WILLOWS REVISITED

Paul Hiebert

The biographer of the immortal Sarah Binks, revered as the "Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan," here brings to public recognition the poets known as the Saskatchewan School of Seven, or possibly, the school of Seven-and-a-half (if we are to include the voice of M). From the momentous twenty-fifth anniversary gathering of these literary lights at the grave of Sarah Binks flowed impressive cultural developments. This celebration and the Saskatchewan semi-centennial Jubilee of 1955 engendered a splendid new Centennial project designed to benefit a nation whose Muse is rendered mute by regional rivalry and the decline of local newspapers such as The Horsebreeder's Gazette, not to mention the ingrained reluctance of poets to regard as worth reading anything written by somebody else. The proposed "Poem-of-the-Month," already assured success by the enthusiastic response of government and television personalities, will allow any unpublished citizen to read, recite, or even sing his best work at one of the many centennial arts centres springing up throughout the country. The cultural possibilities are overwhelming.

Distinguished critic Paul Hiebert here gives an account of these seminal anniversary celebrations and poignant sketches of the poets themselves and examples of their original work. The Great Dean of the Group is John Swivel, native of Quagmire, Saskatchewan, an unsuccessful tombstone salesman who discovered that he could stimulate business by throwing in three "In Memoriam" verses with each tombstone. Around him clusters a galaxy of poets so various and unique as to engage and delight all tastes.

Paul Hiebert renders an important service to Canadian letters by analyzing the qualities these poets have in common: namely, innerness and the use of the cow as leitmotif, which he traces to "archetypal bovinism"—surely a fresh concept in critical theory.

Willows Revisited is the long-awaited sequel to the now-classic Sarah Binks which won the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1947, It is a book full of hilarious deadpan thrusts at culture vultures, pretentious politics and politicians, inflated poets and critics, and many other contemporary foibles. This deceptively straightforward narrative provides the reader with wonderful entertainment and does so memorably.

WILLOWS REVISITED

ALSO BY
PAUL HIEBERT

Sarah Binks

PAUL HIEBERT

WILLOWS
REVISITED

MCCLELLAND AND STEWART LIMITED
Toronto / Montreal

© 1967 by Paul Hiebert
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Canadian Publishers
McClelland and Stewart Limited
25 Hollinger Road, Toronto 16

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

Front Cover

Flyleaf

Also By Paul Hiebert

Title Page

Copyright

CONTENTS

1 "Poem-of-the-Month": A Centennial Project

2 Fifty Years of Progress

3 The School of Seven

4 John Swivel: The Great Dean

5 Wraitha Dovecote: The Exotic Wraitha

6 Bessie Udderton: The Poet of Innerness

7 Baalam Bedfellow, Ph.D.: The Piltdown Man

8 Jordan Middleduck

9 Osiris Jones-Jones, S.O.M.: The Laureate

10 Purge Potatok, D.P.

appendix i Willows Revisited

appendix ii Duck Dinner at Willows

appendix iii Souvenir Menu

appendix iv Mathilda

Back Cover / About the Author

To the memory of my brother, Ernest Hiebert,
who wrote Umski

1  "Poem-of-the-Month"
  A Centennial Project

It may be an exaggeration to say that everybody in Canada writes poetry, but it is certainly true to say that at least ninety-five percent of Canadians have at one time or another in their lives courted the poetic Muse. Statistics always lend themselves to different interpretations, but researches show that with the possible exception of the Finns, no more bardic a people than the Canadians have appeared in history. Yet it is also a strange paradox that in no country of the world is poetry less read or less published. The ingrained reluctance of each poet to regard as worth reading anything written by somebody else naturally accounts in a large measure for the lack of published work; obviously the more poets the less demand for poetry. It would appear that the very richness of the Canadian endowment tends to defeat the first requirement of any national art that it at least be articulate. But there is more to it than that: what Canada suffers from is a too great geographical diversity.

In the last analysis all poetry has its roots in the soil. Though it may be the rocks and rivers of the harsh northland or the lush orchards and tobacco fields of Ontario, the wide wheatfields of the prairie west, the sugar groves of Quebec, or even for that matter the mines and industries that spring out of the soil, in the end the poet, like Antaeus, must touch Mother Earth from time to time to renew his inspiration and his strength. For he is of its substance and of its spirit, and even those struggles and tensions and defeats which mark his life and which as a poet he attempts to express today in forms of poetic cordwood thrown together into meaningless heaps have their origin in that very soil which is his present environment and his final destiny. But alas, the soil is all so different.

The trouble with Canada, poetically no less than politically, lies in the wide variations of the geographical scene. The Finns at least have a homogeneous country. Napoleon's famous "When you have seen one square mile you have seen it all" concerning Finland is still echoed by many travellers to that country, but the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of Canada. When you have seen one square mile you have by no means seen it all, nor, for that matter, when you have seen a hundred square miles or even a thousand square miles. True, soil is soil — literally a common ground to the poet of east or west; nevertheless, the minnesinger of Ontario establishes no spiritual rapport with the poet of the Prairies or the Maritimes, and certainly not with the poet of French Canada. So, also, the poet of Saskatchewan hymning the joy of the western wind or trilling with the crickets on "their moonlit dancing floor," arouses nothing further in the way of understanding than that expressed by the literary editor of the Toronto Bay Leaf, "One wonders what in hell it is all about." A poem written in eastern Canada about the joys of "sugaring off" in spring or the red of the maples in autumn, can suggest nothing more to the tiller of the land in Alberta or Manitoba than the temptation to beat his honest debts, or the advance of communism eroding his political creeds. It is true that Sarah Binks reaching beyond the wide gumbo stretches and alkali flats of her homeland towards the larger Canada could write "Song of the Sea" and "Storm at Sea," but they have never been acknowledged as truly Canadian (most certainly not in the Maritimes). Despite the fact that they have been characterized as "the finest sea songs ever to come out of the dry belt," they are still being relegated to a comparatively small segment of the country as lacking the wide appeal which should characterize a national poetry.

It is just this segmentation, this provincialism, one might almost say this parochialism, which, in the vision of the Saskatchewan poets, must now be overcome if Canadian literature is to come into its own. Moreover, as has been pointed out by the members of the special committee of the Saskatchewan School of Poets who were appointed to go into the matter and to make suggestions in connection with the Centennial, the Canadian Centennial itself could not have come at a better time. For the Saskatchewan poets, especially the original School of Seven, are above all Centennial-conscious. For them any anniversary, whether of a half or of a whole century, or even of the twenty-five years since they first gathered to celebrate the death of Sarah Binks, is more than a specific date. It is a state of mind, it is a linking of the past with the present, a ploughing and a harrowing and a general stirring up of the soil of history so that something good may come of it. Thus an anniversary celebration is also an opportunity, and keeping in mind the last time they joined in an anniversary celebration in which they as well as Saskatchewan profited, they see in Canada's one hundredth birthday an opportunity not only for Canada to achieve literary renown, but also for those individual writers and poets who participate to acquire their own share of recognition and renown. After all, Saskatchewan's own semi-centennial celebration led to the publication of their collected Willows Revisited and also to the individual awards of the Saskatchewan Order of Merit for those writers who gave their support and their talents to the Government when it stood in need of another chapter in its own anniversary booklet.

It is thus not surprising that the Centennial drive toward a larger national literature and away from the otherwise restricted locale of their own writings should come from the poets of Saskatchewan. For twelve long years they have stood in public acclaim as part of the natural and cultural resources of that province. In some respects it has been a lonesome grandeur:

"Let no one think," declared the Premier of Saskatchewan at the opening of the Natural History Museum in Regina at the time of the semi-centennial, "that we here are unaware of our great cultural heritage, and that in declaring this museum open all we are interested in is Indian bead-work and stuffed ducks. In this great country of ours, stretching as it does from the midnight sun where there is ptarmigan and musk ox — and we hope to have some of them mounted here before long — all the way down to our four thousand miles of undefended frontier, there is a cultural heritage. And the poets are as much of our cultural heritage as anything else. I know they tend to stand alone off by themselves. But don't get the idea that we, the government, are overlooking them. These men and women who have written such fine poems and have brought honour and publicity to this province deserve recognition, and the government is going to do something about it as you know. Now the Order of Merit which we are going to mail to them may not in your opinion be as big a thing as this here museum, but it's in the same class, because literature is as much a part of our natural resources as wheat and cattle and some day we hope to discover oil on a large scale."

The twelve years from 1955, the semi-centennial of the province of Saskatchewan, to 1967, the one hundredth anniversary of Canadian Confederation, may be no great span in the life of a nation, but in those twelve years much has happened both provincially and nationally. In Saskatchewan the hoped for oil has been discovered "on a large scale," and on the national scene a new flag has been devised to draw all Canada together in peace and amity. As a rule the true poet, unless like Jones-Jones he is a civil servant and something of an unofficial laureate, is unaffected by great events. Certainly the poets of Saskatchewan have been unaffected by the discovery of oil. But the first suggestion of the new flag seems to have been the occasion for the poets of Saskatchewan, especially those of the School of Seven, to be aroused to their sense of national and social responsibility.

Since their acclaim by the government of Saskatchewan in 1955 and the award of the Order of Merit, the School of Seven has produced little in the way of literature, being perhaps content to rest upon their laurels. The exception, of course is Bessie Udderton whose Vestal Verses IV dealing with the newer frozen foods and their preparation, is about to appear, although this treatment of the newer products is not generally regarded as a contribution to literature. (Bessie herself regards it merely as a social duty.) Nevertheless it is just this sudden consciousness of social obligation, of which Vestal Verses IV is merely an example, which seems suddenly to have seized upon the School of Seven and has led them to propose the "Poem-of-the-Month" as a project for the whole of Canada.

Actually this sense of social participation has its roots in that now famous quarter-centennial occasion when the group of six poets, later to become the School of Seven, met in Willowview Cemetery to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Sarah Binks.¹ In its original conception this meeting was to have been a somewhat exclusive affair and in spite of the notices which had been sent out, confined to the poetically elite, a fact clearly indicated by the unwillingness of some of those present to admit Purge Potatok to the gathering. Indeed it is quite possible that if the lunch which Potatok had brought that day had been less acceptable to the members, the group would never have become known, as at present, as The School of Seven. But the Saskatchewan government, quick to perceive an opportunity to equal Ontario in the matter of artistic schools, and even in the hope of going Ontario one better by making it a School of Eight, offered to publish the seven poems written for that occasion in its own booklet, Fifty Years of Progress. So far Saskatchewan has never reached its hoped for goal of a School of Eight; indeed, the most it has been able to accomplish by taking into account the voice of the unknown and (so far) unidentified Muse on Jones-Jones's tape-recorder is a School of Seven-and-a-half. But this numerical shortcoming has not discouraged the group since through the publication of their work they have been lifted into prominence and awakened into awareness of social responsibility.

One can never say of them that they had had no sense of social or political responsibility, but merely that it was latent. In fact it was at this first meeting in Willowview that Jones-Jones first presented "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden," which has since been adopted as the provincial song. Moreover at this meeting (See Appendix I again) the Saskatchewan crest, later to be proposed as a symbol to be incorporated into the new national flag, was first mooted. And there is no doubt that it was the success of "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden" that led Jones-Jones to write a new National Anthem, and later the Bilingual Anthem for all Canada. These have not yet been adopted, nor for that matter, have the proposals of the School for the design for another new Canadian flag which seems to have arisen out of the Saskatchewan crest already mentioned. The design of the Saskatchewan crest, that of a snearth laying an egg in a nest composed of maple leaves and fleur-de-lis, was not a new idea in itself having come originally from the Premier of Saskatchewan on his return from one of the conferences of provincial premiers at Ottawa; but it was seized upon and elaborated and finally presented as the decahedral flag, or, as it became better known, the Canadian Decahedron.

The basic idea of the decahedral flag as finally presented by the special committee of the School of Seven was that, instead of the usual oblong flag of other nations, Canada should adopt a ten-sided flag having ten corners or angles in which the provincial insignia or crests could be placed. The advantage of such a flag, it was pointed out, was that since it could not be flown upside down, it could be flown in each province with the local crest on top. No province would thus have any advantage over any other province, and no accusation of favouritism could be directed against the Federal government when adopted. Another advantage would be international. A decahedral flag among the oblong ones of all the other nations would undoubtedly attract considerable attention and might even promote tourism, since visitors to places where flags were being displayed (the United Nations in New York for example) would probably wonder what kind of a nation this could possibly be.

The choice of the crests or provincial symbols themselves was to be left to the option of the provinces, but it was suggested that Saskatchewan employ the one already devised by the Premier, that of the snearth laying an egg on the nest of maple leaves and fleurs-de-lis. This was regarded as all the more appropriate since it was assumed that Ontario and Quebec would retain their present crests until the next centennial or so or until, possibly, in an outpouring of goodwill from Ontario, they merge their present insignia into a single one, a fleur-de-lis shaped like a maple leaf. It was suggested that Nova Scotia adopt as its provincial crest the sign from the zodiac, a pair of crossed herrings, whereas for New Brunswick a can of Canadian sardines was proposed as being in keeping with the maritime tradition. Prince Edward Island could adopt a potato as its crest and it was taken for granted that Newfoundland would fill its corner of the decahedral flag with a picture of Premier Smallwood. If these suggestions were carried out, then the Province of Alberta, taking its cue from Saskatchewan, would also use a snearth as its symbol, but to be shown as having a meal of fish and chips. This left only Manitoba and British Columbia to be decided and here unfortunately, since the provinces themselves were taking up the idea, some argument occurred and a certain amount of ill will developed which in the end was largely the cause of the proposed decahedral flag being rejected at Ottawa.

In the case of British Columbia the right of that province to use the Grey Cup which they had chosen for their crest as a mark of hope and continuous aspiration, was denied by the other provinces who claimed that British Columbia had no more right to it than they had, in fact, less. Of more serious nature however was the dispute between Manitoba and Saskatchewan concerning the use of the snearth. Manitoba, anxious to seize the opportunity to get rid of its buffalo crest because of the extreme sadness and depression of that animal's features, proposed using a crest whose design was a snearth couchant upon the Grey Cup argent and to this Saskatchewan objected holding that snearths were the exclusive right of Saskatchewan and Alberta to which they were indigenous. To this Manitoba in return replied that the snearth, together with the magpie was finding its way east from the Saskatchewan border and that if Saskatchewan would first undertake to keep their damn magpies where they belonged then they would have the right to talk, and in the meantime "who in hell did they think they were anyway." This dispute was finally settled by the appointment of a Royal Commission of Heraldry in Manitoba with instructions to investigate the whole matter of flags, crests, and symbols, together with the ancestry of some of the members of the Opposition. In its report, part of which is still confidential, this Commission conceded the exclusive right of the more western provinces to the snearth but did however recommend that the buffalo of Manitoba could be much improved by removing one of its horns to bring it more into the heraldic symbolism of the unicorn, and that if, except around the eyes and nose, some white paint were applied to its face it would begin to resemble that of the panda bear and thus, in the opinion of the chairman of the commission, "look a little less like a symbol of the thirties."

Alas, the Decahedron has not been adopted as the national flag of Canada though it may yet be revived. "It's just that the time is not ripe for it," declared the Prime Minister of Canada. "Perhaps in another Centennial or so we may come to it. As it is, we can't so easily break with our past. Traditions cannot be altogether ignored. We have the memory of Wolfe and Montcalm to think of not to mention people like Sir John A. Macdonald and Edward Blake and Daniel Webster and Mackenzie King. They helped build up this country."

Their failure to have the decahedral flag adopted for all Canada has, however, not discouraged the Saskatchewan poets. John Swivel and Osiris Jones-Jones, the two members of the School of Seven who were appointed by the Premier of Saskatchewan to "try and think of something in connection with this Centennial," have come up with more than the design for a new flag. It is no less than a new national anthem. "We have to have a national anthem," declared John Swivel, "and can't get along without one. A nice mess things would be in this country if people started putting on their coats and rubbers at the end of a meeting unless it were really over. But what with all this bilingualism and biculturalism and not wanting any reference to the Queen or the crown, it's time we composed a new one. And if we here in the West can't do it for them, I'd like to know who can! Those eastern poets just hack their prose into pieces and call it poetry. I can write stuff like that standing on my head. Out here at least we still have some respect for rhyme."

The reference to bilingualism and biculturalism and to Quebec not wanting any song linking it to the British crown, led, as a first attempt on the part of the joint efforts of John Swivel and Jones-Jones, to the substitution of the Governor General for the Queen in "God Save the Queen." It began,

God save our gracious Governor General
Even though his appointment is just protemoral
God save him just the same.

but it was immediately pointed out that any objection to the Queen would certainly be extended to the Queen's representative even though he was "protemoral" and appointed by the party in power at Ottawa. The verse was then changed to

God bless our gracious Prime Minister.

To this also an objection was raised since it was pointed out that the title Prime Minister is itself a British title and its use carried the suggestion of colonialism into Canada. The verse was then changed to

God bless our gracious Prime,

"Prime" to be a new Canadian title corresponding to President in the United States, the term "President" itself being regarded as unsuitable for use in Canada, since it might add to the present uncertainty as to who is actually running this country.

The new National Anthem, in the final Swivel-Jones-Jones version was as follows:

God save our gracious Prime
Keep him in every clime
B.C. to Maritime
And in between,
Send him victorious
Strong and uxorious
Loud and uproarious
God save our Preem.

It was Jordan Middleduck who suggested "uxorious" as one of the qualities with which the Prime should be endowed. Middleduck, whose literary creed is that poetry is justified only insofar as it carries a moral message, maintained that "uxorious" stresses the sanctity of the Canadian home, and he also defended the first line against which the criticism had been raised that it sounded too much like saying a grace before starting on the Sunday roast by maintaining further that such was all to the good. "Loud and uproarious" is, of course, indicative of the joy and happiness which it was felt should pervade this country, and the pronunciation of the Prime as Preem in the last line (to rhyme with cream) is a concession to Quebec.

On the whole it was a very good replacement for our present National Anthem. Its almost immediate rejection was due to the fact that it was not sufficiently bilingual. With this in mind another attempt at a National Anthem was made in which "O Canada" was recast bilingually employing for the purpose what is known as Prairie High School French so that it would be acceptable in the West as well as in Quebec. But it also was doomed to failure. Quebec's disinclination to rhyme demandez with pays, and the positive refusal to pronounce vous to rhyme with moose as in P.H.S. French led to its rejection in spite of the fact that the line "Quebec is nous amis" definitely extends the hand of friendship to Quebec and is an effort towards rapprochement on the part of the Saskatchewan writers on behalf of the rest of Canada. However, as the Prime has said, "Given another few centennials, it may yet be adopted. We are not going to close the door on the West. One never knows about Quebec."

Thus encouraged, the bilingual National Anthem has been privately printed and distributed and an effort is being made to have it sung in the schools;

O Canada. Chez nous et native pays,
Vrais patriot amour, in toute fils demandez,
Avec hearts aflamme nous vu vous rise,
Une true nord forte et douce,
Et stand en guard, Oh Canada,
Nous stand on guard pour vous,
Oooh Canada, Quebec is nous amis,
Oooh Canada, nous stand on guard pour thee.

It may be even too bilingual for adoption in the schools. Not so however Jones-Jones' adaptation of "The Maple Leaf Forever" which, incidentally, Quebec has not even considered since the Saskatchewan pronunciation of fleur-de-lis as fleur de liz suggests too close a connection with the present Queen. The use of riz for had risen is colloquial in Saskatchewan and is a deliberate effort on the part of Jones-Jones, the author to bring literature to the people.²

In days of yore when history riz
On Canada's fair domain,
The maple leaf and fleur de liz
With Wolfe and Montcalm came
And now they wave upon this earth,
To join in love together
With herring, buffalo, spud, and snearth,
In all political weather.

There is no doubt that sectionalism together with the unfortunate geographical diversity of Canada have tended to defeat the efforts of the School of Seven toward national unity. Manitoba and Saskatchewan were able to resolve their border problems. Their common soil and common language were instrumental in bringing them into amity despite the fact that the magpie problem has still to be settled. But where regional differences are further accentuated by the problems of language it is unlikely that a complete national unity can be brought about by the simple expedient of a new national flag or a new national anthem. As one travels westward from the Maritimes of the Atlantic, language succeeds language. From the Gaelic of Nova Scotia through French Quebec and Italian Toronto, across the "Bungy" of Northern Ontario, the Icelandic of Northern Manitoba and the Ukrainian of Saskatchewan to the Siwash of the Pacific coast, interspersed here and there with pockets of Dutch, Swedish, Mennonite-Low-German, Japanese, and Swahili, culture succeeds culture. It is indeed no wonder that Sarah Binks made the historical error of having Saskatchewan subject to a Roman occupation, or that Jordan Middleduck in his great epic, Noah (See Chapter 8) should have had Noah concerned about the natives whom he was likely to meet when the Ark approached Ararat:

Today we land, so better crane the neck,
And keep a sharp lookout to meet the foe,
Canadian-French, Ukrainian, Pole, or Czech —
This is the West — we can't exactly know.

