Michael Nixon English 452 Contemporary Canadian Poetry Keith Harrison. The bird you captured is dead. Nuances in the dialogue of freedom of

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Michael Nixon English 452 Contemporary Canadian Poetry Keith Harrison. The bird you captured is dead. Nuances in the dialogue of freedom of"

Penelope Parks
5 years ago
Views:

1 Michael Nixon English 452 Contemporary Canadian Poetry Keith Harrison The bird you captured is dead. Nuances in the dialogue of freedom of Patrick Lane s Poetry

2 Patrick Lane s poetry forms a dialogue of freedom with its cages, domesticated animals, 2 enslaved people, death, and loss. This dialogue is firmly grounded in the real, rustically rooted in the anecdotes of his experience experience from a world that in a very odd way, [he] was a slave to. (Woodcock 1) With strong working-class roots, Lane s poetry strives to break free, becoming a way out of poverty, (ibid.) the intellectual poverty that entraps a mind with no ability to imagine anything better. His poetry also moves in environmental directions, seeking a communion with nature and experiencing a profound sorrow for the losses brought about mankind. However, far from being mere protest pieces, the poems work to extend the analogy that the imprisonment of animals is similar to the poet s craft of capturing experience in written form. Gary Geddes quotes Lane s passionate writing stance that a poet is neither trained nor taught. He is the outlaw surging beyond the only freedom he knows, beauty in bondage (300) Geddes interprets that for Lane the poem would appear to be a sort of prison or cage in which experience is captured, its terrors rendered beautiful in word. (300) However, taking into account Lane s constant comparison of poems to animals, it would seem accurate to add that while losing some of the raw potency and actuality that exists in the wild, his poetry harnesses that force to manifest some of the meaning of the real and make it useful to the reader. While Lane s poems embody real experiences, caging them adds subtle overtones and shades of significance that must be decoded by readers, who can then unpack them in terms of their own relevant experiences. Four poems from 15 Canadian Poems X 3 demonstrate these features well: The Bird, Elephants, Stigmata, and Winter 22. In The Bird, the speaker instructs someone, presumably a child, on the dangers of caging birds to enjoy or learn their traits. When captured, the bird cannot do those things that were so beautiful before. The only way to enjoy this beauty is to capture it in words they can cage any experience, even freedom. In Elephants, the narrator sits with several others, carving an elephant out of soap. This act of capturing the beast s likeness captures some of the poet s craft, while bringing in the vulnerability of the human species who can become as endangered as other species, their graveyards

3 and history buried Ozymandius-like beneath a new highway. Stigmata considers a crab captured in a 3 palm, struggling to return to its home, the tidal pool that is just another sort of confinement. Continuing the idea of an environment shaping its inhabitant, Lane turns to whales and their oceanic home that carves them as scrimshaw artists carve their teeth. Here confinement, the poetic task, shapes and changes its subject before turning it loose for public enjoyment. In Winter 22, the poet watches a white balloon float indistinctly across a the snowy background, capturing the fading concern for whales, as well as the poet s inability to capture that impossible dream of beauty. (309) Like an old man dreaming of a Byzantium paradise where beauty and art commingle, he sees that poems, and art in general, are cages full of gilded mechanical birds, gold-covered but only fakery beneath. Together, these poems read as part of an ongoing dialogue about the reality of poetry on the one hand inextricably linked to real life events, but on the other reduced to words, beautifully mediated but static and caged. In his critical study, George Woodcock notes that, in The Bird, the bird becomes a symbol of poetic activity, but also of freedom and here the relationship between the poet and the natural world reaches its greatest ambiguity. The poet feels the greatest connection to wild things, and yet joins in their destruction (30). The bold lines of the poem translate well into distinct thoughts, ranging from the straight statement the bird you captured is dead, I told you it would die, to the (apparent) child s desire to and learn to fly, and the poet s imperative, Listen again. (303) On the surface is the idea that enslaved creatures die, taken out of their environment and shaped by human will. From there, we can learn to respect animals or people who exist properly only inside particular environments; perhaps we admire or love them while they re there, but taken from it, they lose that majestic quality of belonging. However, in the last stanza, the poet invites an extension of the comparison by stating that Only words/can fly for you like birds. (303) Equally adept in any environment, words can be shaped by a poet to fly anywhere. Combining the imperative to listen again with the deliberate infusion of anecdote in his poetry, Lane advances the idea that poetry does, or should, reflect the real, drawing on

