That does not surprise any Canadian, though it many astonish people of other nationalities (Russians perhaps excepted). For us Canadians, our environment is the ultimate challenge... indomitable perhaps, but what the heck.
We cannot overcome our cold, unassailable environment. So why try? But we can overcome ourselves; we can prevail over the despair that might otherwise plainly engulf ourselves and our national psyche, though it never has. In a word, the creative act of composing a sonnet is, for almost all Canadian poets with few exceptions, a courageous act of personal catharsis.
© by Richard Vallance 2004, with the editorial assistance of Helga Ross,Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, May 29 2004
REFERENCES & NOTES:
[1] Even though some of the poets of late 19th. Century Canada were born in Great Britain and grew up in Canada, these "Confederation Poets" were the first generation of truly Canadian poets whose works focussed almost exclusively on topics and concerns of interest to Canadians and to the infant nation, Canada, only just founded in 1867. This close knit group included such well-known poets as Archibald Lampman (1861-1899), the unackowledged bright star of them all, Charles Heavysage (1816-1876), Charles Sangster (1822-1893), Bliss Carman (1861-1929) and Frederick George Scott (1861-1934). Their most cherished hobbyhorse was the depiction of the harsh realities invested in Canada's natural environment, symbolized by the one word, "wilderness".
[2] Poetry Life & Times, Vallance Review, February 2002. "Archibald Lampman. Winter Uplands (Canadian)".
And this is why today, in the early Twenty First Century, Canadian Literature stands alone in World Literature as a paragon of a richly bilingual, bicultural English-French heritage, not experienced anywhere else in the world, even in France. In other words, Canadian English Literature is not merely English Literature, nor is Canadian French Literature simply French Literature. They are both uniquely, Canadian Literature, Two Solitudes, les deux Solitudes, period, "point final". These very Solitudes underscore every aspect of Canadian Literary achievement, including our poetry.
[3] "Canlit" is a uniquely Canadian word, coined by Canucks.
[4] Lampman, Archibald, "Wayagamack" (Sonnet) pg. 298, in, Lochhead, Douglas, Ed. The Poems of Archibald Lampman (including At The Long Sault): introduction by Margaret Coulby Whitridge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, © 1974. xxxviii, 473 + 45 pp. ISBN 0-8020-6204-0 (pbk.)
[5] FROM the WEB site, Habitats in the Santa Monica Mountains
[6] Canadian Heritage = Patrimoine canadienIn 1535, two Indian Youths told Jacques Cartier about the route to "kanata." They were referring to the village of Stadacona; "kanata" was simply the Huron-Iroquois word for "village" or "settlement." But for want of another name, Cartier used "Canada"
[7] "Shaganash" is the Ojibway word for "ghost" or "paleface", i.e. white men.
[8] Significantly, Canada's population density is amongst the lowest in the world, no more than 1.5 persons per square kilometre, unless you count Antarctica (just kidding!)
[9] [4] above, pg. xiv
[10] [4] above, pg. xxiii
The Vallance Review is frequently cited in our Canadian sonnet journal, SONNETTO POESIA ISSN 1706-4524. To read the current issue or any back issues, you may visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here:
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