But neither sectionalism nor language barriers stand in the way of "Poem-of-the-Month" that splendid Centennial project which the Saskatchewan poets have proposed for all Canada. Since it is essentially a do-it-yourself movement it can succeed in any language and it takes advantage of those very localisms and cultural exclusiveness which have stood in the way of national anthems and the decahedral flag. Above all it makes a personal appeal to those Canadians who themselves write poetry, and thus the movement is assured of overwhelming support. For it enables them to overcome their disappointments and frustrations in that through this "Poem-of-the-Month" they are finally able to publish their poetry, if not in print, at least by bringing it to public attention in public rostrums.

There was a time in Canada when every little community, no matter how new, had its local paper which was happy to fill its columns with the poetic achievements of its subscribers especially when not otherwise given over to births and deaths and to the description of potatoes weighing over five pounds. (No local editor ever bought or raised his own potatoes in the early days of the West.) But with the drift to the cities the small-town paper has largely disappeared, and even those few which remain find little space for poetry among the government-sponsored articles on rape seed or the removal of tea-stains from the new synthetics. Even Sarah Binks, if living in Saskatchewan today, might be hard put to find an outlet for her work. Genius, of course, will always win out sooner or later, but actually it is fortunate that she lived when she did and that just at those times when she submitted her poetry, such literary organs as the Willows Sheet or The Horsebreeder's Gazette happened to be out of five-pound potatoes or Siamese cucumbers. In the cultural history of a nation fate plays its part, but it is too much to expect of fate that those who are not as highly endowed as Sarah should be given the same opportunity.

But "Poem-of-the-Month" is deliberate. In its inception it can be said to go back to any "of-the-month" projects, but it was the appearance of the "cheese-of-the-month" idea which first suggested to Bessie Udderton, the poet of innerness, that it could be applied to the whole of Canada in the form of something resembling a folk festival in which all could participate. Under its rules, any citizen of Canada writing poetry in any language, but otherwise denied its publication, would be permitted to declaim or recite or even sing his best poems at one of the many regional art centres which are springing up throughout the country in connection with the Centennial. These buildings, it is claimed, will soon fall into neglect and disrepair unless they are constantly used which is unlikely since cultural interest tends to run down nationally after the novelty wears off. "The single theme upon which the Little Theatre movement has finally settled will soon lose out in the face of growing amateur competition, whereas ballet," according to the Chairman of the Department of Music and Fine Arts at St. Midget's College, "cannot long survive in this country because of the cold. And in any case you can only look at one girl at a time, and you don't need a hall for that."

Poetry however springs eternal from the deep wells of human emotion and it is just this fact of which the Saskatchewan poets are keenly aware. Culturally they see Canada henceforth as one long Centennial. If the art centres throughout the country are to be given over to public outpourings of poetry, local poets would of course predominate. But it is to be poetry for its own sake. No prizes or awards are to be given. Canada is to have a new poetic birth of freedom in that the frustrations of bottled-up poesy are to be released, and if, out of this, a new sense of national unity does not arise, nothing else will ever arouse it. True, there is always a danger to the present political parties, since with the disappearance of present undeclared and even unrecognized resentments deep in the national subconsciousness these could no longer be channelled into organized parties. Government leaders and leaders of the opposition have recognized this danger, but it is to their undying credit that they have still expressed their willingness to participate in some of the "Poem-of-the-Month" festivals and lend their support to this popular movement which is more and more sweeping the country. "I would have joined this thing in any case," declared the Prime. "Quite apart from any political consideration I want some of my own work to see the light of day. So far all I could do was get some of it in Hansard. You might as well bury it."

Efforts to enlist the aid of other outstanding Canadians have met with even more generous response. Not only the Prime Minister, or Prime, but also some of the members of his Cabinet, have submitted advance copies of their own work which they hope to recite at the official opening of the first "Poem-of-the-Month." Moreover the word has got around and unsolicited contributions of poetry are already pouring in, some of which have not been signed, but when considered of sufficient merit have generously been sponsored by some of the members of the School of Seven. To "Centennial Flag," for example, Jones-Jones has consented to own authorship since it expresses unusually high patriotic feeling. "I did not actually write it," he declares, "but it is certainly the kind of thing I'd do if I were writing it."

centennial flag

Fly flag; Let this our banner wave,
And on this great Centennial swing,
Above Sir John Macdonald's grave
And W. L. Mackenzie King.

Unfurl unfaded in the breeze,
Not orange, but red, fly high and tell,
Of all this land between the seas,
And south to the 49th parallel.

For blanket, bottle, buckskin, bead,
Lead U.S. tourists into town,
West from the Calgary Stampede
To Expos's buildings upside-down,

That when they go they've much to tell,
And colour slides of things they've seen —
Winnipeg, and the tombstone of Riel,
And perhaps a palace of the Queen.

The advance poem from the Prime Minister of Canada was accompanied by a note of explanation. It is to be the first of a series of poems which he either intends to write or has already written, and which he hopes to publicly declaim at one or another of the Art centres on a cross country tour. This first of his poems entitled "To Be or Not to Be?" seems to partake of a definite Shakespearean character which he explains:

"They are not all going to be like this Shakespearean one. Out West I may have to do something after the manner of Sarah Binks or perhaps something more modern, and out at the coast I'll keep Pauline Johnson in mind. But here in the East where people have heard of Shakespeare, it's just as well to give it a cultural touch especially after all that Stratford Festival stuff. They expect it of me here. In the Maritimes I'll be working on something like 'The Wreck of the Hesperus.' "

To be or not to be — that is my question
I now am much alone and much distraught.
But I have followers, yet — Duke Gordon, Earl of Sharp,
And crafty Pickersgill — are these not loyal arms?
And there are more besides;

The year's dismay
Those slings and ballots of outrageous fortune
Have made us craven and have turned our bones to milk.
Such must not be! Forward my Braves and raise
The new flag high. And shout in voices pitched
To shame the rook, or e'en the eagle's call
As, like Air Canada, it soars from peak to peak
Across this wide Dominion, Or should I say this wide
Confederation? Odds boots! But shout,
Up Canada, Quebec for Pearson, and God for all of us!

It is a truly splendid poem and has the national sweep which is in keeping with Canada's Centennial. Much more intimate and certainly much closer to the heart of the feminine voter is that poem sent by the only woman member of the Cabinet in which she expresses her private wish to return to the joys and unconcern of girlhood. The poem is technically imperfect, in the first verse at least, in that it rhymes chronicle with dull, but such little imperfections endear her to every poet in the country. Her opening, "Turn back, O time," seems to link her culturally with Wraitha Dovecote of whose work she is said to be very fond.

Turn back, O time, and let me see again
Those dear young days, when public life seemed dull,
And men in politics gave me a pain
And history was a deadly chronicle.

And I was sweet and slim and bright and brave
Nor bothered then with calorie or rule,
My only care to make the boys behave
Or sneak a cigarette behind the school.

I cannot ask of time, that he should take,
Me back beyond elections and alarms,
To some one man, or know the ancient ache
Of being held and crushed within his arms.

Such days are gone, but let me once more feel
The joy of loosened things — oh lift the yoke
Of public image — give me one square meal
And perhaps a drink, and certainly a smoke.

Because of the great success of the "Poem-of-the-Month" movement as it seizes upon popular imagination, it may become necessary to limit the number of participants at the monthly poetic festivals — either that or build more art centres. Either alternative would be regrettable, since to increase the number of art centres would naturally decrease the number of museums throughout the country, and to limit the number of poets who could take part would defeat the aim of the project which is to bring poetry to the people and in turn have it spring from the grass roots. Already there is a tendency for professionals to use the "Poem-of-the-Month" for their own advancement. Two poems have already come from outstanding radio and television personalities, who really have no occasion to make use of the art centres to advance their poetry, since they have the other medium at their disposal. But, on the other hand, it is quite possible that they see in the "Poem-of-the-Month" an opportunity to express their private feelings and yearnings. Poetry always reveals the inner man to which radio and television are definitely opposed. In the case of the one television personality (at least, one who has attracted attention throughout Canada as being a public exponent of the God-is-dead school of theology as well as that of the God-never-lived), his poem reveals him as being in complete contradiction to his public image. He actually turns out to be a devout and trustful person whose teachings at his mother's knee have not been forgotten, but his natural shyness apparently has prevented him from revealing the inner self which here finds its outlet in poetry:

When I was small and with my mummy,
A dimpled child and mostly tummy,
I said my little prayers because,
I knew there was a Santy Claus,
So I resolved that come what must,
Nothing would disturb my trust,
And nothing, nothing take away
What I was taught from day to day,
So Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Guard the bed that I lie on.

When I was young and cute and neat,
And lived on milk and shredded wheat,
I learned while at my mother's knees,
That stars are peek-holes, moon is cheese,
And sky is round and world is flat,
I learned it all — and that is that;
Now I've resolved that come what may,
Nothing must take my faith away —
So Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark,
Guard the nights when things get dark.

In sharp contrast to a poem of such inner revealings is that submitted by an equally outstanding television star, an author of renown in Canada, who prefers, for the present at least, to remain anonymous, but who has merely submitted his poem as kind of a sample of what he would like to do in connection with the "Poem-of-the-Month" festivals. He feels that Canada's far North is being neglected in all this Centennial celebration and should receive its due share of recognition. With this in mind he has written "Christmas Eve in the Yukon," a narrative poem full of the local colour with which he is familiar. It is a poem full of the true Christmas spirit and has a happy ending.

christmas eve in the yukon

It was Christmas Eve in the Yukon,
And plugging the whole night through,
Came a gambler whose name was Berton,
And a lady who was known as Lou —
But hot on their track, with a gun in his pack,
Was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

And they came to a place called Maggie's
To join in the Christmas whirl,
So they bought some drinks, and they started in
To dance and to cut and to twirl —
Until full of sin, McGrew burst in,
And he said, "I want that girl!"

Now the gambling man was a gambler,
And he was willing to go for broke,
So he said to Dan, "I'll stake her,
Against your gun and your poke,
And if you cut high you can have her,
And I'll let you take my place,"
But the dangerous one just pulled his gun,
And said, "This here's an ace."

But the gambling man was bitter,
And he said to Dan, "I'm through,
It's the only way you can get her,
Since you're Dangerous Dan McGrew,
But I've made my play, you can have your way,
So I'll be looking for a more comfortable pew."
And he turned to Lou, and said, "Honey,
I'm drifting over the hill,"
And as he spoke, he lifted Dan's poke,
And left with a girl named Lil.

Such poems are indicative of the enthusiasm with which the "Poem-of-the-Month" is being greeted across Canada. In Quebec, of course, the poetry will be in French, and in other centres, in the language of the particular ethnic group which happens to have the greatest influence at the time. Or even better, as has been suggested for Manitoba, each month be given over to one of the languages of that province. And it is just in this equality of opportunity for every cultural group in Canada that the strength of the "Poem-of-the-Month" movement lies. No group has any advantage over any other, and none of the geographical differences which have stood in the way of Canadian literature can possibly prevail. There should be complete cultural unity throughout the Dominion. And for this we must give the Saskatchewan poets and the School of Seven full credit. Occasionally, of course, sectionalism may creep in, but it should not affect the overall sense of freedom. The poem of the Leader of the Opposition, for example, definitely focuses its attention upon Saskatchewan, but since it is to be recited only in Regina, its echoes will not reach beyond the prairies. Moreover the Leader of the Opposition, being himself a native of Saskatchewan, could hardly do otherwise than write a poem to that province if he is to meet the spirit of the "Poem-of-the-Month" and be true to himself. In a sense too, this poem is applicable to the whole of Canada in that it deplores the general industrialization of our country and expresses a longing for the good old days when life was less complicated and less preoccupied with "potash, oil, and pelf," symbols which, as a native son of Saskatchewan, he employs to express the growing materialism of our age which "like stealthy pipelines" is undermining the national character. In keeping with the spirit of the western provinces, particularly that of Alberta, it calls upon the Deity to support, or at least confirm, its hopes for the future. It is appropriately entitled "Some Day, Thank God."

some day, thank god!

Some day, thank God, when oil wells peter out,
And potash beds are once more dry as bone,
And that damn dam at Outlook rots from drought —
Saskatchewan will come back to its own:
Some day, I know, the Lord's almighty hand,
Once more will scatter dust on hallowed earth,
And all that wide and flat and lovely land,
Be given back to farmer and to snearth.

At heart the West is sound; I know, I know,
They always stand for virtue against sin,
And firmly as elections come and go,
They never let a lousy Liberal in —
But still I long for that glad day's return,
When once again Saskatchewan itself,
Holds wheat and weather as its sole concern,
Beyond all claims of potash, oil, or pelf.

Some day, thank God, again clean winds will sweep
Across the prairie lands, and once again
The gophers sing where Eastern interests creep,
And stealthy pipelines crawl beneath the plain;
Oh hail the day — the time once more draws near,
To claim again your birthright unafraid,
My Fellow Canadians, I say this without fear
Of contradiction, you have been betrayed.

"Poem-of-the-Month" is a national movement which undoubtedly places the seal of success upon Canada's first Centennial. Literary historians of the future will, however, ask themselves how it could have happened and how it could ever have come about. What, if any, are the influences and antecedents which gave rise to this splendid undertaking? In particular, who are these poets, individually considered, whose genius first inspired the movement? Why indeed should it have been the Saskatchewan poets and not the poets of Ontario and Quebec who saw in this particular centennial such a golden opportunity?

The answer as already intimated, goes back to other anniversaries, the semi-centennial of Saskatchewan, and the quartercentennial of the death of Sarah Binks. In both of these the poets of the School of Seven participated, and from both they derived advantages which are now being extended to the nation. But it is always necessary that we should know the historic background. In the chapters which follow, a brief account of the two centennials, the semi- and the quarter-, is given, together with thumbnail sketches of the poets themselves and some examples of their work. Without such historic settings, "Poem-of-the-Month," though it may continue to sweep the country, loses its significance. But above all, for real understanding we must study that quarter-centennial meeting, the ceremony in Willowview Cemetery, in which the "Poem-of-the-Month" movement has its roots. We must go back to that original ceremonial pyre at the feet of Sarah Binks. More than coffee simmered on their fire that day, and more than the adjoining hay field was consumed by its flame. The wind which fanned it across the adjoining quarter section fans it also across the Dominion. Fortunate indeed are we to have discovered here in Canada, after the long lapse of almost twelve years, the very tape-recording of that event whereby the historic meeting is brought into the contemporary scene. "Willows Revisited," the chapter on Saskatchewan's culture and natural resources which the government published in its Fifty Years of Progress, has preserved for us the great poems dedicated to Sarah's birthplace which were written for that occasion. But only the tape-recording can give us the actual voices of the poets, the little touches which link them to their contemporaries, the human qualities without which poetry is divorced from life. It is to be played at Ottawa over ten loudspeakers, immediately following the Prime Minister's "To Be or Not To Be" with which the first Centennial "Poem-of-the-Month" is to be officially opened. After which it is to be placed in the National Museum. Special recordings of the different voices are, however, being prepared, and may be heard by visitors to the museum by dropping either a Canadian or an American twenty-five-cent piece in one of the special slots corresponding to the particular poet desired, in a recording machine; or, on application to the caretaker, the entire series of seven may be heard for a dollar and a half.

————

Footnotes:

¹ The complete proceedings of this meeting transcribed from the taperecording of Osiris Jones-Jones is given in Appendix I. →

² For the further use of riz in poetry see also Middleduck's Noah, Chapter 8. →

2  Fifty Years of Progress¹

Break not the lute, the poet's spate
Shall flow as thesis for the Doctorate,
And minstrel's tears, a-shedden 'till he dries,
Embalmied be in Universitys.

The Muse

There are two outstanding dates in Canadian history with which every schoolboy of the prairie West was once familiar. They are 1867 the year of Confederation, and 1905, the year in which that great and beautiful province of Saskatchewan was carved out of the North West Territories and became part of the Dominion. With the substitution of Social Science for History in the schools, the dates tend to be forgotten as well as the events associated with them. And were it not for the minds and memories of the poets for whom history and heritage are always treasured materials for the poetic art, they might indeed be completely forgotten; unless we except, of course, the dry and statistical facts which the professional historian must needs record as material for his own craft. The poet, however, has a social obligation. His is a calling and not merely a job. In a very special sense he is also an historian in that in his poetry he becomes a custodian of the culture and mores of his day and age — he must seize some of the quality and flavour of the historical scene in which he finds himself, and he must record it for the future insofar as he is able to master the contemporary idiom of its expression. It is a spiritual feat of which the academic historian is incapable. For him the expression of the poet itself as often as not becomes a part of the factual history to be recorded with the dates — a "thesis for the Doctorate" against which the poet must always protest. The poet feels that in the embalming of his poetic expression, of, in fact, the historical distillate, all the human and romantic qualities which he has been at such pains to capture, have been lost. Indeed the "M" of the scholars, or better, the "Muse" of Jones-Jones's discovery, implies as much when she cries that the lute is broken and the minstrel's tears are shed in vain if they "Embalmied be in Universitys."

But we must have both approaches to history. Both poet and formal historian are necessary to complete the picture. Without the dates of the historian we cannot place either the poet or his poetic expression within its proper frame; he is, as it were, simply talking through his hat. Sarah Binks's poetry, if published today without reference to the day and age in which she wrote, would be comparatively meaningless. But set in its historial context her every word is significant She may have made what in her school days was the very natural mistake of confusing British and Canadian history, and she thus gave Saskatchewan a Roman occupation under which she regarded Julius Caesar as one of the first, if not the very first, premiers of her province. Such errors can never for long escape detection, since it is the duty as well as the privilege of the academic historian to call attention to them and in this particular case it has repeatedly been done. But the error on Sarah's part was merely nominal — her Julius Caesar under any other name would still be the Premier of her day and those bagpipes and drums which greeted his arrival at the Quagmire Agricultural Society Fair would have sounded with the same verve and flourish for the Honourable Grafton Tabernackel as for any other premier of Saskatchewan around 1925, as they did for Caesar. Sarah is thus true to history in a larger sense than the merely factual. The corrections which the formal historian must apply to such minor aberrations of exact history do not contravert the poetical interpretation or deny its validity but rather they place it in its proper setting and perspective.

It is to the great credit of the Saskatchewan Government of 1955 that it should have perceived that the two approaches to its history, the factual and the poetic, were but different aspects of an essential unity. When in 1955 it celebrated its semi-centennial anniversary it was careful to verify the fact that a full fifty years had passed since the province had been granted its charter. But at the same time it avoided becoming encased in the too-literal mould by giving recognition to the accounts and legends of achievement which were as much poetic as factual. Thus the human quality was not sacrificed. In its anniversary booklet, Fifty Years of Progress, the material achievements of Saskatchewan's first half-century of existence are balanced against the account of its cultural growth. Sarah Binks, of course, is given her place of honour, as she rightfully deserves. But even more to be commended is Saskatchewan's recognition of the Binksian heritage — the successors of Sarah who today carry the poetic torch.

The Saskatchewan Government's souvenir booklet, Fifty Years of Progress, which was printed to mark its semi-centennial anniversary, is a work of which every citizen of that province may be proud. It was printed on good paper and was distributed free to anyone desiring a copy, and even to many not desiring a copy. Like all books which were given free it is now almost impossible to obtain. This is particularly true of the first edition which was withdrawn by the Government, nominally because of printer's errors, but actually because of internal dissension in the cabinet. Apparently when Fifty Years of Progress was first printed, a number of Farm Bulletins for the Department of Agriculture were being printed at the same time and some of these Bulletin pages became interspersed with those of Fifty Years of Progress. As a result the inspiring message of the Premier to the people of Saskatchewan to which the first two thirds of the book was devoted was interrupted from time to time with different recipes for apple cake and cottage-cheese dumplings which the Department of Agriculture had collected from various ethnic groups and which it had intended to publish in a bulletin of its own. But these errors, together with some instructions on "Bee-keeping for pleasure " and some notes on how to prepare a wholesome drink from rhubarb and where to obtain the proper yeast, were not in themselves regarded as serious, at least not to the extent of withdrawing the book; since for most of the readers the Premier's asides on apple cake were regarded as part of his message. The actual reason for the recall of the first edition was due to the unfair tactics of the Opposition who started a whispering campaign to the effect that the Minister of Public Works was himself the author of the poem, "Moonlight on Wascana Lake," which was printed as a frontispiece to introduce the book.

"Moonlight on Wascana Lake" is actually a very good poem, and it was printed at the suggestion of the Premier himself who felt that it would be a fitting tribute to the home of the Government. Since on the outside of the book the Legislative Buildings in Regina are shown mirrored in that splendid body of water in which the hand of man has combined with the hand of nature to form the setting for those famous architectural piles, there would seem to be no reason why the poem, "Moonlight on Wascana Lake" should not form the frontispiece for Fifty Years of Progress. It is true that Wascana was a bit low that year and smelled, but the real reason for the recall of the book and its subsequent publication without the poem, was that the Minister of Public Works hated poetry of any kind and was unduly sensitive to the Opposition's jibe that he himself had written "Moonlight on Wascana Lake," considering the fact that the book was appearing under his auspices and authority. Moreover, the Minister rightly felt that in the ranching constituency of Saskatchewan's southwest corner which he represented, any hint of his being associated with poetry would disqualify him with the electorate. What might in the end have resulted in a cabinet crisis was resolved by the Premier himself who suggested as a compromise that a reward be offered for the discovery of the author of "Moonlight on Wascana Lake;" that the book be re-published without the poem; and, finally, that the Department of Public Works withdraw from the publication and that it be brought out under the imprimatur of the Department of Agriculture.