4 and enhancing our experiences. With his comparison to a bird, with its natural ability to soar freely, 4 Lane s poetry also incorporates some of the poet s desire for freedom. The bird becomes a symbol of the freedom that people seek for, wanting to learn to fly (302) by taking on its abilities a desire that seems hopelessly grounded because a feather is/not made of blood and bone (303) and in the imagery of the dead captured bird. One chance seems to remain, however, in poetry s potential, as the bird goes through a radical transformation: a bird is a poem that talks of the end of cages. (303) The living creatue / poem dichotomy melts as the boundary between them blurs, and the symbol of flight and freedom becomes a poem about the end of cages, an experience of freedom that is the poet s highest desire. Elephants continues with the theme of poetry shaping language. The scene is set on a job site where some men are working to construct a road through the bush. Lane s language goes to work on this setting, deconstructing it a little and bringing out its negative details. The cedar bunkhouse is cracked, the setting is sundown, the soap is a brown hunk, the truck-driver is an alcoholic, and the other worker is a cat-skinner. Each element is reduced to being described by its basest feature. The men are actively trying to forget their setting, just a the poet wants to try to forget the forever/ clank clank clank/across the grade (303). The nights are endless and cold, set in mosquito-darkness. Set against these words that echo of slavery, an act of creation occurs as the poet begins to craft an elephant from soap. This elephant, a gift for an Indian boy who lives/in the village a mile back/in the bush, (303) begins to take form with the caress of the knife. While it seems that the soap remnants are almost more useful to the child, this creation is the only positive element in this poem, set physically and emotionally in the dark. Compared to the physical addiction of the alcoholic and the slavery of labouring that the poet certainly relates to, this brown, soap, gift elephant is a creative act of freedom. In the hands of the poet, the soap-carved elephant becomes a representative of poetry; it is a creative act that brings into being an approximation of reality, and offers hope that the wielder can shape it according to his will. Just as in Elephants, the language of a poem shapes its reality; here it carves a

5 negative atmosphere in the absence of light. In general, all poetry is a language construct, its meanings 5 and nuances painting the picture the reader will view. Through this construct, the poet forms the inward reality of the poem; this very act, while influenced by the poet s experiences, allows great flexibility in presenting what he desires. The knife caresses smooth soap (304) and forms a poem with its own hopes, fear, and ambitions, thereby revealing some of the poet s meaning. The last verse finds the poet handing the carving, the image of the great/beast (304) to the Indian child, whom examines it, and then wonders What s an elephant? (304) Here the poet turns to the act of interpretation and reader engagement with poetry. It is not always immediately obvious from a representation a poem, or a carved elephant that it is one of the silent/animals of the rain forest [that] die somewhere in the limberlost of distances. (304) Still, with further engagement, readers can come to a place where they can articulate their own vision of the great beast, in this case, how the Indians are a voiceless (silent) people whose culture is being buried beneath new highways, never to be found. The poet has veiled his poem in negative language, with its one image of creative freedom; ironically, it is only interpreted through its recipient, who reforms the image according to his own experiences. Stigmata returns to the issue of experience, further considering the influences of metaphor. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, stigmata occur when ecstatics bear on hands, feet, side, or brow the marks of the Passion of Christ with corresponding and intense sufferings. (Catholic Encyclopedia: Mystical Stigmata) Literally, stigmata are wounds of disgrace or reproach, a definition subsumed by the religious, but the less developed meaning may be involved here. So, Stigmata is a poem about metaphors, starting with the Fruedian question of What if there wasn t a metaphor? (307) The rest of the poem continues in this fashion, introducing many multifaceted analogies that serve to involve our many realms of experience. The first question leads us to consider the rest of the poem in its light. Children bounce mouths, possibly starfish (large fleshy mouths), and women talk with empty wombs (307) introduces the ideas of conversing both with and about their barren state. Possibly they sorrow for a self-induced loss, possibly they wonder about their unnatural act of preventing pregnancy.