It is surprising that to date no one has come forward to claim the reward for the authorship of "Moonlight on Wascana Lake" since it is a symphonic poem of high literary and moral value. Its political overtones point towards the civil servant Jones-Jones as the author since he is a kind of Poet Laureate for the Government and as a member of the School of Seven in Saskatchewan he may very possibly have had a hand in it. A more reasonable suggestion is that, in keeping with the co-operative movement in Saskatchewan, the poem actually represents the combined efforts of several members of the School of Seven. Certainly the last few lines with their high moral tone and their search for truth point not alone to Jones-Jones but also to the always high-minded Jordan Middleduck. Furthermore the reference to the sardine tins and the empty ice-cream cartons in the lake indicate that Bessie Udderton, the exponent of innerness took part in its composition. The suggestion which has been made that "Moonlight on Wascana Lake" may, like "Spring," actually be one of the hitherto unpublished poems of Sarah Binks can be at once ruled out, since in Sarah's day Wascana Lake was still a partly dried-out creek to which Sarah's description as "a mean little puddle; I could spit across it," still applied. About all that can be said with certainty is that the Minister of Public Works did not write it.

moonlight on wascana lake

Be still, oh Lake, be still Wascana's wave,
Nor lap these picnic bottles to their rest,
Sound not harsh note of sardine tin, nor lave
The empty ice-cream cartons to thy breast;
But let this respite from the daily rote
Release the evensong of life's estate —
The bull-frog searching for the perfect note,
The house-cat shrieking for the perfect mate —
Then let each sound of orchestration deft,
Arise and fill sweet melody of night —
The ancient engine shunting on my left,
The chuckles from the bushes on my right:

In rip and rill, in bush and bog are things
Uncertain as to measure and to place,
The shrill mosquito in the higher strings,
The sulky beetle groping in the bass —
Oh whispering lovers underneath the bridge,
Be still, be still — oh brittle crickets pause,
Oh cat, oh engine, bull-frog, bug, and midge,
Await your cue, nor hurry quick applause;

But learn that only dissonance awaits
The one whose tune is to all others deaf —
'Tis unison alone that orchestrates,
And swells the spirit of the ccf,
Let not your sounds contend — each note of strife,
May find its echo in some far-flung booth —
Co-operation is the key of life,
Co-operatives, economic truth.

This poem, so true to the spirit of the ccf Government at the time, was followed in the first edition of Fifty Years of Progress by the Premier's message, and then by a message shorter by at least twenty pages from the Minister of Public Works. In his message to the people of his province, the Premier points to the tremendous strides which Saskatchewan has made since its founding in 1905, and he quotes percentages and statistics to show the increase in production. In those cases such as oil and potash where the production figures jumped from zero to their present values the percentage increases are given always as being a complete one hundred percent, a figure most readily understood, although, as admitted by the Government, as percentages they are actually somewhat higher. It was also apparent from the Premier's message that the production of apple-cake in Saskatchewan had also increased by a hundred percent. Figures were also given as to the number of student-miles travelled by school buses per year as compared with those of 1905, and the total weight in tons per square inch of tire surface carried by the public road system during the life of the administration. They were all impressive and reflected great credit upon the Government, but from the standpoint of the student of literature an even greater credit must be given to the Government for having devoted an entire chapter of its Fifty Years of Progress to the cultural growth of Saskatchewan.

This chapter which was entitled "Willows Revisited," after John Swivel's poem by that name, was most appropriately prefaced by a hitherto unpublished poem entitled "Spring" written by Sarah Binks herself. Concerning this poem at least, there has never been any dispute as to its authorship, since it was actually signed by Sarah. It was discovered by sheer chance in a desk in the office of The Horsebreeder's Gazette by one of two tax auditors who happened to be examining the desk at the time, and it was at once recognized as having literary value. Apparently it had been submitted by Sarah two years before her death and had been accepted for publication, since it bears the stamp, "Paid, June 15th, 1925." Such manuscripts, according to the editor of the Gazette, were kept for filler and were used as occasion arose. But this particular poem had been completely forgotten, since it had been pushed to the back of the drawer because of his secretary's habit of keeping both her lunch as well as his in front. The editor, however, was quite willing to trade Sarah's "Spring" for a copy of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" of which he had never heard and which on examination he declared to be "just about the same length."

In "Spring" Sarah's natural exuberance takes over without any stress upon the more solemn political spirit which characterizes "Moonlight on Wascana Lake" and it is therefore more appropriate as an introduction devoted to poetry and culture of Saskatchewan. In "Spring" Sarah simply bubbles with joy. She catches that fleeting moment in which the seasons in Saskatchewan change from the dead of winter to the heat of summer. For spring in Saskatchewan is never a season; it is an event. It is a day like Christmas Day or Fair Day except that it never comes by the calendar; it comes as a complete surprise. No one in Saskatchewan ever expects spring; he hopes for it. Spring there, is a matter of faith, not science, but faith there is always justified, however late. Saskatchewan would be only too glad to celebrate the arrival of spring on a certain day much as the ancient Druids celebrated the arrival of the vernal equinox, if they only knew when it would arrive. But Sarah catches it on the fly:

spring

By Sarah Binks

It's spring again! Who doubts the day's arrival,
Peeks not the thistle from the garden bed?
And shrieks the robin not the glad survival
Of cut-worm lifting up its vernal head?

In swelling chords, full-throated to the weather,
And strong of lung, once more spring voices sway —
Alto and bass, the cow and calf together,
Spring, spring is here, peal out its passing day!

I know of nothing that can so elicit,
Such great relief as spring, I know no boon,
That's half as welcome as the annual visit,
Of spring between the equinox and June,

Let voices then lift up in high endeavor,
To greet this day — the robin and the kine,
And add the wind at sixty for full measure,
And one shrill note which happens to be mine.

Sarah is always the true artist. There is something positively Wagnerian in her adding her own voice, the "one shrill note," to all that noise with which spring announces itself. This is because spring is in her heart, and she is also true to her own province in that she introduces the cow as a kind of spring symbol emphasized by the appearance of the spring calf. It may well be that the cow as a leitmotif in so much of the contemporary poetry in Saskatchewan, owes its origin to Sarah's repeated reference to the spring calf. It is certainly a heritage which should not be overlooked.

It is interesting to observe here in connection with the cow that in the second edition of Fifty Years of Progress, the poem which replaced the deleted "Moonlight on Wascana Lake" was one dealing with cows and was written by the Laureate, Jones-Jones. He had been commissioned by the Department of Agriculture to write two poems, one dealing with wheat and the other dealing with cows, and he was paid fifty dollars each for them. This probably represents the high-water mark for literature in Saskatchewan, but the Government felt that this was an anniversary and was willing to pay a little extra for quality. "Cow," the second poem, was duly published in Fifty Years of Progress, but "Wheat" became lost in the confusion of so much publishing, and the one verse which has so far appeared came out a full year later in the Bulletin (No. 4506) entitled Bird Houses and Bee Culture, the bee culture being that part of this fascinating subject which had not already appeared in the Premier's message. (It also contained a final recipe for apple cake which had been sent in very late by one of the ethnic groups.) The poem "Wheat" was apparently meant to deal with some of the farmers' problems in raising grain for the market, in this case the problem being that of the game birds and ducks eating the grain before the hunting season opened in the fall. No doubt, in keeping with the Department of Agriculture 's tradition, other problems were dealt with in the poem, but these are not available and "Wheat," what there is of it, merely raises the problem without settling it.

wheat

(Probably one of the later verses)

Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet,
The birds eat wheat,
And wild ducks gorge the oat,
And man must shout
To keep them out,
In words unfit to quote;
Unless, of course, he feels his toil
Must fatten them for fall,
So that the man who raises oil,
Can come and shoot them all.

It is a pity that the rest of "Wheat" was lost. It is actually of a higher order than "Cow."

cow

(By Osiris Jones-Jones, S.O.M.)

Throughout the ages, lo! the cow,
Kindhearted, useful, good,
Is oft forgot, we praise her now,
We praise her loud — and should.

The milk, the cheese, the steaks we eat,
Are they not from the cow?
And multitudes upon the street,
Are they not shod — and how?

And though the sire, of puffing snoot,
Lascivious, goggle-eyed,
Is mean and shiftless, dissolute,
And given to false pride,

Let none decry the cow — but state
That such is nature's way;
Each living thing selects its mate,
In beauty or in hay;

And if, perchance the cow seems odd
To crave such no-account,
She still has virtues left to laud,
The bounties from her fount;

For even man may take to bed
A one of virtue's doubt —
But cow at least, when given head,
Knows what its all about.

"Willows Revisited" in the Government's anniversary book followed the sections dealing with Oil, Industry, and Education, and it dealt with the cultural achievements of Saskatchewan, particularly literature. In addition to the space given to Sarah Binks and to the fame brought to her native province, the Government paid tribute to various contemporary ethnic groups for the contributions they were making towards the enrichment of western culture in the matter of folk-dances, folk-costumes, and folk apple cake, and also commended them for their efforts to transplant the habits and customs of their homelands to the new country of their adoption. Particular reference was made to Purge Potatok, the New Canadian of Ukranian origin upon whom the Saskatchewan Order of Merit was conferred for his poetry, and mention was also made of the translations from the German by Mathilda Schwantzhacker, although no particular honour was here bestowed. (See "Mathilda," Appendix IV.)

The group of poets, which until then had been simply and somewhat loosely known as the Regina School was now, with the addition of Potatok, given official recognition as the School of Seven and was to be regarded henceforth as Saskatchewan's answer to Ontario in the matter of culture, the hope even being first expressed here that some of these days Saskatchewan would be able to go Ontario one better. Moreover as a special honour to mark the anniversary year, upon each member of the School was now conferred the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, an honour which carried with it the privilege of writing som after the name.² Finally all seven of the poems which had been declaimed over Sarah's grave the year before, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death, were published in the chapter, "Willows Revisited," even including as a concession to modernity the poem recited by Professor Bedfellow and which John Swivel, who acted as master of ceremonies on that occasion, had predicted the Department of Agriculture would never publish. But it was pointed out by the Minister of that department that "there is a place for everything in this country and on the whole the poems are as good as anything in Canada," which they undoubtedly are. The Minister mentions also the place and occasion which gave rise to the seven poems and states that "when it comes to shrines we here in Saskatchewan don't have to take a back seat to anybody." The reference, of course, is to the famous meeting place, Willowview Cemetery, where the School of Seven first met as a body.³

————

Footnotes:

¹ From an address prepared for the Grafton Tabernackel Memorial Lectures and given before the Ladies Literary League of Quagmire, Saskatchewan. September. 1965. →

² The original intention of the government to institute a Saskatchewan Order of the Bath, was disallowed by the Dominion Government at Ottawa as being an attempt to restore hereditary titles into Canada. →

³ See Appendix I. →

3  The School of Seven*

One and a half miles north of the little town of Willows lies the acre and a half of light and sandy soil known as Willowview Cemetery. It is not visible from the town of Willows itself, being concealed by a slight rise of land. Nevertheless it is appropriately named Willowview, since from the top of the wrought-iron gate which the schoolboys in search of gophers are fond of climbing, it is possible to see the upper halves of the two elevators of Willows. There were once four elevators at Willows, and at the time when Willowview Cemetery was named, it was possible to see the tops of all four from the gates. In the earlier days of the western prairies the number of elevators in a town was always a measure of its importance and a matter of local pride, and it is probable that Willowview was so named because it was felt that the departed citizens should not be altogether deprived of a sight which during their living days had always gladdened their hearts. Since only the tops of the elevators were visible from the cemetery itself, the suggestion that there was a further reality "beyond the hill" gave the whole a kind of spiritual quality. This has been somewhat reduced by the loss of two of the elevators and even more by the erection within sight of the cemetery of a filling station, also calied Willowview, and of "Joe's Eats" at the correction line a half mile away. Adjoining the cemetery itself on the north lies the farm of Purge Potatok, a hundred and sixty or more acres of sand and alkali which no one has ever bothered to plough, crossed by many prairie trails and short cuts centring in a small barn and the shanty where Potatok lives.

Since the historic meeting of the School of Seven in Willowview, the cemetery has been, to quote the mayor of Willows, "spruced up." It has been enclosed within a stout fence of barbed wire, the grass has been repeatedly cut, and the letters above the gate which had been dislodged by the schoolboys in their climbs have been replaced and soldered back into their original position. (At least it is claimed by the local tinsmith who did the soldering that they are in the original position and who has, according to his claim, "the holes to prove it" despite the fact that two letters I and E in the sign have been transposed and that it now reads WILLOWVEIW.) In addition to such improvements as fence and gate, the concrete obelisk which marks the last resting place of Sarah Binks has been straightened since it had developed a decided tilt away from the prevailing west wind, and was, in fact, in some danger of falling over. A small sign has also been placed on the gate by the Town Council of Willows stating that the lighting of fires within the cemetery is strictly forbidden and that violators will be prosecuted.

Apart from the activity around Joe's Eats on Friday and Saturday nights, the scene around Willowview (or Willowveiw if preferred) is one of great peace. And it is singularly appropriate that here in the quiet obscurity of a wayside cemetery, the great poetess of the prairies should sleep. She has been much forgotten. Fame, alas, is always a fickle jade and apart from such special occasions as Saskatchewan's semi-centennial celebration, she is remembered only by the poets themselves. But she is remembered particularly by those who gathered in Willowview to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death and to pay her homage in poetry of their own.

Perhaps it is just as well that Sarah died when she did. If she had continued to live, the School of Seven might never have got under way, and we would have missed the fascinating diversity and variety of outlook expressed by the poets of the contemporary scene. Nevertheless Sarah has left her indelible mark upon the literature of Western Canada. One can never say, of course, that her mantle has descended upon any particular one of her successors, yet there is not one, with the possible exception of Wraitha Dovecote, but owes her a great debt. The poetic well from which Sarah scooped her famous "Up From The Magma" still quenches the thirst of her followers. The poetic springs, once started, continue to flow even in the dry belt. The dream of oil, which in the case of Sarah's father's farm was to remain always a dream in spite of repeated drillings, may have become a physical reality in many of the farms of her home province, but those borings can never tap the streams of poetic fancy which Sarah tapped. Indeed, the contrary is true. Sarah's drillings reached only failure and frustration, but these taught her the great lesson of literature which she was to express in one form or another throughout her mature poetic life. "Literature is mostly doleful choral, and grief the poet's steady stock in trade," she was to cry when contemplating the "marble slab" (or as it turned out, the concrete obelisk) which was to mark her fame. And since not all of Saskatchewan is by any means underlaid with oil, those poets of today who have not access to what there is of it, must needs still dip their pens in the alkaline waters of the prairie which seeped into Sarah's well of inspiration. Certainly those poets of Saskatchewan who have, as they say, "struck oil" in one way or another, have found their fount of inspiration emulsified to the point where it no longer flows, and they have disappeared from the literary scene. It would almost appear as if the frustration and defeat and non-recognition with which until recently the poets of Saskatchewan have been faced, have also presented their own challenge and opportunity. Without them we would never have had that peculiar, intangible quality of innerness, a spiritual no less than physical hunger which pervades so much of the School of Seven and which reaches its highest expression in the Vestal Verses of Bessie Udderton.

The little group of Saskatchewan poets who gathered in Willowview Cemetery that hot and windy Dominion Day in 1954 to pay homage to Sarah Binks were not unaware of the literary significance of their meeting, more especially since the Government through the Department of Agriculture had signified its willingness to publish their poems.* Perhaps no one was more aware of this than the Great Dean of Saskatchewan letters, John Swivel, who addressed them that evening in the Clarendon Hotel following the duck dinner.³

"This," he said, "has been a definite historic occasion. We owe it to Sarah Binks. Insofar as Sarah is remembered, we will be remembered. And let us keep in mind that whatever this day has meant to us — and we certainly owe the Committee a big vote of thanks for all the trouble they went to in making arrangements for the dinner and things like that so that it means even more than we had originally thought it would — let us keep in mind that we are heirs of a great poetic tradition and it's up to us now. It's unfortunate that we had that fire but I think we can settle the whole thing for under five dollars or something like that, and I think we can afford to raise it among ourselves especially as we know the Department is going to publish the things we did here today — at least six of them. Anyway you can't say I didn't warn you, and I am sorry it had to be Miss Dovecote who was the chief sufferer because it wasn't her fault. Anyway, we really put it across today and those poems of ours, and I won't say they are all of the highest quality, are going to have their impact. After all, this Willow-Quagmire district is the Premier's own constituency and Sarah Binks's monument is smack in the middle of it. And while I'm at it I might as well tell you that this afternoon while the rest of you were going over Mr. Deepy's poems, I added the date of this meeting to those on Sarah's monument, because, as I said, this is a historic occasion and deserves to be remembered. We certainly owe a lot to her."

The six poets who were joined later by Purge Potatok are those upon whom the Saskatchewan Order of Merit was later conferred.

They are:

John Swivel (The Great Dean of Saskatchewan letters).

Wraitha Dovecote.

Mrs. Martha Waffle (Bessie Udderton).

Professor Baalam Bedfellow, Ph.D.

Jordan Middleduck.

Osiris Jones-Jones (The Laureate).

Purge Potatok, D.P. (Appeared later. See Appendix I.)

Each of these poets had written a poem for the occasion in honour of Sarah or of her birthplace, Willows, and these were to be read and tossed upon a ceremonial pyre built on Sarah's grave. They are each in keeping with the individual's own work and poetic point of view and are correspondingly of great interest on that account. But apart from personal temperament and individual differences of approach, there are certain characteristics of the School of Seven as a whole which can be considered. Of these the two outstanding ones are those already mentioned, innerness, and the use of the cow as a symbol.

From a literary point of view it has always been something of a mystery as to why the poetry of Saskatchewan should so often turn upon the cow as a central theme. Saskatchewan has never been a "cow country" in the sense that Texas and Arizona were cow countries. The Canadian prairies passed almost imperceptively from the control of Sarah's "The Red Brother," to the wheat economy of which the cow was a mere adjunct, more for domestic comfort than of economic significance. There was certainly no intervening period of gunslinger and cowpuncher around which a people as bardically inclined as the Canadians, could have written the ballads and the heroic literature which inspired the American Southwest. And yet it would almost seem that no poet of western Canada, and certainly no poet of the School of Seven, can feel that he properly belongs unless he has written at least one poem about the cow or has made some passing reference to the cow as a poetic symbol. But it is just in this very symbolism that the attraction of the cow as a theme lies.

Sarah Binks undoubtedly started it all. We need only go back to her very earliest poems to the calf, and her "Song to the Cow" to perceive that for her the cow was a symbol of domesticity. The cow, for her, represented farm and fireside. The cow's nose was "plush-like and warm," its eye quick to perceive the best feeding ground, and it had "a breath like ale," all of which Sarah summarizes in her commendation by

These attributes in a cow, I deem,
Are the best to be had and win my esteem.

Sarah loved the cow as one loves a fellow-creature of any kind able to receive and return affection, and she invariably clothes it in human qualities. Even in "Hiawatha's Milking," Co-boss, although perhaps a bit unwilling to yield something of her essential self to one who in her opinion could represent no more than a past culture and a civilization which was already on the way out, is nevertheless sad. Her eyes are "doleful" as well as soulful and she sighs deeply before kicking Hiawatha in the pail. Such things reveal the cow as standing for the domestic virtues as well as for the security of the land of which Sarah always felt herself to be a part. And even in "Spring" where the cow and the calf blend their alto and bass in harmony of praise to the new weather, there is somehow or other a suggestion of a happy domestic scene like children singing together in the joy of Christmas morning.

The cow, having thus quite unconsciously been set up as a symbol by Sarah, her successors have naturally followed suit. But not slavishly. For the different poets, the cow carries different significance. Only in the case of Purge Potatok can we say that the significance of the cow is the same as it was for Sarah. And even here it it slightly different, since in Sarah's case it was coloured by her femininity. But the "home and hearth" solidity which the cow represented for Sarah has its counterpart in the mind of the New Canadian, Potatok, as standing for economic security. For him ownership of the cow is not spiritual freedom as some have held, but rather freedom from the grinding poverty of his homeland where tradition still maintained that only an Archbishop or a Grand Duke or even the Czar could ever aspire to a cow. And like Sarah he has a deep personal fondness for the cow as a fellow creature, especially for his "boy-cow" whom he affectionately calls "that little baster," whatever that means, and whom he somewhat playfully slaps "six times on the pents," certainly not in anger, for having escaped the corral he built for it.

In his Ph.D. thesis at St. Midget's, Byron Rumpkin advances the interesting theory that what has since come to be known as archetypal bovinism arises out of a repression within the subconscious, either self-induced or externally forced whereby the natural desire for milk during infancy becomes replaced by a desire for alcohol. In this process the id becomes to some extent identified with the bos image in the subconscious mind which seeks an outlet. It is then projected, but its semantic implications depend entirely upon the value structure acquired during maturation, and in the case of the poet these may be manifold though the form remains the same. The different symbolic significances of the cow may thus be accounted for.

More evidence should be adduced to confirm this theory, but as far as it goes it is useful in explaining the wide variety in cow-symbolism which is observed in the School of Seven. It is certainly consistent with Jordan Middleduck's high-minded value-structure that he should perceive the unusual, though by no means altogether unknown, cow-in-the-sky phenomenon through the eyes of Noah's wife and draw the comparison with clouds as a heavenly manifestation. On the other hand with Jones-Jones, the symbolism of the cow is, as we have seen, simply and readily expressed by fifty dollars.

Further consideration of cow-symbolism is reserved for later and more detailed discussion of the individual poets and some examples of their different uses of the cow will be given as they occur in their works. John Swivel's frequent reference to the cow to symbolize his favourite theme of time's passing and the vanity of life is well known. Less obvious, of course, since she attempts to conceal it, but still understandable on the basis of Rumpkin's theory, is Wraitha Dovecote's famous sigh of farewell to her departing youth in the brilliant "Hast Milk to Spare?" But it is difficult to know in the case of Baalam Bedfellow, why, as in "Seared Land," he should call out in an apparent agony of spirit, "Strive for us cows, for we are weak," when we know perfectly well that he hates cows almost as much as he hates birds. He has certainly never had archetypal bovinism, since this, on top of his anti-snearth complex, would have killed him. It must be that as a Westerner he just can't get the cow out of his system. For when he cries out as he does in some of his other poems, or even in some of his later instalments of "Seared Land," "Strive for us, ye Powers for we are weak," or even, "strive for us ye stars for we are feeling pretty weak these days," we cannot but conclude that he merely uses the cow as a figure of speech. We cannot feel that like Potatok or like Sarah, he loves the cow. Bedfellow is just too cerebral for such emotion.

Interestingly enough, the only member of the School of Seven who has never written about the cow is Bessie Udderton. True, she has a great fondness for dairy products and these, for her, have become to a considerable extent identified with innerness with which so much of western poetry has been identified and of which she herself is the chief exponent. It may be that her reluctance to write about the cow is due to the fact that she once, in referring to the countryside around her home described it as being "studded with cows," an expression for which she was immediately taken to task by her readers who felt that although a poet was entitled to get her metaphors mixed, taking liberties with sexes that way was something else again. Milk, cream, butter, cottage cheese, beef-Stroganoff, tenderloin tips with mushrooms, grilled T-bone, sirloin roast (medium) — Bessie make the oblique approach to the cow, but it is no less real on that account. Moreover, as Rumpkin has pointed out, the very fact that she chose the pen-name, Bessie, is itself significant. The bos image dies hard.

Not so apparent as the cow but more deeply imbedded in Saskatchewan literature is innerness, that quality of poetry which, although not unknown in Canada, has become a definite characteristic in the School of Seven. It is a peculiar inversion of two negatives to form one positive. All poetry, as we know, must have its roots in history but innerness arises out of Saskatchewan's lack of history. It arises furthermore out of Saskatchewan's characteristic economy of wheat, or at least what was its characteristic economy before the discovery of oil. Wheat, in Saskatchewan, has always stood, and indeed still stands for prosperity — of food and an abundance of things to eat. But it is a prosperity of which the poet traditionally suffers a lack. And in Saskatchewan's history the very soil which the poet was seeking to express and out of which he was to draw his inspiration, was refusing him its essence. Reaching then into the history of the land itself for further inspiration, the poet finds another lack since there is practically no history worth mentioning. The result of all these lacks is however not what we would expect, a frustration and a withdrawing, but actually an idealization. The poetic spirit is not easily crushed.

Those who hold that innerness in Saskatchewan is merely a case of the poets there being hungry and that they are writing about it, cannot see the fine points of literature. To understand innerness we must go back as far as we can into what there is of Saskatchewan's history. Actually there is very little. Fifty Years of Progress undoubtedly represents, as the Government points out, a tremendous percentage increase in almost everything, which is not surprising considering there was nothing to start from. In actual years the Saskatchewan poet has no long period of political or heroic history from which to draw his inspiration. Sarah Binks, of course, wrote her own history but the poet of today cannot call upon Caesar and his legions as did Sarah for poetic inspiration, especially since the historians, notably Farley Mowat, have shown that it was not the Romans but the Norwegians who first discovered Saskatchewan; and these at best can serve only as a poetic mulch. Nevertheless, the poet makes the best of what he has even if it is, as the great German critic and historian, von Hinten states, "ever so little." Without it, he declares, it loses one Geist after another: Lacking innerness [declares von Hinten] no poet can interpret history. Poetry is the innerness of history. Without innerness, no poetry. But also without history no innerness. It then becomes history in the special or the ersatz sense. It is to ask ourselves whether or no.

But history in this special sense requires two things, namely, history in the ordinary sense, and the poetic historian in the extraordinary or disordinary sense. Of these two the latter is the most important. The history of a people lies not so much in the Zeitgeist, or record-of-events, as it does in the strength-through-interpretation-given-to-events, that is to say in effect, the Wienerschnitzelgeist of the poet. And we must here again ask ourseves whether or no. If no — then no. If not no — who can say? But always the historian must be master of both or he loses the soul-spirit, the Poltergeist.

This he cannot acquire on his own. It is given or it is not given. If the poet cries, "help me with," we can do nothing. It can thus be qualitative as well as quantitative, depending on the negation. But of history in the ordinary sense there must always be some, if ever so little.

Here we have the dilemma of the Saskatchewan poet. Having of history in the ordinary sense "ever so little" he sublimates it by bringing it into the present and mixing it, if not exactly with wheat, at least with what wheat and wheat product once stood for. Innerness and the cow here meet on common ground. Undoubtedly the Regina School may have been hungry in its early days. But this is no longer actually the case. If the poets still tend to regard food with more than the usual poetic anticipation, as Bessie Udderton undoubtedly still does, it is all the more to their credit. The great poet penetrates the hidden depths of life and has therefore a deeper inspiration; but for the School of Seven, food has lost its mere sustaining and caloric significance. It has become spiritualized and like the cow has taken on a higher meaning. True, its physical necessity as poetic fuel is acknowledged and even Jordan Middleduck, probably the most impecunious and certainly the leanest of the School of Seven, says as much in his "Break Not the Lute," despite the fact that as a rule Middleduck is far above such considerations of the flesh as food, let alone other things:

Break not the lute, the poet's spate
Rests not alone on vernal scenes,
But also on when last he ate —
He cannot function lacking beans;

For tears that fall upon the page,
And sorrow which the poet pens
Unless with nourishment assuaged,
Yield no poetic dividends;

And unfed Muse, the sulky jade,
Like women all will soon retreat,
And never be at best arrayed,

Unless invited out to eat.⁴

We owe much to the Saskatchewan Government for its encouragement of the indigenous poetry of Western Canada and for its recognition of the School of Seven in conferring the Order of Merit upon its members. Such things bring them to the fore. They are all, in a sense, the literary heirs of the immortal Sarah Binks "than whom" to quote a voice from the distant past, "no greater has ever hit the prairies." But they all lack Sarah's verve, her ebullience, her youth, and, above all, her joy in the soil. They may, like Sarah herself, still represent their province and their native land, but what with the oil and industrialization of Saskatchewan they seem to have become old before their time. Wraitha Dovecote, the one from whom we would expect to find before all others some of Sarah's clear notes of joy, has fallen into an infinite sadness. John Swivel, the Great Dean, despite all the honours and success which have come his way, has returned again to the writing of those very In Memoriam poems through which he had first won recognition. Bessie Udderton's lyrical innerness, especially as she tends to put on weight, tends also to become more and more a mere index of chain-store products, and Professor Bedfellow, the Piltdown Man, is becoming increasingly difficult to understand, as he returns more and more to the primitive in his efforts to reach a pre-bird period of history. Osiris Jones-Jones, although high in Government regard as the Laureate and author of the Provincial Song, "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden," is nevertheless counted more for his skill in bird-watching and in running a tape recorder than as a creative artist. Only perhaps in Purge Potatok, the lowly immigrant, the d.p., the newcomer to this country, do we capture again, albeit in broken English, some of that love of the Saskatchewan soil that once was Sarah's.

Talent they undoubtedly have, and all are poets of the West. But it is no longer the same West. It is no longer the kingdom of wheat and no longer can any of them shout, "The farmer is King!" They may reflect their province but it is no longer a province of Sarah's "field and sky and rain-drenched hill." As we have seen in their co-operative "Moonlight on Wascana Lake," political considerations now intrude. There are economic frustrations and there are deep spiritual and psychological problems which must be overcome. But in the end it all makes for a great literature.

Saskatchewan is coming of age. The "Fifty Years of Progress" is, to quote from the Premier's message, "but one stage in the long history which still lies ahead." Who knows what the next fifty years will bring? To the ever-growing accumulation of bardic literature each individual in the School of Seven has made his own contribution. But in the end to understand and appreciate the total accumulation we must see each of the poets as a person and as an individual.

In the thumb-nail sketches which follow no attempt has been made to give exhaustive biographies or to trace literary influences and antecedents, but merely to present the poet as he is at present. It is hoped that the reader will be enabled thereby to have a better understanding of their work as springing from a definite personality. Once they are dead, it will be a pleasure, of course, to give them each a more complete study.

————

Footnotes:

¹ It is the School of Seven and not the "Group" as in Ontario according to Fifty Years of Progress. "We don't have to follow every damn thing they do in that province," said the Premier of Saskatchewan in his message in that booklet. →

² A complete account of this meeting together with a transcription of the tape recording of the proceedings made by Jones-Jones is given in Appendix I. The seeds of the "Poem-of-the-Month" project which was to spring into blossom twelve long years later were being sown on this occasion, but of this the Regina School was completely unaware. →

³ See Appendix III. →

⁴ This is the poem to which Bessie Udderton, the poet of innerness wrote two verses in reply. Incidentally, the theme of the broken lute is a favourite one with the School of Seven and on one occasion at least was even adopted by M, the unknown Muse of Jones-Jones. See Appendix I. →

4  John Swivel
  The Great Dean

The great difficulty encountered in the study of the individual members of the Saskatchewan School of Seven is that they are not yet dead. To explain a poet properly the literary historian must first search for roots and influences and antecedents out of which the poetry has arisen, and these he must find in the poet's own history. But what does he do when the poet's own history is still in the making and has not yet caught up with him. The biographical tales, legends, and reminiscences which are so necessary for the poetic understanding are simply not available while the poet is still alive. In the case of such generalizations as innerness and cows, it is always possible to make use of certain lacks to account for them, but when we are dealing with the individuals themselves, a more positive background must be found. Otherwise no poet, and especially not the Saskatchewan poet, is understandable or even plausible. Without the background to serve as a context of understanding, poetry is left hanging in the air, a mere something to be enjoyed for its own sake standing in opposition to all the traditions of sound scholarship.¹

It would be fascinating to review John Swivel's childhood, to point to his early reading, his schools, his teachers, his interests and his hobbies, and perhaps even his first stirrings towards girls. But the truth is that we know little, and what little we know is negative. He seems to have read nothing, had no hobbies, and have been singularly indifferent to girls. About all we know is that he was born in Quagmire, that he grew up in Quagmire, that he lives in Quagmire, and that according to his own wishes and expectations, he will "pass on" in Quagmire. Quagmire for him is the complete cosmos. And yet, uneventful as John Swivel's life has been, he stands today as the Great Dean of Saskatchewan letters, the outstanding poet of all western Canada, and in the hearts of his countrymen second only to Sarah Binks herself.

Few facts emerge concerning John Swivel. He was the youngest child in a family of six children all of whom were girls except himself, which may account for the fact that he never married. His parents, who were neither poor nor affluent, sent him to the local school which he attended until the age of sixteen. He was then employed as an errand boy and general handyman in one of the large insurance companies who had just opened a western branch at Quagmire. In the course of time the young Swivel became a full-fledged insurance agent in his own right specializing in life insurance from which he managed to make an indifferent living. It was not until he accepted a tombstone agency as a side line that prosperity smiled on him.

The sale of tombstones as a complement to the sale of life insurance seemed to Swivel to be a logical step, but the tombstones seem also to have marked a milestone in his literary life. For it unearthed in Swivel a talent which had all this time been latent — that of poetry. He had certainly never been particularly active in his business of selling insurance and even his sale of tombstones had been marked by a somewhat inept attitude which no amount of special drives and seasonal price reductions and sales conferences on the part of the company in Regina was able to overcome. But when he discovered that by giving with each tombstone three "In Memoriam" poems, which he found he was obliged to write himself (since those supplied by the company were limited in number and in any case did not meet local conditions), not only did his sale of tombstones increase, but so also did his enthusiasm for selling them. Swivel had found himself.

It was in the writing of the "In Memoriam" poems that John Swivel's genius has developed. Except for his own pleasure he no longer writes this type of poetry which in the course of years has undoubtedly become of greater historical than poetic interest. But the influence of the "In Memoriam" poems has been profound. They have coloured all his later work. There is a sad, reflective quality in everything he does. One cannot escape on reading any of his poetry the sense of time's passing, the inevitable drift of all reality into shadows and memories. "All is vanity" saith the Preacher, and to some extent John Swivel has been accused of merely re-echoing this thought, of being, in fact, a Saskatchewan existentialist, insofar as anybody in Saskatchewan can be an existentialist. But it is not so. Swivel is greater than that. He sees beyond time's passing a larger reality, the unfolding of a design which he does not attempt to understand but whose unfolding he can contemplate with trust and equanimity. Perhaps nowhere, in all his work, is this better expressed than in his famous "Omniscient Plan."

"Omniscient Plan" is a singularly beautiful poem quite apart from its philosophical import. One likes to think of Swivel writing that poem. He is now in his declining years, retired, and settled down, living in a small but comfortable cabin on the prairie edge of Quagmire. He has suffered lately from twinges of arthritis and is troubled with gas on the stomach. But life has treated him kindly. Honours have come to him. He has twice won the Governor General's Medal for Poetry and the pair of carpet slippers which were presented to him by the Canadian Authors' Association on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and appropriately inscribed in needlepoint, Poeta nascitur on one, and non fit on the other, repose in a glass case on the parlour table. These, together with the elaborately framed Saskatchewan Order of Merit on the wall and the two refrigerators and the complete set of aluminum kitchenware which were awarded him for exceeding his quota for three years in succession during his tombstone selling days, form a fitting background for his achievements and his memories.

One likes to think of the Great Dean sitting on his screened veranda as he so often does and contemplating the Saskatchewan scene. He sees it with the poetic eye. He sees in the wide horizon of the West an infinite variety which to others would be bleak. He sees the animation of the prairies which to less poetic minds would be dull and uninteresting. It is a world for him which is full of sounds and poetic music; and the very fact that it is not one of urban activity and restless doing is for him an opportunity to explore the depths of time, the past, present, and future, all of which he sums up so beautifully in those closing lines in which he states that in Saskatchewan, man "Is given place to count the hours and meditate upon the tenses."

Omniscient plan that here unfolds
In sound effect, and pastorale;
To him who love of music holds
The gophers pipe their madrigal;
For gophers animate the scene,
And give a semblance of event,
And sing in praise of their demesne —
Though otherwise inconsequent.

For those who have no ear for sounds
And hold the gopher out of key,
The wide horizon still abounds
In infinite variety;
For there are posts and posts and posts,
And these are oft equipped with wires,
Which lead in turn to other posts,
And these again have insuliars:²

Again, to him whom nothing calms
But knowledge coming to the learner,
Who'd scorn the gopher singing Brahms,
And wouldn't know a scene from Turner,
Whose joy is cultivated powers
Within the mind and not the senses,
Is given place to count the hours,
And meditate upon the tenses.

Because of his ability to reflect upon the lives of great men and the heroes of the past, Swivel has sometimes been compared with Sarah Binks. But there is a vast difference in their approach. Sarah's poems, even when they deal with historical figures, always carry with them the verve and vitality of the contemporary scene. Historically Sarah was often enough at fault. The pterodactyl, for example, which she summons out of Saskatchewan's geological past, was never actually native to that province, but for Sarah it shares its joys and troubles with the birds she personally knew and studied, the snearth and the hallelujah bird. She had always the happy ability to pluck historical figures from the past long dead, to re-endow them with life and vitality. Time for her is always the living present, but for John Swivel it remains forever in the past. For Swivel it is a dimension which has disappeared leaving behind only its vague imprint and its sense of being lost in the eternal moment. One need only look at his famous poem, "The Great Man," his tribute to the Honourable Grafton Tabernackle, or rather to his memory, to see this exemplified.

"The Great Man" was written on the occasion of Swivel's last visit into the city of Quagmire. His cabin is on the far western outskirts of the city, and because he has to walk, he seldom gets into the heart of the city itself. But on the last occasion we are told that he stood for a full hour in a light drizzle with his hat removed before the statue of the Honourable Grafton Tabernackle, lost in contemplation. It is an odd statue, and it is quite possible that the citizens of the late premier's birthplace who subscribed — or at least partially subscribed — the moneys to erect the memorial to their Premier, will be better remembered because of it than will the one for who it was erected.

"Partially subscribed" indicates the zeal and the ability of the citizens of Quagmire to honour their fellow townsman who had reached Saskatchewan's highest honour. It was originally intended to have the figure done in bronze on a scale of three to one so that it might dominate the entire parking area in front of the Municipal Hall; but when it was found that the funds raised were insufficient to meet the original design, a compromise was effected by having the top half of the statue done in cast-iron at the local foundry on a three quarter scale, and the rest done by local labour in concrete, the scale being left to the artistic ability and the good intentions of the contractor in charge.

Some criticism has been levelled against the statue, chiefly on the grounds that there is an obvious discrepancy between the scales of the two halves of the statue. This may or may not be valid — it is impossible to make a proper check, the Premier having been too long dead. But critics have also complained that the arc light which was later extended from the top of the head was an artistic mistake regardless of what it could do for the parking area, and that the whole thing now resembles nothing so much as a home-made boudoir lamp of the amateur hobbyist without the shade. But such criticisms are generally considered by the majority of the citizens of Quagmire to be political in origin and certainly John Swivel was not moved by them. His poetic spirit is concerned only for the Great Man himself;

the great man

He was a great man in his day,
He strove, appropriated, bummed, and stole,
He saved his cash for a rainy day —
They stack him now beneath the mold;
They stack him on a mound of dirt,
Alone he stands in cast-iron shirt:
Alone, alone, in marble pants,
The Great Man views the sun's last going,
Oblivious that chiselled glance —
Daisies are waving, violets growing —
But what knows he of wealth or fame,
Nor all these things within his leaving —
Pigeons have erased his name
And far beyond all care or grieving,
He stands alone, who once was great,
Cast-iron, stone — inviolate.

"Marble pants" of course, is sheer poetry. The statue, as has been pointed out, is not marble but concrete. But it gives the impression sometimes of being marble, in view of what the school children have done to it with coloured chalk. Swivel makes full use of this opportunity to pay his hero even greater tribute.

John Swivel's life was never one of ease. The sale of tombstones often involved a long and patient search for prospects, and he travelled from farm to farm. As a poet he was always welcome; moreover, he frequently "helped out" with the chores and the farm work in return for what was in those days a simple and even primitive hospitality. Many a night he spent on the earthen floor of the lean-to attached to the sod house or the tar-paper shack; and he has seen farm life change from the early days of the four-horse binder at the reins of which the farm wife as often as not took her turn, to the coming of the modern combine gang from Oklahoma and Texas who move across the border and sweep the field clean overnight leaving everything shipshape for the farmer to go to Florida. And Swivel frequently looks back to those early days, and we are given glimpses of them. They are not only of days on the farm, but also of schools and schoolings where education and discipline was more rigorous than it is today, — when, for example, the trial of Warren Hastings was one of the highlights of the school reader and when Geography and History and "Parsing" had not as yet been blended into the more flavoursome stew of Social Science. And we are never sure in reading Swivel's poems whether he approves or not of the many changes which have taken place. He seems to look back with a certain fondness and a nostalgia amounting almost to regret. But time, being what it is for John Swivel, invariably takes over and enfolds the good as well as the bad within its infinite capacity. Even knowledge, so hard to come by, has, we are told, no abiding worth; it is one with the many acquisitions and treasures of life "awaiting the inevitable fire" and, like them, passing into rust;

It matters not how little we discern,
Nor yet how much, about the future day,
The sum of all the things we used to learn,
Has since been gathered up and swept away:
The cotyledons, and diaecious flowers,
The products of New Guinea and Sudan,
The men who dug the well in fourteen hours,
The ten terms of the Treaty of Siam,
The tracings and erasings and the pastings,
The parsings, and the bushels in the peck,
The impeachment and the Trial of Warren Hastings,
Have left that attic set above the neck.

And all the information we acquire,
Is like the clippings, magazines, and string,
Awaiting the inevitable fire
We light in June to celebrate the spring —
Like nails and nuts, and hook and hinge collected
Unsorted and accumulating dust,
And kettle with its handle disconnected —
So passes all our knowledge into rust;
It matters not what wealth of bolt and bottle,
We've put aside, or, straining, stocked the head —
That trove of trash, that lore of Aristotle,
Is never wanted 'til it's gone, or dead.