6 Whichever shades of meaning layer in the reader s mind, the reason is an attempt for freedom, the 6 reoccurring theme of Lane s poetry. Furthermore, we see barroom windows rotten with light where eyes of men open and close like fists. (307) The image of greed and want is evident here, as men look at something, and then want it, while the comparison to fists brings up the perennial barroom fights. Throughout this first stanza, Lane is taken up with what man s viciousness to man, and, even more, man s viciousness to other creatures. (Woodcock 9) Sometimes, our quest for personal and communal freedoms has undesirable consequences that can result in less-than-religious stigmata for those involved. A further, anecdotal, experience of the poet s is considered, as he picks up a crab from its tidal pool home. Here, the poet brings in an irony of two levels of confinement for the crab: first, within his closed hand; second, within its rocky pool home, subject to ever-changing tides. This is due to the shift of perspective involved between the tiny crab and the human poet: the humanly irrelevant distance is all the difference between one s house and a jail cell. So entrapped, the crab s small green life twists helplessly, (307) in the same fashion those in the first stanza were twisting helplessly to proclaim their own freedom. A third level of isolated experience is introduced by the living bars of bone and flesh (307) which separate the crab from its surroundings, in the same way as our flesh and bones create the dichotomy that is me and not-me, and developed by the line a cage made by the animal I am. (307) At the extreme of the idea of the isolated self the ego is the philosophical concept of solipsism : the theory that self-existence is the only certainty. (Chambers English Dictionary) This absolute egoism would also take personal self-interest, with all its goals, desires, and ideals, and make it into an ethical system. The ego ideal is one s personal standards, ideals, ambitions, etc. formed into a composite of characteristics to which one would like to conform. (ibid.) Suitably, Lane introduces this division, as we sometimes find our ideals and methods of carrying them out clashing with others, our climb for the top taking us clambering on the backs of others. Lane further ties up this idea with Stigmata. I hold a web of blood, (307) as the poet experiences a sort of religious communion with the

7 nature he holds in his hands as it tries to tear at his palms. The isolation of the two selves is overcome 7 while the poet holds the crab in his hand and shares in its experience and suffering. Winter 22 combines a vision of environmental protection with an element of achieving goals in light of their impossibility. Its first image is a white balloon drifting across snowdrifts, an indistinct and unimpressive object made even more so by its lack of air, and wrinkled nature. Embossed with the statement, Save the Whales, addresses a general lack of interest in the cause of environmental protection. Lane here straightforwardly makes a point that many are not interested in the movement in general, but goes on to explain that it for at least one, it is a temporary greed he loves (309): a selfish, feel-good, action that wears off with time that was more interested in preserving without regret than actual care. Lane then alludes to old poems about Byzantium, (309) surely including Keats Sailing to Byzantium, with its desire to become a golden bird, singing Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (Keats ) Byzantium, as an ideal place of knowledge and art (man s ideas eternally instantiated), but also a perished, ancient, city, complements the complex idea of mankind s inability of making and maintaining perfect replicas of reality. A poem is good attempt at struggling with reality, but it is still a gilded mechanical bird, (309) gold-covered, but still falling short of the ideal. This exotic creature represents romantic reminders of our earthbound nature and our deepest yearnings for escape. (Geddes, 300) Even so, man s imitation remains caged and lifeless, doubly artifice; they break down as an impossible dream of beauty/while everything blows away (309) Byzantium, balloons, dreams, and whales alike. However, poets still maintain their art in the face of this seeming hopelessness, seeking to capture and manipulate their vision of reality, and present it to others. Drawing deeply from Lane s personal experiences and enslavement, his poetry takes on a knowing feel to it. His poems often include animals (including the human kind) and their suffering, reflecting a basic shared pathos. As well, these creatures that possess admirable qualities while in their native environment that shaped them (as in The Bird, and the ocean-carved whales of Stigmata) are often seen out of their environment, caged. Here they become more useful to mankind, where they can

8 be admired more closely and deeply; however, this is an illusion, as captured beings lose their native 8 splendour we cannot even learn to fly from them then and die. This doubles back into a commentary on the ways people enslave themselves, whether to their baser attributes or to a labouring life. His poetry often wishes for the freedom of flight that has been taken away from a captured bird; often, that quest is ultimately seen as futile, a desire for a long-lost Byzantium unattainable to old men. Still, the poet can find freedom in his art, writing poetry that allows him to shape an internal reality that hopes for some external shaping to accompany it when read. While these dreams sometimes lose air and blow away like a wrinkled balloon, the poet can be more optimistic because of his experiences communing with nature; now, as then, he can open his hand, and let the life leap out, writing poems that talk of the end of cages.

9 Works Cited 9 Crozier, Lorna & Lane, Patrick. Defying canonical isolation. The Peak. SFU. 7 July Lane, Patrick. Selected Poems. 15 Canadian Poets X 3. Ed. Gary Geddes. Ontario: Oxford, Geddes, Gary. Patrick Lane. 15 Canadian Poets X 3. Ed. Garry Geddes. Ontario: Oxford, Woodcock, George. Patrick Lane and his Works Mystical Stigmata. The Catholic Encyclopedia < (1 April 2002)

Worksheet : Songs of Ourselves, Volume 1, Part 3 Cambridge O Level (2010) and IGCSE (0486),

Worksheet : Songs of Ourselves, Volume 1, Part 3 Cambridge O Level (2010) and IGCSE (0486), Caged Bird - Maya Angelou Text of the poem A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But