Swivel can not always have been so lost in time's poetic embrace. The sense of futility which pervades so much of his work seems to have grown with his increasing success in the sale of tombstones. But in his earlier days he must undoubtedly have taken a certain reserved and cautious joy in life even to the extent of admitting on occasion that it was good. Certainly the poem which has come to be known as "Wood" indicates as much. Perhaps his fondness for physical labour may explain it, for he was fond of any work which made no philosophical demands upon him beyond the somewhat sombre satisfaction of being helpful. In "Wood," a poem which incidentally harks back to the days before electrification in Saskatchewan, when all the cooking and whatever there was of heating was done with wood only, he makes a case for a farm wife who is finding her lot hard. Swivel points to the joy of common effort and calls attention to the fact that although she might find little to laud in her husband, in the matter of wood "at least he sawed it."

wood

Happy the man who calls life good,
And rising bucks three cords of wood,
And says, "How good! How good to live,
With this here wood — how good to give
Of this my talent and my strength,
By cutting it in proper lengths."
So too, the one he calls his wife
Is happy who can say of life,
"At least 'tis cut, and I'll admit it,
Now all I have to do is split it,
And seize each passing pause and jiffy,
To pile it high against the biffy,
And comes the winter tote it in,
And cart the ashes out again,
And though to me he rates no plaudit —
Say this for him, at least he sawed it."

Some of that attitude of resignation which later characterizes so much of Swivel's work can already be discerned in "Wood" and one is also made aware of an endless cycle. But on the whole it is more cheerful than most of his poetry, and his reputation would not have suffered if he had written more like it. But then he might never have become the Great Dean. For in the end his place in literature rests upon his ever-closer approach to being something of a Saskatchewan existentialist. His increasing preoccupation with the impermanence, if not actually the meaninglessness, of all things, and his emphasis upon the futility of all directed effort would lead us to think so. Certainly he seems to be departing from that quiet appreciation of the crowded horizon against the western sky and the gophers singing their way into our hearts as expressed in "Omniscient Plan." But it may also be merely an intensification of his gas on the stomach. One never knows about existentialists. For say what we will, Saskatchewan is still in his blood and like all his fellow poets in the School of Seven, he cannot escape the cow. In fact, no one has excelled him in cow-symbolism. In "Behold These Monuments" the cow finally becomes the ambassador of time itself. Surely nowhere in all literature has she been led as high. The wheat may spoil, the hill may be levelled and the proud elevator may fall — but where the cow has come "naught remains." Wraitha Dovecote's infinitely sad and nostalgic "Hast Milk to Spare" in which the cow is said to represent her departing youth is considered by many to be the last word in the use of the cow motif in Saskatchewan poetry, but in "Behold These Monuments" the Great Dean has gone her one better;

behold these monuments

Behold these monuments to all our moil,
Yon silo that contains the salted hay,
And these, the stacks, uplift with cumbered toil,
Defiant thrust, will some day pass away;
And even wheat, hard won from stubborn soil
Is not secure against time's certain chase,
For what the Wheat Board cannot sell will spoil,
And what is left the field-mice will erase;
And cows, ambassadors of time, will someday load
Themselves with silage until naught remains,
And prairie winds the high-flung stacks erode,
And leave man but a memory for his pains;
For time, who fells the elevator's pride,
And levels hill wherewith to fill the slough,
Will say, "Mark no achievement cut and dried,
Just two years' drought — and where the hell are you!"

————

Footnotes:

¹ Concerning this Professor Potatfritte of Paris declares: "And why not for its own sake? The trouble with all these Germanic philosophies is that they undergo putrescence, from which von Hinten, as a chief proponent, is by no means excluded. We do not need history for poetry. Under existentialism, poetry, though it may not be enjoyed for its own sake, can, as in all art, be endured for its own sake. What is required here is not history but fortitude, and of this the Germans with their high-flown theory of the Wienerschnitzelgeist know nothing. →

² The word "insuliar" in this poem is the Anglo-Saxon for our modern "insulator" and carries the same meaning. It is characteristic of poets generally, but of the Regina School in particular, to enrich our language either with new words or with old words revived and carrying a new burden of meaning. Swivel, for whom all time seems to exist only in the past and never in the present or future, is therefore specially inclined towards the use of words which are obsolete. →

5  Wraitha Dovecote
  The Exotic Wraitha

Wraitha Dovecote, the sad Wraitha, the exotic Wraitha, the broken-hearted Wraitha, the ever-beautiful Wraitha Dovecote. One never knows quite where to place or how to classify this charming poetess. From the standpoint of Saskatchewan she never seems altogether to fit in; farms, fields, elevators mean little to her. Where she touches Saskatchewan soil, and it is rarely, she does so lightly like a butterfly touching a flower. In all her poetry there is not a single grain of wheat. But prairie winds breathe gently through her lines and the dust that falls upon her memories is a prairie dust and the leaves which descend upon her heart in what she calls "the pale, cold twilight of November" are those scant few of the treeless plains which we can almost count. Moreover, she has written about the cow and she has written well. John Swivel and his "time's ambassador" notwithstanding, her brilliant "Hast Milk to Spare" is undoubtedly the finest cow-poem in all Canada.

Wraitha Dovecote is the only daughter of Mercy-Me and Thomas Jefferson Dovecote, a family of United Empire Loyalist stock who moved from Ontario to Regina during the drought years. Her father, who had a limited capital at the time, bought Saskatchewan land which in those days could be had for a song, and when he died during Wraitha's infancy, he left his wife and daughter with an adequate income. On her mother's side Wraitha traces her ancestry through her UFL forebears to Puritan Massachusetts where a great, great ancestor, God-Help-us Bittersweet, a devout and mild-mannered cranberry farmer of that state married a Mohawk princess, Kitchee-Kitchee-Koo, or, to give her name its English equivalent, Sitting-Duck. Kitchee, as she was known in the community, proved on repeated washings and to everybody's surprise to be exceedingly beautiful, and when, at the age of twelve, she presented her husband with identical twin daughters, she was relieved of her duties of picking cranberries, and she devoted herself to raising her two children. They were christened Mercy-Me and Glory-Be, names which in the course of time became family names which were used interchangeably since no one was ever able to tell the twins apart. Actually Wraitha's names are also Mercy-Me and Glory-Be but she proved at birth to be so frail and wraith-like that her mother added the name Wraitha which still seems to suit her better than either of the other two.

There is no doubt that Wraitha owes much of her beauty and some of her disposition to Kitchee-Kitchee-Koo. She is tall and long-limbed and dark, with a haunting quality in her eyes which one associates with a sprite in the woods. But her expression has become saddened. She became aware of her broken heart early in life — in fact at the age of twelve — when her mother refused to let her get married. And although her heart has since healed and been broken again repeatedly, each break has left its mark. They might indeed have destroyed her entirely had her sorrows not found an outlet in her poetry. The Mohawk gene in her blood is dominant in more ways than in her beauty. Kitchee-Koo, we are told also led a sad life under the careful eye of her husband, and it was only during the cranberry-picking season that she was able to sing with a free heart.

Wraitha and her widowed mother, who is still comparatively young and correspondingly handsome, live in a comfortable home in one of the better residential districts of Regina. From their upper windows they can see Wascana Lake. Their front yard is surrounded by a high iron fence with a heavy ornate gate, also of iron, which clangs ominously when opened and closed by the postman. Between the fence and the house are two large trees, a weeping willow and an evergreen, carefully trimmed to resemble a cypress. There is a large marble urn between the trees and this is kept filled with dead leaves and the grass is deliberately left uncut, the whole effect being one of studied neglect. The neighbours in the block used to object to this somewhat unusual landscaping, but since Wraitha has risen to fame, they have come to regard the Dovecote home as a kind of museum piece and are proud to live beside it and to show it to their friends when they come visiting from Manitoba or Ontario. In the back yard, however, which is not visible from the street and is enclosed in high boards, Wraitha and her mother have built a tiled patio, and have installed an outside barbecue, a portable bar, a small nook for sunbathing, and a plastic swimming pool.

Wraitha, with the exception of Professor Bedfellow, has the best education of the School of Seven. Following her high school she entered St. Midget's and in four years as well as an equal number of heartbreaks, she received her degree in Home Economics, magna cum laude. The result of her greater education shows to advantage in her poetry; she uses better grammar and she tends towards a lighter touch and a greater sophistication than the other members of the Regina School. But she has made little use of her professional training. As one of the outstanding graduates in Home Economics she has been given repeated opportunities to demonstrate cake-mixes or cosmetics or to model bathing-suits, but she has always felt that her talent lay in the field of poetry, particularly since she was subject to attacks of broken-heartedness and felt that she might as well make use of that also. Moreover, she was encouraged in this by Professor Bedfellow under whom she took her English at St. Midget's. Bedfellow repeatedly referred to her there as a poet of great promise; and although some of her classmates at St. Midget's and later some of her neighbors in Regina maintain that the great promise was not altogether literary in character and, in confirmation, point to her close and continued friendship with her former professor long after all examinations had been written, it is very doubtful whether the lovely Wraitha and the Piltdown Man share anything except a common interest in poetry. It may even be that the very contrast in their poetic attitudes draw them together in a kind of literary wonderment, and that they are genuinely and objectively interested in each other's work because they do not understand it. They are certainly poles apart in their literary credos, and if Bedfellow tolerates Wraitha's poetry at all, it is only because he regards it as an expression of her intense femininity — something which Wraitha admits he does most thoroughly understand, although she is unwilling to admit that he understands anything else.

In her high-school days Wraitha was already trying her hand at poetry, and although her early efforts tend to be trivial and flighty they are indicative of her later talents. One finds in her scribblers fragments such as,

Oh worra, worra, worra,
My love is no more true,
Last night, and again tonight,
He caught me out with you.

She wrote such light poetry as "I'm a Bobolink" and "Love is Willing":

I'm just a little bobolink
Bobling in the brook,
And in my little bobling suit,
The boys all look.

I'm just a little butterfly
Flying for butter,
And all the butter-and-egg men
Help me flutter.

I'm just a little goose girl,
And all around are geese —
And what I know of ganders
Is mostly grease.

love is willing

Love is sweet and willing
But all too soon forgets,
The end of coo and billing
Is nothing but regrets;
The end of loving briefness
Is only rue and longing,
Now who'll assuage my griefness,
And who'll undo the wronging.

They are not particularly good poems but they have charm, although suitable only to be recited at class parties and at school graduation exercises. She did in fact win the school prize for poetry with "Mother's Song" which she recited in the course of her address as class valedictorian. Like all beginners she tended to imitate, even to the extent of plagiarizing complete lines, and she was no doubt greatly influenced by Sarah Binks's "Little Papoose," the poem in which the Algonquin mother feeds her infant. Wraitha here has the Algonquin mother complimenting herself and her child on being the proper shade of red, a matter concerning which she appears, according to the young Wraitha, to have had anxieties. It is apparent here that Wraitha's knowledge of the Indian nature, despite her own distant ancestry, was at second hand, and that she was reflecting her high-school point of view. The Deputy Minister of Education who awarded the prizes that day is said to have chucked her under the chin as he did so saying, "Honey, you don't know your Indians." Moreover it has also been pointed out that there was no birch bark in Saskatchewan and that the baby's pants would probably have been made of Hudson's Bay four-point blanket. Nevertheless, it shows the mother's concern for her child and together with Sarah Binks's "Little Papoose," it has been included in the school readers of Saskatchewan.

mother's song

Blessings on you, little man,
Born complete with coat of tan,
And that's a blessing for me too,
For now you're Piegan, Cree, or Sioux —
Unless you fade by any chance,
Barefooted boy in birch-bark pants.

Blessings on you, little son,
Shades like yours should never run,
Just see they don't, then comes your way
Five big dollars treaty day.
So blessings on your little head,
Barefooted boy — at least you're red!

Graduation poems seemed to appeal to Wraitha. At least it was after her graduation dance at St. Midget's when, unable to get to sleep, she wrote "To Joe College," in which she visualizes the future success of some of the male graduates and expresses her willingness not to stand in the way of their careers:

Some day, you say, you'll reach the top,
Aggressive, strong, conformy,
But if you don't, my Sweet, and drop,
I'll shed no tears — you bore me.

Some day you'll drive a Cadillac,
With precious jewels bedeck me —
But get you stroke or cardiac —
Well, not a thought to wreck me.

You'll be a big executive,
Your name, you say, on Wall Street,
But if they never let you live —
I'm not the one to bawl, Sweet.

And though I listen to your dreams,
And say, success attend you,
My wandering mind must dwell, it seems,
On just the place to send you.

It was not a particularly popular poem with her classmates whose attitude towards the male graduates, particularly those in Engineering, was not the same as Wraitha's. But on the other hand her little poem called "Dolling Up" which was probably inspired by the course in cosmetology for which St. Midget's is famous, proved to be so popular with all her sorority sisters that they began adding verses of their own until forbidden by the Dean of Women.

dolling up

Blue is the colour of your true love's hair
And green her eyes are lidded,
And red her lips beyond compare,
And all her toe-nails — ibid.

And n'er was gal for your delight,
Adorned and robed completer,
And never star did shine more bright,
And never rose smell sweeter:

And never lass came more equipped
With virgin thoughts to send up,
Or all prepared with word and wit
To hold her social end up:

And yet despite such bright array,
So she'll be wooed and wedded,
You'd like me best when cats are grey —
Alone and bare and bedded.

Graduation in Home Economics actually came as something of a shock for Wraitha, and she felt it keenly. Not only was she now to be no longer under the care and concern of deans and demonstrators at St. Midget's, but she was suddenly being thrust into a world in which she had to depend upon herself and make her own decisions. But, much more than that, with graduation came a sense of leaving behind her the springtime of life. It was to become a theme which occurs again and again in her work and its first poetic expression, although not, as later, so explicit, found its outlet in "Hast Milk to Spare," a poem which definitely enrolls her among Saskatchewan poets.

hast milk to spare

Hast milk to spare, oh cow, then let
The lacteal bounty flow for me,
And give in unrestricted jet
The vitamins from A to G.

Happy and fretless be your lot
Nor let your private problems vex,
Lest, sadly, C and E are shot —
The antiscorbutic ones, and sex.

Let never inhibitions fix
In you those concentrates of youth,
But give them — all too soon we mix
The gin and orange-juice and vermouth.

Distill each careless day and free,
And pass along in white and wet,
The A and B and C and D,
And so on — down the alphabet.

It is a brilliant poem, although some maintain that it is a hard brilliance, an intellectual brilliance lacking any real feeling for the cow. It certainly does not partake of that affection which is so often seen in Saskatchewan poets and which Sarah Binks, for example, expresses when she speaks of the cow as having "a breath like ale" and a nose which is "plush-like and warm." But Saskatchewan has come far since those days. The cow has become a symbol, an abstraction, perhaps even a philosophical idea, certainly no longer a living being to be nurtured and petted and enfolded in loving arms; nor perhaps (except in the case of such humble and simple-minded poets as the immigrant, Purge Potatok), will it ever again be. Poetry too must make its sacrifice to progress. But there is nevertheless a personal sadness running through "Hast Milk to Spare" which, in the end, a cow could share. It is unfair to say as some of Wraitha's feminine critics have said, that it is a mere expertise in biochemistry written by one who has just graduated in Home Economics and that Wraitha's real concern is not the cow but vitamin E. The truth is that, rightly or wrongly, Wraitha felt that she was leaving something forever. "Hast Milk to Spare" is her clamant call to her departing youth — a farewell to her girlhood. Graduation is always a milestone in young lives, and in addition Wraitha had just suffered another broken heart. And it is indeed fortunate that at this critical time, she had the friendship and good influence of Professor Bedfellow who directed her interests towards poetry and enabled her to recover as quickly as she did. And in spite of John Swivel, who regards any suggestion of time's passing as being an encroachment upon his own private poetic field and who has stated that Wraitha's "Hast Milk to Spare" is merely an expression of frustrated motherhood, her cow-poem still stands as the finest to have ever come out of the West and is being sung at every dairymen 's convention from Winnipeg to Vancouver.

Wraitha seems to have regarded her education in Home Economics as having opened to her a hidden wealth of knowledge and learning. But she tends to overestimate its intellectual content. She speaks of powers that might enable her to "pierce the veil of truth" and "the craftiness of learning" as a burden which she will be happy to lay aside. Indeed in her "Now It is Done" she even departs for once from the affairs of the heart and becomes a child of Saskatchewan, in that she discovers the fields of wild mustard and the occasional field of flax. These at least Wraitha could always see, even though she could never have told the difference between wheat and barley nor have cared to know.

now it is done

Now it is done — let others oil the turning
Of that old wheel of wisdom 'til they die,
For me at least the craftiness of learning,
Has turned upon itself — and I am I!
And I am I again — the rut and rubble
Of that wise world where only sages speak,
Is gone — once more the sunlight on the stubble,
Is poured for me, once more upon my cheek,
The rain, the prairie rain, will beat and bluster,
And warm, wet earth will breathe beneath the plough —
And yellow in the sun the field of mustard,
And blue the flax will blossom for me now.

But the relief of leaving a world" where only sages speak" and where the wheel of wisdom turns endlessly upon itself is shortlived. She becomes aware of the fact that what she has learned cannot so easily be laid aside and that it has been acquired at the expense of something which to her is very precious and can never be regained — her youth. "Life's only spring" she calls it. And this sense of loss, whether it is to be of love or youth becomes for her a recurrent theme. "Clock Stay Thy Hand" may be her farewell to St. Midget's, but she was to know many farewells, each more poignant than the last. Her poetry henceforth was to be a long pain, and she has an amazing ability for imparting it to her readers. Her heart never completely heals, and she never gets used to it. But we must say this for the sad Wraitha — she never becomes jaded or cynical, and though her heart breaks as easily now as in the year of her graduation and though for her the clock has never stayed its hand, she remains forever young in spirit.

clock stay thy hand

Clock, stay thy hand, I have not sought those powers
That learning brings to pierce the veil of truth,
Or Wisdom's sight — I'd trade it for those hours,
You've taken from my own uncertain youth;
And now, like birds their distant summers seeking,
My simple heart must take its own swift wing —
But Time, O Time, I'd leave within your keeping,
All knowledge, could you leave life's only spring.

Wraitha may remain forever young in spirit but she certainly has misgivings and occasionally it seems she also has regrets. Two poems, "Love Came in my Heart" and "House Unfurnished," look back with a sad nostalgic longing to some of her young dreams which never became reality.

Love came in my heart one summer day,
And left again with summer's fleeting smile,
And Heart, all lonesome, cried aloud,
"Oh stay, And warm me with your presence yet awhile."
But Love did leave, and leaving brushed my lips,
In careless gesture with his finger tips.

But Love's light touch has left a deeper ache,
Than Heart, all lonesome could have known before,
And Heart cries, "Love, oh heartless Love, to make
So little gift from that abundant store,
So little, who could every treasure keep,
Not give at all — and leave my heart asleep."

house unfurnished

Maiden, who have always kept
Ordered heart, and neat,
Fearing Love might leave unswept,
Signs of muddy feet,
Taking thought lest Love might see
Heart in wild dishevel —
Maiden, let our parting be
On the same high level.

Maiden, would you now regret
Virtue unrewarded,
Or let a vagrant doubt upset,
A heart so neatly ordered?
Love could only leave a card,
In house so neatly burnished —
Maiden, try now to regard
The place, at least as furnished.

Here we have that sense of complete and utter desolation which is carried over into all her poetry. Those of her critics — and they are invariably feminine critics — who say that her heart has not been broken but that it is merely cracked, and add that Wraitha has had a thoroughly good time in her day and is now merely writing about it by putting her heart in a glass case, are moved by envy as much, perhaps, of the good time she is presumed to have had, as of her talent in referring to it lyrically. But such critics misread Wraitha Dovecote. The truth is that Wraitha actually suffers, and although her distress may, in the accepted sense, be a spiritual rather than a physical suffering, it is no less real than, for example, John Swivel's gas on the stomach. Moreover, despite her still obvious charm, her youth is passing and she is very much aware of it. Or it may be that because of her repeatedly broken heart, she regards herself as being older than she actually is and feels that her suffering and experience and not merely the count of years are the measure of her life. She certainly writes more and more as if all her happiness were in the distant past. If she were not actually looking ahead in her poem, "Some Day," one might almost say that she was already old:

some day

Some day I know the time will come to sit,
Before the tepid hearth and warm my knees,
And huddle close, and watch the shadows flit
Across the faded screen of memories —
And then some day I'll think of you, and know
That deep within that dessicated shell
There is one ember, yours, that still can glow,
And leap to sudden flame and warm it well;
And laughing winds of yesteryear will sweep
Across the flame, with love's forgotten art —
And I, in sweet abandon, once more keep,
Some tryst of wild adventure of the heart.

The same theme of past youth and happiness but with perhaps more resignation is expressed in the exquisite little verse she sent her friend and mentor, Professor Bedfellow, last Christmas when apparently her heart seemed to be giving her more than the usual trouble. Anniversaries and holidays always bring out Wraitha's best poetic expression.

christmas greetings

Once more the Christmas Greetings greet,
Once more the log is on the fire,
To warm again cold hearts and feet,
That mark the passing of desire,
And memories of passions spent,
And whispered words again are new,
When love, exhausted and content,
Enfolds again the thought of you.

It is doubtful whether Wraitha Dovecote, in spite of her award of the Order of Merit will ever be enrolled by Saskatchewan among the greats of that province. She has an undoubted poetic charm and her broken-heartedness has a wide appeal, but she is nevertheless too withdrawn. She escapes life, and despite the frequent indications in her poetry that she herself is by no means pure ectoplasm, the sorrows and loves of which she writes tend to be spiritualized beyond reality, or at least beyond the reality of common experience. Bessie Udderton, her fellow poetess, may be lacking in the lyrical quality which characterizes all of Wraitha's work; but when Bessie belts out the recipe for a new cake or hails the approach of another spring as giving promise of rhubarb pie, she is writing her way deep into the hearts of her countrymen and is every bit as much the voice of her province as Sarah Binks once was when she wrote about the Hired Man, the Calf, or the Premier. But Wraitha's weakness lies in the fact that she searches for and finds her inspiration only in herself. As a result she has become that which she has so often been called, the "exotic Wraitha," an artistic conversation piece, who is poetically, as she has always been physically, a Pre-Raphaelite of whom Saskatchewan is proud but does not altogether accept.

And yet one never knows. It may be merely that with her recognition of departing youth Wraitha is going through a kind of poetic change of life leading to a calmer outlook and a deeper insight. It may be that as she approaches her thirties, she becomes aware of the fact that that elusive quality of her girlhood may all too soon be replaced by one to which the term "haunted" as well as "haunting" can apply, and that her tall, slim beauty may perhaps also very soon be described, as indeed it was recently described by one of her former classmates, as beginning to "rattle in the pins."

It is for this reason that she has her moments of sadness and perhaps even of despair. But it is a new sadness and her despair already carries within it the promise of a new awakening. One certainly feels this in her lovely "Would That It Were Forever Fall," in which, despite the fact that she never succeeds in escaping those artifacts brought over from her Home Economics course, the dying ember and the once-tenanted household, her heart at least seems to find rest in fortitude and in the final recognition of summer gone.

Would that it were forever fall,
And these sere leaves be evermore descending,
And this grey bleak that hovers over all,
And in my heart, be never ending;
Let this, the pale, cold twilight of November,
Metallic, hard, be cut in steel for me —
Lest some day spring may wake a dying ember,
Of summer gone, and love's old tenancy.

But even more than resignation and fortitude is Wraitha's growing acceptance of love and life as rising above the turbulence of youth with all its problems and disappointments. And with this acceptance has come awareness of an external world, an awakening to the province which is her home. She will never see Saskatchewan in all its sweep and variety in the way which John Swivel has seen it; or cling to its soil with that almost personal affection which marks the joy and gratitude of the humble Purge Potatok for his adopted land. She will never cry out in protest and indignation against its desecration as Baalam Bedfellow cries out in "Seared Land," nor will she see Wascana Lake as through the eyes of Osiris Jones-Jones as a great political achievement. But the little details, the feminine jewels, as it were, of that lovely land in which she lives, are becoming increasingly hers; and although the difference between a field of wheat and one of wild oats is still, and will always be, beyond her comprehension and concern, the frost-covered crocus of the Saskatchewan spring, and the prairie rose, hot-kissed by summer, and autumn's deep glowing goldenrod, have finally become for her "the gifts of love's last going."

Where shall we rest, My Love, when love is spent —
We who have stood and watched its dawn's first breaking,
Holding in heart and hand that sweet content,
Of only you — and love beyond our making,
Filled each with quick and wondering surprise,
That things could be beyond all former knowing —
We were the first — explorers we, of skies,
And earth all new and clean in love's bestowing:
Earth was all washed in light, and we had supped
A first new gladness there — like children playing
In treasured field, you called to me, "I've cupped
The rainbow in my hand for love's long staying —
And that first sheen of dew and frost that blows
Upon the crocus, and the goldenrod's deep glowing,
And the hot kiss of summer on the rose —
Are mine to keep as gifts of love's last going."

Alas, poor Wraitha!

6  Bessie Udderton
  The Poet of Innerness

There is a school of philosophy which maintains that spiritual hunger and physical hunger are merely two different aspects of a basic urge within human nature striving for security of existence. The process of eating, it is pointed out, is an adjustment which man must make upon one level of experience, in order to establish his security upon another and higher level, and in so doing he lays the foundation for a more complete existence. It is not altogether a new theorem; certainly the idea, often expressed popularly in its crude form, "A man must eat to live," has never been denied by philosophy and has even been acknowledged as having a measure of verity which must be taken into account in explaining man's relation to the arts. The concession which philosophy makes that there is a close relationship between art and the feeding of the artist has never been explicity stated. It is only recently with the startling discovery in philosophic thought that existence precedes essence that the significance of man's artistic efforts are seen as his attempts to come to grips with an existence in which he finds no security whatsoever and which he despairs of ever making secure, regardless of how much he eats. Looked at in this new light (though eating may still be regarded as an attempt at adjustment with the accepted fact of existence), food takes on an aura of futility and frustration. In its very impermanence it thus lends itself particularly to a type of nostalgic longing and spiritual hunger which characterizes poetry at its best and which has already been discussed as innerness.

In one sense innerness resembles the Wienerschnitzelgeist of classical philosophy which von Hinten employs with such effect in his critical studies. But whereas the concept of Wienerschnitzelgeist tends to emphasize essence to the almost complete exclusion of existence, innerness also takes time into consideration, and recognizes the fact that although one precedes the other, they are not of necessity separated thereby. The total reality of food must therefore be faced. In innerness this is achieved. And although it may be going too far to say, as some have said, that Bessie Udderton, the poet of innerness, is the Sartre, or even the female counterpart of Sartre, in Western Canada, it must be said of her that, insofar as anyone in Saskatchewan can ever be an existentialist, by facing up to the fact of food for its own sake, she has raised it to the point where it may almost be regarded as one of the existentialist art forms. Her literary creed is well summed up in those two quatrains she once wrote in reply, or perhaps in addition to, Jordan Middleduck's "Break Not the Lute," (quoted in Chapter 1) in which he raises doubt as to the desirability of poetry produced by the poet when he is starving. Bessie simply states without equivocation that "starving can be overdone." It is this recognition of facts as well as her fortitude in facing them in all her poetry which is said to mark her as an existential poet:

And starving can be overdone,
Though pain and grief that poets sing,
And frustrate life, may best be won,
From days that lack all nourishing;
It don't mean that when all is writ,
And tears have dried and sorrows cease,
She shouldn't up and eat a bit —
Perhaps milk, a cold wing, and cottage cheese.

However, existentialist or not, it is always in such last lines as those which express her taste in food, the "milk and cold wing, and cottage cheese" that Bessie stands revealed as the true poet of innerness and it is upon this that her fame and popularity rests.

Bessie Udderton, the pen name of Mrs. Martha Waffle, is a native of Saskatchewan, and little may be said about her private life which is not already known. In her charming little booklet, The Flowering of the Dry Belt, Miss Rosalind Drool tells about Bessie's girlhood and her early marriage in high school and also describes her home and family on their farm near Cactus Lake. She has been the subject of innumerable articles in the local journals and of study groups in Saskatchewan, and already such prestigious organizations as The Ladies' Literary League of Quagmire and The Chaucerettes of Regina have been holding annual Bessie Udderton nights in which her work is discussed and reports on some of her recipes for home cooking are received. Her three published books to date, Vestal Verses, More Vestal Verses, and Still More Vestal Verses (the latter subtitled Songs of Savour), have all been very profitable, and the royalties from these together with the ones received from the Bessie Udderton Cook Book, have helped to solve the problem of farming in her home.

Bessie is always at her best when at her shortest and there is no doubt that in her little gem entitled "Spring" she is at her very best. Spring, of course, has always been a favorite theme for poetry from Chaucer to John Swivel, but Bessie has found a new joy in that season (or event) which only innerness could bring forth. Nowhere in Saskatchewan has she been excelled in this matter. Not even Sarah Binks's own "Spring" with its rich musical accompaniment of a sixty-mile wind together with the voices of the cow and calf "full-throated to the weather," has approached in lyrical quality the sweet anticipation of Bessie when she cries in joyous abandonment, "It's spring, it's spring, it's spring!"

spring

New peas and beans and baby beets
Must still await July,
But already tiny rhubarb shoots
Give promise of the pie;
And tips of young asparagus
Their joyful message fling,
And hens will once more lay again —
It's spring, it's spring, it's spring!

There is a lushness here, a yielding, and only the quiet pastoral contentment of Purge Potatok's "I 'Tink She's Spring Come" has ever been compared to it. "Spring" and her equally famous "Duck Dinner at Willows," the poem which the Government included in its Fifty Years of Progress, are in themselves sufficient to give Bessie a high place in the Saskatchewan School of Seven.

Again and again in Bessie's poems we find that sweet surrender of anticipation which we find in "Spring." The "oh joy, oh life-prolonging," with which she greets the lemon pie in "Duck Dinner at Willows" has its counterpart in the sudden ebullient "Oh, Brother!" when faced with the deep apple pie with whipped cream and cheese in "The Man in Grief."

the man in grief

The man in grief may blunt the edge of sorrow,
With half a glass of Scotch in ginger ale,
And, given steak, will bravely face the morrow,
To gird his belt of misery in this vale —
But more — if broiled, and deep in mushrooms smothered,
And sided with french fries and early peas,
And hearts of artichoke, and then — Oh Brother!
Deep apple pie with whipped cream and some cheese;
To finish up — a demi-tasse unsweetened,
A Benedictine once — perhaps creme de menthe —
Such man can rise and swear he's never beaten
By slings of fate or circumstance' intent.

But woman, lost in grief, needs no consoler
In terms of steak to stiffen up the spine,
Nor takes to beans to quench the dripping dolour
That fills her four-inch handkerchief with brine;
But turns the page of life's most tearful ballad,
Without recourse to food in lean or fat —
And rising from her wet, unfinished salad
Goes out to buy some stockings and a hat.

Or so 'tis said — but me, when all is crumbling,
And deep despair enfolds, and sorrow frets —
I bake fresh rolls and make a stew with dumplings,
Cucumbers with sour cream, and crepes suzettes.

Bessie Udderton has matured greatly. She has never been a deep poet like John Swivel nor an adventurous one like Baalam Bedfellow. She is feminine and she is cheerful. She leads a full life, perhaps too full occasionally, and of recent years she has been subject to mild attacks of indigestion, and these have undoubtedly affected her outlook on life. She tends to be more thoughtful and she loses some, though by no means all, of that surrendering delight in those aspects of innerness with which she has come to be associated. Two poems, taken from her latest book, Still More Vestal Verses show this trend towards the more reflective mood. In "Some Day" she looks ahead and finds the outlook bleak, but she never becomes really downhearted. Her one great regret, apparently, is that so much of the things which are dear to her heart remain "unpenned," and that time and opportunity are so limited. But even the thought of her inevitable end gives her a certain lift, a sense of renewal. Some day she will sing her poems with the angels and in what she calls the "sweet angelic lays" will sing again of those things which she has found so dear in life.

some day

Within each poet's heart there comes the day
When he must turn and contemplate the end,
And sigh deep sigh, and resolutely say,
Alas, alack, so much remains unpenned;
So few the years, so limited the rhyme,
To tell of days 'twixt shelf and glowing stove,
To laud light touch of basil or of thyme,
And glorify the nutmeg and the clove.

Perhaps some day again the poet's skill
Will join with angel voices in the sky,
To praise sweet peppers with a pinch of dill,
And mushrooms in the steak and kidney pie,
And join in hymn that garlic rubbed on roast
Should just be light — and sweet angelic lays,
Sing jambalaya shrimp is best on toast,
And salted cod makes perfect bouillabaisse.

The same theme runs through her more sombre "Thoughts After Christmas." Here after a too-hearty Christmas dinner and unable to sleep at night, she turns her thought to the future. Her buoyant nature, as always, comes to her aid, and instead of becoming worried or despondent, she sees in her restlessness an occasion for a deeper insight and a look into the future. As in the angels' song she sees in it the opportunity to express the perfection towards which she has always been striving and which has been denied by life's lack of opportunity, or perhaps even, by life's weakness — "The meals we planned, but never wrought."

thoughts after christmas

When this last Christmas of the year,
Has once more come and once more gone,
And turkey, pudding, nut, and beer,
Lie heavy on the heart at dawn,
And falling tinsel from the tree
Remarks time's passing in the night,
And dead the shouts of revelry
And cold the fires of delight —
Be glad — the ache that mince-pie brings
And puddings that discourage sleep,
Can turn our thoughts to higher things
Than counting several thousand sheep;
And that distress that's unallayed
By salts and soda, lifts the soul
To regions high where unafraid
We stand and contemplate our goal;
And from that height we look ahead
To all those things that once we sought,
From childhood dreams of gingerbread,
To meals we planned but never wrought.

Only once as far as we know did Christmas festivities ever get Bessie completely down. The poem she wrote about her feelings after the festivities and which she entitled "Boxing Day, and is it Ever!" was never very well received by her admirers and is, in fact, something of a literary oddity. It certainly lacks her usual serenity of rhyme and metre, but it is by no means out of character on that account. She never loses sight of innerness. She merely, to quote one of her reviewers, "plays hell with it," and the fact that she had overindulged in the soufflé with "sauce a-la-Russe vodkarlik" of which she is exceedingly fond, had given her a splitting headache.

boxing day and is it ever!

Now longs the heart for a Christmas
On an island, or even an isthmus,
Far from turkey, mince pie, nuts, bismuth.

Now dream I of quiet fasting solitude
In a place considerably removed from food,
Preferably a desert island in some other longitude.

I want just an isle where none tootles,
On tin flutes, or cries, "Have some nootles!"
And I say, "No thanks, go way, I've had oodles."

A desert isle where there are no dates-in-garlic,
Or soufflé with sauce a-la-Russe vodkarlik,
And where none gather round to sing Yule songs including Men of Harlech.

A completely desert island next Christmas,
Where nothing grows, not even hibiscus,
And men just lie around and don't even shave whiskus.

But such an attitude of withdrawal is unusual for the cheerful Bessie Udderton. As a rule she likes Christmas and especially she likes Christmas dinner. She looks forward to it as an occasion to display her culinary talents as well as an opportunity to exercise her literary ones. There is never any doubt as to the source of Bessie's poetic inspiration, even though she may have her misgivings as to her Christmas dinner giving rise to what she calls the "ancient ache" somewhere in the region of the stomach, or, at least as well as she can place it "between the navel and the heart." But even if it comes, she accepts it as a part of life and life's pleasures, and, like a true existentialist, she faces up to it and even moulds it into the material of art, or what is known in poetic circles as "grist."

There is no uncertainty, in spite of her "Boxing Day and is it Ever!" that Bessie is a sociable and hospitable soul, and the men whom she invites over for Christmas dinner do well by it to the point of torpor. This is beautifully illustrated in her twin poems, "Before Christmas Dinner" and "After Christmas Dinner." They are interesting too as an example of what was once known in Victorian literature as "Poetic Twinning," a verse form in which one poem is more or less the mirror image or counterpart of the other somewhat after the manner of our more modern His and Hers in bathroom towels. For the modern writer who has difficulty sustaining an idea through a whole poem, let alone two, twinning has become a lost art, and it is gratifying indeed to discover that in Saskatchewan some of the graces and amenities of poetry are still being preserved.

before christmas dinner

Now once again the festive season nears,
'Tis time to hang the garland on the hook,
And serve again the simple drink that cheers,
Nor yet inebriates; 'tis time to cook,
To measure and to mix and beat and bake,
With ancient household lore and tribal art —
And hope that Yule, just once, in ancient ache,
May fail, between the navel and the heart:

But if so be, in gulp and burp and tears,
And night that neither pills nor book assuage,
It isn't just that poet feels his years,
It's also grist to fill the printed page.

after christmas dinner

Now once again the end of dinner nears,
'Tis time to take the apron from the hook,
And put away the Three-Star wine that cheers —
Also inebriates — 'tis time the cook
To say to each and every torpid guest,
"Let's move across the hall and take our ease,
God rest you Merry Gentlemen! — but rest!
If not, there's biscuits, coffee, port, and cheese."

"And I'll just slip and put away the food,
And gather up the Christmas loaves and fishes,
And join you later in your lassitude —
In perhaps two hours after doing dishes."

Bessie has written few poems which have so established her popularity among her feminine admirers as her "After Christmas Dinner." Not even her lilting "Kitchen Song" has attracted as much attention. In "Kitchen Song" Bessie apparently sings as she cooks, and although it has sometimes been said that she here falls down in the matter of innerness, particularly when it comes to soup powder and spam, it must be admitted that she has squeezed the last bit of lyricism out of what for many women would be regarded as plain work:

kitchen song

Whatever is making
In boiling or baking
Depending on culiner's choice,
Demands jubilation
In the joy of creation
Expressed in appropriate voice.

I hum when I'm mixing
A batter — or fixing
A chicken to mount on the grill,
But for moulding a mock-duck
Or tossing up pot-luck,
Just any old song — so it's shrill.

A sweet obligato
Is not for tomato,
Nor mezzo-soprano for ham,
But high-noted trilling
Can help some in grilling,
The dubious virtues of spam.

Sing louder for chowder —
But instant soup powder
Rates little in musical notes,
But I'll top Alberghetti
When boiling spaghetti
And drone bagpipe wail to the oats.

I yodel when basting,
And warble when tasting,
"Yum yum! It's right out of a book!"
So there's always occasion
For some diapason,
To add to the joy of the cook.

7  Baalam Bedfellow, Ph.D.
  The Piltdown Man

Literature, if it is to be great, must have its tensions. Those very contradictions and anomalies which we so often regard as faults in poetry are not marks of weakness but of inner struggle out of which the strength of literature emerges. "Synthesis can come about only if first there is unsynthesis," declares von Hinten. "It is not enough to have alone the Wienerschnitzelgeist; there is also such a thing as Knochen." Keeping this in mind, together with his theorem that the positive which arises out of such synthesis becomes in the end the Almost-Ultimate, or, even, as he maintains, the Ultimate-Almost, it would almost seem that in this respect the Province of Saskatchewan excels. Certainly its claim that in the matter of tensions and contradictions it can not only hold its literary own but can out-contradict and out-tense any province in the Dominion, appears to be justified. For in Baalam Bedfellow, Saskatchewan has indentured into its service an artist in whom split personality has not only become vocal, but in whom two distinct and contradictory attitudes stand so at variance that they regard each other with complete contempt.

Bedfellow is difficult to evaluate. He is a bird-poet supreme, a writer of lovely songs done in flawless verse which has been compared in grace and freedom to the flight of birds themselves. At the same time he produces torn and tortured poetry, if such it can be called, in which any reference to birds is anathema. "To hell with birds," he says fiercely and frankly in "The Deep Vale." He has become twice famous, or perhaps one should say that his fame, like his personality, is split. His appeal, is, in fact, to such diverse schools of aesthetic appreciation as to extend to the readers themselves as well as to his works. Such critical opinions as "They wouldn't know a poem from a hole in the ground," followed by the rejoinder, "Those bastards can't even read," are by no means uncommon in Saskatchewan literary circles when Bedfellow's poetry is under discussion.

There are times when Bedfellow appears to have an almost Wordsworthian love of nature. He then rises as if on wings and opens our ears to "the catalogue of diverse sounds" which he hears and which he shares with us. For example, he takes joy in the strange wisdom of the heron, whose silence and retiring ways win his approval; and he wonders whether the robin's song, if put in words, would make Grade IV at school. He is a master of the contrast between silence and sound, and he makes full use of birds, some say as symbols, to drive the contrast home. And yet there is no doubt that in private life he hates and is even personally afraid of them. There are instances in which he has been known to have disappeared for a complete day or more on being informed that a strange chicken had been walking across the St. Midget's campus and that it had probably escaped from the Animal Husbandry Department. This fear of birds, amounting almost to a phobia, together with the fact that he is by no means happy in his position of teaching English to a class in Home Economics at St. Midget's, may tear him spiritually but it has undoubtedly given rise to something new in the literature of the prairies. He has been called a modern among moderns.

As a writer Bedfellow can frequently be very scornful and at times even abusive, and there are certainly times when he can be as cryptic and as lacking in meaning as any modern, at least in Canada. His admirers in the West point to his contempt for capitals and rhyme and in fact for any of the conventions of classical poetry to support their claim to his modernism; and add that some of his unpublished stuff is as dirty and as tough as anything produced in the East. Many of his poems, they say, can hardly be recognized as poetry and have, in fact, frequently been mistaken for bad prose. But to classify Bedfellow as one of the moderns on this account overlooks Knochen, to say the least. There is Bedfellow himself of which his poetry is the expression. And Bedfellow is not a modern; he is a primitive, a throwback, and, to some extent, even a romanticist.

Undoubtedly Bedfellow is aware of social injustice and conditions around him, and it would be strange indeed if, as a professor of English, he failed to cry out against them in terms of stark realism and current idiom. But in the end the conflict is within himself, and even within the deceptive simplicity of such poems as "The Ant," one cannot escape that sense of protest. But Bedfellow 's protest is never so much a cry for reform as it is for return and therein he is a romanticist. For just as writers who fail to make the adjustment with reality withdraw into the past or into the romantic age of chivalry and knighthood, so Bedfellow also would return to a bygone age. But in his case he would return further — much further, some have said even to the arboreal or cave existence of primitive man. It may be that this is an exaggeration, but he would certainly go far beyond any age of knighthood and chivalry to one in which he could be completely free, and especially free of those disciplines imposed upon him by his position as a teacher of English to a class of girls in Home Economics. It is perhaps as much due to this literary credo as to his personal appearance that he has come to be known as the Piltdown Man. His friends call him Pilt.

It must be observed however that Bedfellow is also at heart a true Westerner. This is indicated, if by nothing else, by his repeated reference to the cow in his poetry, and even to the cowbird in his bird poetry. Just what the significance of the cow as a symbol may be, is in his case naturally obscure. It has been suggested that for him the cow represents a period of transition from Saskatchewan's simple past where the only problem of any concern was that of the weather, to the more complicated ones of the economy of oil and potash and Social Credit to which he objects. He has publicly protested against the pasteurization of milk and has also written a polemical poem in which he calls upon his province to protest against the modern method of curing tobacco, which, he claims, not only robs it of all its natural vitamins, thus contributing to the spread of socialism as well as to the lowering of the birth rate, but finally leaves it "unfit for a cow." But regardless of the particular symbolism he may have in mind, it would be strange indeed if Bedfellow were not to reflect in his work some of the torsions and the tensions of his native province.

But all this is true only of one side of Bedfellow's work, that is, the so-called "convolute and cerebral" which has been mistaken for modernism. His bird poems are something else again, and neither a political and sociological study of Saskatchewan nor the usual scholarly discussion of the artist as being the literary spokesman and the aesthetic blossoming of his day and age can possibly account for the strange anomaly of a complete set of sweetly lyrical bird poems set against the harsh realism of such works as "The Ant" or "Seared Land" wrung from a tortured heart, or the sombre depths of "The Deep Vale." Here at least only the psychological approach to literature seems to work.

The great advantage of the psychological approach is that the scholar is thereby enabled to discover not only what the writer is trying to say, but also what he is trying to conceal. In Bedfellow's case the psychological method seems to have paid off especially well, in that, in addition to having thrown light upon some of the hidden facets of his character, it has also produced some interesting nature notes concerning bird life in Saskatchewan, particularly that of the snearth. These together with pertinent incidents from his childhood have enabled psychologists to explain practically all of Bedfellow's poems, the "convolute-cerebral" as well as the bird poems. Only the cow symbol still seems to be lacking in meaning to the psychologists, but then the psychologists themselves are not Westerners.

The details of that traumatic experience out of Bedfellow's childhood which was to change the course of his life, or rather to split it, are somewhat obscure, but the effects are not. We know only that he was attacked by a snearth. In his childhood trust and innocence he had been sitting on the grass eating a peanut-butter sandwich which was suddenly wrenched from his grasp by the bird. Such experiences always leave their deep imprint, but in a sensitive child such as the young Baalam the imprint must have been deeper than usual. Any other child with Bedfellow's natural endowment of protest against the imperfections of the world around him would simply have transferred them to the imperfections of the world above. But apparently Bedfellow's experience with the snearth was of an order sufficient to cause him to undergo what psychologists call an "inversion" which becomes an actual perversion in the case of poets and finds its outlet in the writing of bird poems.

The child Baalam, as the psychologists are careful to point out, had not himself been under attack. It was the fact that he was being robbed of the peanut-butter sandwich at that particular time which caused the inversion. They point out that since he had already eaten over half of the sandwich it had become, and was further becoming, a part of his very self. It was not so much the sandwich as spiritual integrity which was at stake. It was the actual id which was being violated and despoiled. Subconsciously on such occasions every human being sees the pit of annihilation being opened before him and in the case of the sensitive poetic perception of the young Baalam there must have been an awareness of something of himself going out. There would be a retreat into angst but in this case there would be more. The fact that the snearth had succeeded in getting only some of the peanut butter sandwich would leave the child with a sense of incompleteness, and this, together with the inversion and the angst would account for that deep-seated sense of insecurity which characterizes all his poetic works.

The three poems, "Deep Vale," "Seared Land," and "The Ant," sometimes known as The Socio-somatic Trio, are of the deep-seated sense of insecurity applied to the social scene. But the bird poems also rise out of that same inner lack. The difference between the two types of poetry are more apparent than real. In the bird poems an effort is being made to find some scene or some environment in which perfection has already been reached and in which individual freedom can find its place. They express a search, an aspiration, and on occasions even a doubt as in "Who Can Shriek?" But one never finds in them that anguished call as when Archie, the Ant, cries out, "God, how awful is hunger!", or that sense of utter futility and frustration around which "Seared Land" centres with its despairing cry, "Call this a democracy!" Indeed, in the last analysis the Socio-somatic Trio must be regarded as inverted projections in which Bedfellow looks back, as it were, to a kind of pre-snearth existence in which the spirit is untroubled by the insecurities and the complexities with which he is afflicted. Because of the unfortunate experience with the snearth in his childhood, birds have thus become for him something of a symbol presenting a barrier into the untroubled land. He attempts to surmount this barrier by poetic flights of flawless rhyme resembling in many respects the flights of the birds themselves. As far as Saskatchewan is concerned he has succeeded and as we have seen he has become famous as the bird poet of the province. But as far as he himself is concerned he has never quite succeeded in reaching that pre-snearth perfection towards which he projects himself. The astute scholar continually discerns in his bird poetry a definite undercurrent of doubt, a mental reservation, and it is this which has led psychologists to the discovery that he definitely hates birds.

It is interesting to note that at first Bedfellow was exceedingly reluctant to write about birds and even went so far as to intimate that they do not rate poetic treatment of any kind. But the significant fact which emerges from his poetry about birds is that he does not seem to have the same doubt about the birds themselves as about the sounds they make. Again and again we observe this. He dislikes many of their songs. It may be that his poetic ear is unusually tuned and that he discerns unpoetic values in many bird songs. In his "A Bird is a Bird is a Bird" he not only makes the point that birds are not subject matter for poetic treatment, but also that the poet who, as he says, "Hums a refrain" concerning them is himself lacking in poetic adjustments. Later, however, in his efforts to get beyond all birds to that pre-snearth idealization towards which a Piltdown Man must always strive, he enters more fully into the poetic treatment of birds, probably feeling that the quicker he gets it over with the better. But to his great annoyance he has merely succeeded in becoming famous.

a bird is a bird is a bird

It is said that the poet can hear
The far cry of wild-goose and hawk,
But there's also the Bronxian cheer,
And the screech, not to mention the squawk;
And the poet who hums a refrain
Concerning those twirps in the sky
Must be half paralysed in the brain,
Deaf too, and blind in one eye:

For the full-throated note that is wrung
From the robin when bursting with joy,
Is nothing but noise — and is sung
Just to aggravate, plague, and annoy;
And if poets have frequently heard
That a rose is a rose is a rose,
Then a bird is a bird is a bird,
To be treated as such — and in prose.

There are always poets who can abandon themselves to the more sensuous joys of nature, its smells and its sounds and colour. But Bedfellow is too cerebral. He is haunted by an intellectual doubt, and even in some of his finest poetry such as "Alas That Nature" he questions the final meaning of some of nature's aspects, and even when he relates them to some of nature's deeper urges, he leaves the questions unanswered. This, of course, is poetry at its best.

alas that nature

Alas that nature so abounds
In catalogue of diverse sounds,
Of twit and tweet, of chip and chirp,
Of gulp and gackle, beep and burp,
Emit by things that fly;
Worse, worse, by far, than woman's blurb
Whose piping treble can disturb
The human brain beyond enduring
When given to her so-called luring
Are birds in ecstasy;

'Tis always given to cut a throat,
But who, thus, can arrest the note
Of cat-bird imitating cat,
Or rat-bird emulating rat,
Or cow-bird miming cow,
Or say of these, "Such bird-pretence
Is nature's vague concupiscence,
And that, like woman's preen and paint,
To make herself out what she ain't,
It makes the grade — somehow."

Bedfellow has undoubtedly matured in his attitude towards birds. In some of his later poems, "The Robin's Note," for example, he concedes that bird noises may have a larger purpose than merely that of annoyance, and may, in fact, serve as a means of communication between the birds themselves. He does however question their intellectual content.

the robin's note

I deem the robin's note would make
But little sense when put in words
And what the sparrows undertake
To say within the tongue of birds,
Would never make Grade Four at school,
Or even Three — but each can tell,
In general what the others drool,
And give his own peculiar yell.

Bedfellow seems to be developing an increasing tolerance for bird sounds. This may be due to a greater maturity, but is more likely due to an increasing deafness. Nevertheless he reserves his highest praise for the bird with no voice whatsoever, the heron. The heron of Saskatchewan, (Pokus Canadensis) locally known as the Shy Poke, actually happens to have a voice, but like the African giraffe has never been known to use it, and this self-discipline wins the poet's admiration.

the heron

The heron wisely takes to flight
When anything comes into sight —
Except another heron;
And if perchance the other yells,
He knows it ain't — and jet propels
Himself beyond all nearin'.

For, lacking voice, he cannot teach
That life is something more than screech,
But earnest aim and service;
And thus, in pre-defeat he bleeds
For birds not thus endowed, and leads
A frustrate life — and nervous.

The poem is regarded as being definitely escapist by discerning scholars, but in the Prairie Provinces it has won wide acclaim because of its high moral message which was certainly never Bedfellow's intention. Indeed the thought of a high moral message of any kind or even the thought of being associated with any writer from whom a high moral message of any kind can be expected is sufficient to infuriate him. When, for example, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit was conferred upon him and he then learned that it had also been conferred upon John Swivel, the Great Dean of Saskatchewan letters, and upon Bessie Udderton, the poet of innerness, he immediately returned the certificate to the Government with very specific details as to what they should do with it, and refused to be included in the group portrait of the School of Seven. In his English classes at St. Midget's he frequently refers to the Great Dean as "The Great Dane," and as far as Bessie Udderton is concerned, he generally dismisses her simply as "B," or somtimes as "that B," depending upon which of Bessie's Vestal Verses happens to be under discussion. But Saskatchewan, though it knows little of his "convolute-cerebral" poetry, is nevertheless proud of him because of his bird poems; and on one occasion at least has even suggested that some of his poems — in particular his "Who Can Shriek?", since it seems to be devoted almost entirely to the great healing power of nature and raises no contentious issues of any kind — be included in the songs of The New Curriculum when it is adopted in Saskatchewan. "Who Can Shriek?" certainly rates that honour.

who can shriek?

Oh, who can shriek with sorrow in the morning
Or join with friends in agonizing shout,
When overhead the clamant jays are swarming,
Or louder still the sparrows drown him out?

Oh who can split the air with lamentations
Or groan aloud through anguish-gritted teeth,
When up above the robins' exhortations
Assuage the wary mourner underneath?

There is no grief so deep within Man's marrow,
But birds will seek it out: there is no pain
Which man can hoard that chickadee and sparrow,
Will not displace and make him whole again.

Those very qualities through which Bedfellow has come to be regarded by the more sophisticated literary critics as being a modernist have also led to his being regarded as a Communist by others. Both judgements are wrong. It must be emphasized again that Bedfellow is not some social reformer looking forward to a utopia, but that he is a throwback; he is recessive. Naturally, therefore, he must find fault with present conditions as he finds them, and he does so with poetic vigour and vehemence, so much so, that, on one occasion at least, the question was raised in the Provincial Legislature as to his fitness to teach a class in Home Economics. But his popularity as a bird poet in Saskatchewan has protected him from too-great criticism. Moreover, his position in the academic world seems to be further secured by the fact that no one has ever been found willing to succeed Professor Marrowfat at St. Midget's at the salary offered.

Actually Doctor Bedfellow is popular among his students because of his tendency to return to the primitive. Any misgivings as to his fitness to teach modern English to a class of girls in Home Economics has come, not from the girls themselves, but from those few mothers who happen inadvertently to have come across a copy of the St. Midget's Quarterly to which Bedfellow is a regular contributor. His casual use of such four letter words as damn and hell, and the frequent appellations of Brother and Comrade in some of his definitely non-bird poetry has led them to believe that he is not only leftish in his views on life but that such an attitude may have definite social implications extending beyond the pasteurization of milk, and that their daughters should not be exposed to it. Fortunately Bedfellow's poems of protest against conditions and conventions remain practically unknown in Saskatchewan except to those few who are themselves contributors to the St. Midget's Quarterly which appears only once or twice a year.

"Seared Land" is undoubtedly Bedfellow's finest work to date. Quite apart from it being "convolute and cerebral" poetry of the highest order, there is a peculiar staccato quality about it which gives it a charm unknown to most of the moderns. He not only deals here with his native land but as a Westerner he employs here the cow as a leitmotif, which, whatever its symbolism in other cases, is here obviously a symbol of strength. "Strive for us, cows, for we are weak," he cries and somehow or other the reader gets the impression that he is speaking from the heart.

seared land

Boom! Boom! Boom!
Seared land! Seared land! Seared land!
Break this land!
Not yesterday! Not tomorrow! Not day after tomorrow!
Now!
Break the land!
Break the hard-pan beneath it!
Break the sound-barrier above it!
Break the barbed-wire fence around it!
Take a hammer to it!

What? Can this be land?
Spotted with things,
Chasmic,
Abysmal,
Monstrous in its declivity,
Loathsome in its fissionable material?
Ferrous, Granitic. Perhaps Bentonite?

Man is here!
Crawl, man, crawl!
Ferret-like, toothed-like, glazed,
Zodiac-stricken,
Umbilical, maniacal, clerical, anti-clerical —
And yet there are cows!
Strive for us, cows, for we are weak,
The land is weak,
The tea is weak,
The liquor is weak,
Everything we buy seems to be weak these days —
Call this a democracy?

Seared land! Seared land! Seared land!
Prairies, pampas, steppes, the African veldt —
Cows? Yes. But weakness is endemic;
Support me, Comrade,
Let me lean upon you, Let me tap of your strength!
Let me lean upon your thigh-bone,
Support me, Comrade, lest I fail,
I fail, Comrade!
I fail, I fell, I have fallen,
I shall fall, I shall have fallen,
Lest I fall —
Ah, subjunctive!
Lend me your hammer, Comrade!
Boom! Boom! Boom!

The use of "Boom! Boom! Boom!" is singularly effective. Bedfellow may scorn all rhyme and (though they are inserted here for clarity) also capitals and punctuation; he nevertheless achieves a deep poetic cadence. Like the beating of surf upon a distant shore, suggested here but never clearly outlined, together with the skillful use of "Lend me your hammer, Comrade," followed immediately by three booms again, we are led from the deep despair of "Call this a democracy!" to somewhere else. Just where, it is hard to say.

"The Deep Vale" is not quite as depressed as "Seared Land" but it raises issues and presents us with a social challenge;

the deep vale

Boom! Boom! Boom!
No one is emancipate,
We are all slaves,
We are all victims!
This is the Dark Vale! And is it ever dark!
What is it that you seek, man, in this Vale?
Look over the edge, man, and tell me what you see.
Is it deep? Is it dark?
"Ah," you say. "It is even deeper than it is dark."

You stand on the edge and you say, "Ah, how dark it is!"
You stagger on the edge and you say, "How deep it is!"
Man, you can stand on the edge and totter,
And you can stand on another edge and teeter,
But in this Vale one edge is as good as another —
It's the Deep Vale!

But what did you expect to find, man?
A bottomless abyss?
An abysmal bottom?
A quaking? Something cataclysmic?
A continuity of existentials?
No wonder you stagger on the edge!
No wonder you teeter —
"Ah," you say, "It is an edge I have selected from the many,"
"Ah," you say, "in the matter of edges I am my own master,
It is an edge of my own choosing,
I am a free agent,
I am free as a bird when it comes to edges!"

Friend, not so fast, this is the Deep Vale,
Friend, you are wrong there and you couldn't be wronger,
You are not at all free!
If one edge is the same as another, you have made no real choice.
And you go around saying, "Ah, I am free!"
Cows may be free, but not you!
Not in the Deep Vale.
You damn fool!
And you just can't go around saying "Ah," like that,
And to hell with birds!

It is because of such poems as "The Deep Vale" and "The Ant," that Bedfellow has come under suspicion of being Communist or at least very leftish in his views. To be misunderstood is, however, the lot of the poet, and in Bedfellow's case he seems not only to have accepted but, as some maintain, has actually encouraged misunderstanding. He certainly seems to be indifferent towards the good opinion of his readers, and in the case of "The Ant," he even disdainfully dismisses them at the end of the poem with the remark, "You wouldn't know!" Such an attitude never makes for sympathetic understanding, and if, as in "The Deep Vale," he refers to his reader as "You damn fool," it is not surprising that some of the mothers of the students in Home Economics have their misgivings as to his suitability to teach their daughters. But it must always be remembered that Bedfellow is a throwback, a primitive, and that his longings are not cast towards some economic and social utopia, but back to an age in Saskatchewan's distant past when, in his opinion, the country was wooded. As we would naturally expect from a professor of English, his science is at fault in that he assumes the giant sloth to have preceded the bird-age in evolutionary history, and the question has frequently been debated as to whether a tree could actually ever grow in Saskatchewan, regardless of how far back we go into its geological history, but such fine points are the concern of scholarship and not of poetic appreciation. The fact remains that in such poems as "The Ant" Bedfellow shows a real concern for his fellowmen and not merely a Communist anger. "The Ant," in spite of its deceptive simplicity, strikes deep into the human problem. It well merits the description given to it by Professor Verysnoff in the Encyclopedia of Canadian Poetry as "a search of the soul for its origins giving every promise."

the ant

Listen, Comrade!
Listen, you who call yourself a forward-looker!
Listen, you who like to think of yourself as a peerer into the future,
I will tell you a story which is very sad:
It is about a little ant whose name was Arthur,
Arthur lived with his mother in a little house across the tracks,
Arthur's mother loved Arthur, and Arthur loved Arthur's mother,
But there was no love lost between Arthur and Arthur's father,
Nor between Arthur's mother and Arthur's father;
This was because the old man was lazy,
At least everybody said he was lazy,
Or was he a victim of the capitalistic system?
In any case he was an alcoholic.

Well, one day Arthur's mother said to him,
"Arthur, you look hungry!
You look pale and undernourished and underprivileged —
I think you are hungry.
Go out and find yourself something to eat,
Perhaps a chip, or something else of wood,
See what you can find!"
And Arthur said, "Yes, mother," and he went out —
God, how awful is hunger!

So Arthur went out and hunted for something to eat,
And after he had hunted for hours and hours and it was getting on,
He said, "I wish to God I lived in a country with trees!"
And shortly after he saw a little chip and began to eat.
Is it not wonderful, Comrade, to eat?

Look back, Comrade, instead of being such a forward-looker,
Look back, Comrade, you're nothing but a future-peeker,
You're just one of these Pre-Revolutionites!
Once this country was full of chips — real chips,
Long ago. Before the buffalo! Before the bison! Before the giant sloth!
They didn't go around pasteurizing milk in those days,
They didn't go poking holes in the ground looking for oil,
Or potash, or Bentonite, or gypsum —
Look at it now!

Well, Arthur was sitting and eating his little chip,
And molesting no-one,
And certainly doing nobody any harm,
Just smiling all over his little ant-like face,
And saying to himself, "Is it not wonderful to eat?"
A tall Swede, who weighed two hundred pounds,
And owned a section and three quarters of land,
And had two tractors,
And over a hundred head of cattle,
But all his sentiment and brains in his feet,
Came walking that way;
And as he came walking that way —
He stepped on the little chip.
Boom!

Tell me, Comrade, is life not sad?
Tell me, Comrade, has life a meaning?
You wouldn't know.

8  Jordan Middleduck

Jordan Knox Wallace Middleduck, according to the Saskatchewan Who's Who, was born in 1925 on the farm on which he still lives, and which, incidentally, he seldom leaves. Both parents are dead, and he lives alone and unmarried at his present age of forty-one on his bit of land which is picturesquely located on the right bank of the Saskatchewan river near the little village of Pelvis. He is regarded as very much of a recluse by those who know him, except in the matter of the three churches to which he belongs and which he somewhat disapprovingly, but nevertheless faithfully, attends.

His great-grandparents are said to have been weavers in the Low Country of Europe by the name of Mitteltuch (meaning utility cloth, as befits weavers), and they were noted for their piety. On moving to Canada in the mid-eighties and settling in Bruce County, Ontario, the name Mitteltuch gradually was changed to Middleduck by the Scotch settlers there with whom the large Mitteltuch progeny intermarried. None of the traditional family piety was lost in this change. In fact, it tended to increase, and Jordan's father was a stern Presbyterian who brought up his large family (of which only Jordan today survives) in the narrow path of rectitude and with a stock of moral principles which, surprisingly enough, has enriched Jordan's literary talents.

It is not unusual to find in Saskatchewan, and even more so in Alberta, a poet who expresses in his work some of that oldfashioned literalism and fundamentalist morality which has not only guided so much of the private life of that province but has even coloured its politics and economic theory. But Jordan Middleduck is more than a stern moralist. He regards his poetic talent as a trust to be devoted to the uplift of mankind. In this respect he is something of an anachronism. One might almost say that he is a classicist, a throwback, as it were, to another poetic age. He is somewhat Miltonian in character; his style is leisurely with a flavour of the archaic; and this tends to be augmented by the fact that he is largely self-educated and, like so many of that class who have read a great deal but have not heard the words spoken in ordinary conversation, he sometimes gives them a quaint pronunciation. One encounters such modulations as "humidity" rhyming with "pretty." Thus;

In wind and hail we're sitting pretty
Come rain and relative humidity,

and one also comes across such oddities as "ocean" being pronounced "orcean" and the plural of "neck" on the giraffes being given as "neckses." These are not, as in the case of John Swivel's use of "insuliar" a revival of some archaic form whereby our language is being enriched by the poet; they are the vernacular of the district in which Jordan himself was raised. The diction of Noah, for example, could have come from any farm in the neighbourhood of Pelvis. Middleduck's roots are deep in the Saskatchewan soil, but, despite his moralizing, he is concerned with human-ness as much as with humus, and this, together with his high sense of mission gives him a special place as the spokesman of the people.

Middleduck's fame rests almost entirely upon his great epic Noah. He has written two other works, Jonah, and The Red Sea, but these have not as yet been published, and, in fact, The Red Sea has not been finished. The fact that his farm on the banks of the Saskatchewan is subject to annual flooding may have influenced him in his choice of themes. Certainly it has had a lot to do with the writing of Noah.

Where Middleduck excels is in the delineation of character, This is particularly true in the case of his greatest work in which he takes the Biblical story of the flood and tells of the voyage of the Ark in which Noah, at the age of six hundred, rescues the many generations of his children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren (to mention only the more recent ones) from the perils of the great "inundation." It is an epic poem and as epics go, it seems singularly lacking in incident. The Ark simply drifts without any particular efforts at navigation on the part of the crew, and the daily log is monotonously repetitious in its account of the weather for the day as being regularly "Cloudy with showers." But out of this emerges the towering figure of Noah who grows in greatness from his first appearance when his wife admonishes him to lay off alcohol, to his final landing on Ararat where he meets, erroneously, "the Romans." The other figures in the poem, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, are vaguely drawn and they serve rather as foils and prompters for the moral lessons which Middleduck, through Noah, wishes to convey. Only Noah's wife, Mrs. Noah according to Middleduck, stands out in any detail, and even she is a somewhat blurred image of Noah himself in that she too has caught some of his hortatory manner, or at least she acquires it before the poem is finished.

Middleduck's flood scenes are always somewhat reminiscent of the spring break-up of the Saskatchewan river beside which he lives, and the fact that he visualizes the great flood of Biblical times in terms of his own experience and expresses it in his own idiom, gives his interpretation a unique charm. The poem opens in the classical manner with an epigraph and a short introductory verse in which he indicates the aim and content of the poem to follow, and also gives a hint of the moral lesson to be learned from adversity.

epigraph

Take heed, ye mortal children here
Oh Pilgrim, mend your ways,
The deep dark vale is ever near,
And hell a matter of days.

This is followed by the "Introduction." Middleduck is always very specific and the reader is left in no doubt as to what he is trying to do.

introduction

Of flood I sing, I sing of flood,
First ditches filled, then roads turned mud,
And stacks that float and barns that totter,
And as far as you can see it's under water,
And there's no getting out, and the food all et up,
And it's raining buckets, and no sign of let up —
And you say it's woe, and it's turning woer —
Take heart, Brother Pilgrim, remember Noah.

Admittedly this opening is somewhat depressing, but again Middleduck would not leave us in any doubt as to his high moral purpose. Having made his point, however, he changes pace with great artistry, and we are gradually edged into the change in weather. He accomplishes this with his famous and delightful little lyric, "Clouds," with which Mrs. Noah greets the day, and this is followed immediately by the three poems to the birds whereby she undertakes to read the weather.

Bird poems are something of a surprise coming from Middleduck in that they depart from the sombre and somewhat monotonous couplets which he adopts as his epic form. Moreover it has been suggested that Middleduck wrote the bird poems to infuriate Doctor Bedfellow who has repeatedly expressed his contempt for Middleduck's poetry, and who, in turn, is regarded by Middleduck as being lost and beyond redemption — in a literary sense, at least.

But actually Middleduck wrote the bird poems to indicate the character of Noah's wife, who is portrayed here as being "flighty." She was Noah's third (at least) wife and was considerably younger than her husband. She is described as being "porgy" by which Middleduck means that she is fond of food and is putting on weight, and she also comes under Middleduck's condemnation for being "partial to orgy" whatever that may mean in Middleduck's limited experience in such matters.

She was pretty, but porgy,
And given to orgy,
And subject to difficult mood,
When she'd run out on Noah
And dance the Aloha,
On the beach — or swim in the nude.

But Noah's wife was more than flighty. Being obviously of Hawaiian descent, she was a great student of nature, and she had inherited from her ancestors a weather lore which enabled her to foretell changes in the weather pattern from studying the behaviour of birds. But first she sits and contemplates the clouds. It is in this poem that Middleduck makes the famous comparison of the cloud with a cow.

clouds

Clouds! Whiter than shrouds,
Swifter than cows,
Beautiful clouds —
I greet you.

Bringing the rain,
Pattering netherwards,
I leave off work,
And gaze heavenwards.

Snow comes from thee,
Too hail and mist,
Fog and sleet also,
Are thy gift.

White as anything,
Light as a feather,
Let me thy praises sing,
Forever, forever.

Having thus set the scene, Middleduck then calls our attention to the different birds which are being studied by Noah's wife, and through which she is made aware of a change of weather in the offing, of which she later informs Noah. Apparently not every bird has an instinctive knowledge of a change in the weather pattern. Just as in Saskatchewan it is only from a study of the snearth that weather changes can be predicted, so, also, in Biblical times, the number of birds which could be relied upon as foretelling the weather was limited. They were, according to Middleduck's poem, the canary (especially the young canary), the bobolink, and the hen ostrich. Each of these birds rates a special poem in the epic, and they are poems of a lyrical quality which we would hardly expect from the austere Middleduck. The truth is, however, that on his isolated farm, Middleduck the lonesome bachelor, has acquired a real fondness for birds, and he is, in fact, the only person known who has ever succeeded in making a pet of Saskatchewan's own provincial bird, the shy and silent snearth. It is no wonder that Middleduck is cordially hated by Professor Baalam Bedfellow.

Of the three bird poems given, "The Bobolink" is undoubtedly the one of the highest quality. The "Canary," of course, has its admirers, and "The Hen Ostrich" is rich in moral and meaning, but "The Bobolink" stands supreme.

the canary

I will tarry but a little by the sycamore, the sycamore,
Tarry but a little by the tree,
For the clouds are drifting westward,
And the birds are flying eastward,
And up above the geese-birds,
Are gathering in groups of three,
And the hairy young canary,
Like a fairy light and airy,
Twitters madly, twitters badly, the refrain —
Tarry not, tarry not, by the sycamore, the sycamore,
I wouldn't be surprised if it rains.

the bobolink

All gaily and all cheerfully,
The bobolink it sings,
And high above, its mate to it
A song in answer brings —
And under the eaves
From off the perch,
Over the hill,
Beside the church,
Beneath the elm,
Atop the birch,
The answering echo rings —
And then they join in song together,
And say, "What lovely sunny weather!"

More cheerful then and gailier,
The bobolink and mate,
Their voices blend to praise the day,
And trill and ululate —
And over the eaves,
Above the perch,
Atop the hill,
High up on the church,
Still higher on the elm,
And half-way up on the birch —
The blue-jay cries, "That's what you think,
You dizzy, daffy bobolink —
Tomorrow night you'll both be coughing
There's change of weather in the offing!"

the hen ostrich

Of all the birds that ever sings
I think the tall hen-ostrich brings,
To her affairs the greatest sense,
At least a sense of competence;
Throughout those days when all her young
Are coming out, she holds her tongue,
And when they're hatched, and not 'til then
She finds her shrieking voice again
To lure the male who's just a rover
Across the sands, to start all over —
Unless of course, they both decide,
It's going to rain — and let it ride.

The point has sometimes been raised by critics that Mrs. Noah here learns more about the coming storm by observing the cross currents of wind and by listening to the blue jay than from watching the canary and the bobolink. But then, Middleduck may have had some point of Mrs. Noah's character in mind — one never knows about these Hawaiians. The important thing to remember is that she actually did learn about the unprecedented bad weather which was due, and that she did warn Noah in good time to take whatever steps he deemed necessary to rescue his relatives and some of the animals from the impending flood. Not only did she warn Noah about the weather, she also — and here we definitely have the high-minded voice of Middleduck — warns him to remain sober if his plans are to be "attended with success;"

Oh never touch of demon rum,
Leave whiskey on the shelf,
And as for rye, when once begun,
No man can be himself;
For he who quaffs the devil's brew,
Of sherry or champagne,
Or Collins, slinger, twist, or screw,
Can never sail the main —
And none can navigate a barque,
Or know just where he's at,
If stewed to ears he heads the Ark,
Away from Ararat.

Noah, perhaps more frightened than pentitent, takes her advice and proceeds to build the Ark. Middleduck, who like all Saskatchewan farmers, is very capable with his hands and is something of a builder, gives us detail as to the construction of the Ark, but these are not particularly interesting except to those who are concerned with the technical details. In the end it is finished, and we are told that it is "built of cubits and stands on stilts," so that it can float when the water rises. When the gangplank is finally down to admit the passengers, animal and human, we are given a vivid picture of frightened animals dashing to safety through any available opening in the Ark, regardless of the signs and arrows that have been put up for their orderly embarkation:

And then at last the Ark was built,
Of cubits made, and stood on stilts,
And the arrows were up and the gangplank down —
And here come the animals afraid to drown!
Through every doorway, entrance and egress,
Come dashing teams, a zebra and zebress,
A tiger and tigress, a gnu and a she-gnu,
A jack and a jenny, a mu and an emu,
A pair of elephants, a brace of rhinoceros,
Two dinosaurus — mostly esophagus,
A gaggle of apes — they appear Hamitic,
A single earthworm (hermaphroditic),
A D-wolf and B-wolf, a sheep and a goat,
A tapir and tapir, a pig and a shoat,
And those things from Africa with the long, long neckses,
And others and others of opposite sexes —
Too numerous to mention or describe them here
But cleverly paired from afar and near:

Thus came the animals, two by two,
And then the Noah family, and the crew.

Noah, at six hundred years of age, is definitely of the old school and tends to be out of touch with the younger generation which he feels it his duty to rescue from destruction. He is stern, rigid in his habits, and, having finally heeded the admonitions of his wife, he neither smokes nor drinks. He regards the private morals of his passengers, particularly the feminine passengers whom he distrusts, with a jaundiced eye. He has little confidence that the new generation which he is rescuing and which is to repopulate the world after the flood will be any better than those who are being left behind to perish. He is never genial towards his great-great-progeny; in fact, he tends to be definitely peevish, as if resenting the responsibility which has been placed upon him. His concern is never for their physical safety, for which he seems to have no anxiety, but for their morals and for their general behaviour. Here, for example, is an extract from Noah's address to the passengers whom he has finally and after much trouble succeeded in collecting on the main deck for a briefing on the evening before their departure.

For them as makes the trip I'd like to say,
Especially to the girls here, if they could
Shut up a second, just for once, and pay
Attention for their own eternal good —
Now things appear in strange proportion
Due to the largeness of the orceon,
And it's just as well, before you go,
(Especially them as can't say no)
To realize that on the wash,
A lot of stuff that's said is tosh,
And you want to watch on the briny wet,
You don't do things you might regret;

Man needs a woman's tender hand,
Perhaps most when out of sight of land —
But that don't mean at sea she otta
Do things she won't on terra cotta,
And, just because he's feeling queasy
Ain't no excuse for being easy:

We leave tomorrow when the water's riz —
I thank you, Ladies, such as is.

Although very little ever happens aboard the Ark, Noah is vigilant and keeps a sharp eye on all his passengers. When the occasional incidents do occur in Middleduck's epic, they are introduced not for the purpose of action but to illustrate the greatness of Noah's character and his ability to rise above adversity. On one occasion, for example, the monkeys are liberated from the hold by some of the passengers as a prank. These enlist the aid of a passing octopus in rounding up all eight members of the crew and "battening them down in the hatches." The monkeys then take over the navigation of the Ark and almost succeed in returning to its point of departure. Noah's indignation on discovering this deception is positively titanic, and the scorn which he pours over the generation of teen-agers, whom he assumes to be the guilty ones, finally spreads over to the entire passenger list —a list incidentally, which he found some difficulty in keeping up to date. There is much resentment on the part of those of the older generations and what Middleduck describes as "mutterings" are heard which threaten to get out of hand if not develop into actual mutiny. As it happens the sudden shout of "Land ho!" from one of the monkeys in the rigging, who had been overlooked when they were exchanged for the liberated crew, saved the situation. After this nobody paid any further attention to Noah who retired to his quarters in a huff.

Greatness triumphs. Noah grows in character as his distractions increase and after several months, land is actually reached. Repeatedly he calls his passengers together to give them advice and cautions them concerning the dangers which they may meet in the new land, the occupants of which Middleduck mistakenly assumes (probably as a result of reading Sarah Binks) to be Romans. He counsels industry and sobriety. They must be moderate in all things. Work, he declares, is the greatest of all virtues, but even work, if it is actuated only for money, is every bit as bad as slothfulness;

Who drinks at night a quart of wine,
Can never hope to rise at nine,
With quick affection for his species
Or greet the robin's morning clichés;
But he who early goes to bed
Alone and sober, 'less he's wed,
Will rise alert to face the day,
And grinning drive dull cares away;
But he who works beyond his need,
Acquiring money just for greed,
Until he's got a greed psychosis —
Well, nature sends him acidosis,
Pink-eye, pip, grippitus, shivers,
Yaws, and cirrhosis of the livers.¹

Middleduck takes full advantage of his poetic privilege to modify the story of the flood so that it will meet local conditions as well as accord with his own temperament. He is a kindly soul and the thought of so many people being drowned is abhorrent to his nature, stern though it may be. The Ark, accordingly, which for many days has been drifting westward finally reaches a new land which is called Ararat, a land which is already populated with friendly and hospitable folk. These bid Noah and his family welcome and are happy to include them in their collection of ethnic groups even though Noah himself is at first suspicious and regards them as "foe." In the end he comes to the conclusion that his own group is not so much either, and he settles down happily in the new country which, from his point of view, has the big advantage of being a drought area — at least not subject to flood. As is to be expected, Middleduck sees this new land in Saskatchewan terms and the words which he puts into Noah's mouth for the final briefing indicates the splendid ethnic variety of his native land as well as carrying another of the high-minded messages for which he is famous;

Today we land, you'd better crane the neck,
And keep a sharp lookout to meet the foe,
Canadian-French, Ukrainian, Pole, or Czech, —
This is the West, we can't exactly know:
I think they're Romans, but could also be
Dakota-German with some Swede and Dutch,
Or Scotch descendents with a touch of Cree,
In any case, you're not yourselves so much;
So never say, to hold yourselves above,
"My ancestors came over on the Ark."
It wasn't no Mayflower, and if it waren't for Dove
And me, you wouldn't have disembarked.

Noah, great and revered and much mellowed by his age and the experiences of his six hundred years, spends his declining days in whatever comfort his arthritis permits. Mrs. Noah, now apparently younger and more Hawaiian than ever, deserts her husband for a life in the city where she gives dance and swimming lessons. But Noah takes this philosophically. He is now much sought after by the younger generations for his wisdom and advice, none of which they ever accept. But his attitude is no longer the querulous one which characterized him in the Ark. He is almost genial. He knows that the contemporary generation is again "steeped in sin," and although he may caution the youth against putting too much money on the horses on Fair Day, the races being as he says "foreordained," he also knows that his advice will not be taken and that they will never learn. But he does make the point that man should not blame the horses;

Shun Fair Day, Son, 'tis never ours
To mock the loser when he's slow,
Or tempt the steed beyond his powers,
To win, when he should place or show:

The driver in the harness race
Must bear alone the barbed defeat,
He knows when best to slow the pace,
And win it in another heat:

Such things in life are foreordained,
But we blind mortals steeped in sin
Will never learn — but just complain,
For betting is as bad as gin.

We are given a final picture of Noah in his old age. He is bent and worn and he suffers from different ailments, and pork and beans of which he has always been very fond now, we are told, "lie heavy." He might indeed be a lonesome and tragic figure, were it not for his memories. He is very rich in these, and he is content in knowing that he can still recall the long parade of those he once held dear and whom his memory has now enshrined beyond the power of time to ever fade. They are vividly presented, "adorned and scented," and Middleduck for once rises in artistry above the usual lessons which he considers his poetic duty.

The days will tend to mar man's noble dial,
Six hundred years will spavin his proud gait,
And tie his spine in kinks and knots — the trials
Of centuries will twist him out of shape;
And pork and beans lie heavy — and arthritis
Will plague his nights, and then by day the bends,
Or Bang's disease, or sometimes just gastritis,
Will keep him home forgotten by his friends:
However, such is age, and I'm contented
For age can still review the past parade,
Of curled, adorned, and beautified and scented —
The lovely willing gals who never fade.

Such is Noah the great epic work of which Saskatchewan may indeed be proud. It undoubtedly has its faults, but it also has its moments; and this must be said for it, that where it lacks in lyrical quality it gains in character and moral earnestness. Middleduck, the lonesome bachelor on his little stretch of flooded or droughtstricken land finds time for much philosophical reflection, and he also seems to mature with each successive flood on the river. He is something of a classicist, or he would not have chosen the outdated and even unpopular epic and ballad style of poetry as his medium of expression. But fame and popularity do not concern him in the least. He writes because he feels he must, and for this reason his poetry has a singular purity and simplicity not shared by any other member of the School of Seven. One feels this particularly in that most beautiful of all Saskatchewan poems, "The Mendicant Poet." Here, if anywhere, Middleduck mirrors himself, the lonesome child of the poetic Muse, out of touch with his contemporaries and unable to adapt himself to his age. He makes no concession to modernity; he is neither convolute nor cerebral; the cow does not particularly interest him, and, as far as innerness is concerned, it enters here frankly and simply to assuage the poet's physical hunger and makes no attempt to approach even the level of Poltergeist. Denied the good things of life, the "peppered liver pie" and the apple strudel or even coffee and crullers, the poet retreats into himself. In the end it is a spiritual hunger which he faces. The great question of "how fares the soul within" is, in the end, the paramount question. And like the Mendicant himself, Middleduck is content to go his own way and write in his own way, calmly trusting that his high-minded idealism and poetic integrity will some day find him his honoured place in Canadian letters.

the mendicant poet

Beset with fleas, despondent, lacking cash,
The weary traveller treads the roads of men,
And in his well-worn pantaloons a gash,
And in his eye a tear — and he is thin.

He meets a stranger: "Hast thou almses here?
Or canst thou give me solace with a beer?"
The citizen is mute, he looks askance,
Nor deigns to give the weary one a glance.

Then to the hut he goes; tap, tap! "Good Friend,
Hast thou a peppered liver-pie to lend?
An apple strudel? Or a hunk of ham?
Coffee and crullers for a hungry man?"

"Nay, we have none of these," the dame responds,
"We doubt thy hunger, mendicant — be gone!
Nor have we call for verses. Beat it, quick!
No minstrel's songs within this bailiwick!"

Abashed the bard retreats — He has no heart
To wrestle with the damsel for a tart;
The turnip from the furrow he will tweak,
And live upon the parsnip and the leek.

At eve we see him sitting at the door,
Well filled with turnips, smoking hay, and poor,
And on his face a sweet seraphic grin —
'Tis hard to say how fares the soul within.

————

Footnotes:

¹ It is interesting to note here that Middleduck has long maintained that the long life reached by such men as Adam and Methuselah and Noah himself was due to the fact that they had two livers. Science has not been able to verify this certainly plausible theory, but it is nevertheless interesting to find the idea in the literature of Saskatchewan which province will undoubtedly get the credit if the two-liver theory is ever confirmed. →

9  Osiris Jones-Jones, S.O.M.
  The Laureate

From a literary standpoint probably the least distinguished of the present Regina School of poets is the Laureate of Saskatchewan, Osiris Jones-Jones. He has been the official poet of two successive Saskatchewan governments, neither of which regard him in any way as being a political turncoat merely because he places his poetic talents at their disposal regardless of their own political differences. As a somewhat obscure civil servant, first in the Department of Agriculture under the ccf, and later in the Department of Public Works under the present administration, Jones-Jones has always taken the attitude that he must impartially serve whoever employs him, and this high-minded political neutrality has ensured his continued employment through administrative changes. This is unusual, but he is exceedingly useful and is not easily replaced, in spite of the fact that everybody in Canada writes poetry. Jones-Jones can be counted on. Whenever the Government needs a verse or two in support of some project or perhaps a couplet to promote some particular tourist attraction, Jones-Jones can be depended upon to deliver the poetic goods. Let one of the Departments of the Government say, for example, that it wants twelve lines in praise of the Minister of Agriculture in a booklet such as its Fifty Years of Progress, or that it wants two verses describing the accommodations at Lake Wishtaboola for the tourist brochure, Trails to Paradise, and that it wants these by 11:35 the following morning, Jones-Jones is always equal to the occasion. Such precision and reliability is not only valuable to any government, but Jones-Jones obliges without any thought of remuneration, despite the fact that on special occasions, as in the case of "Cow" already mentioned, he was glad to receive the fifty dollars honorarium.

As a poet, Jones-Jones is said to lack fervour. This is understandable because of his political neutrality. Although, like Jordan Middleduck, he regards his talent as a gift to be devoted to public service, he lacks Middleduck's sense of mission. He feels that any public service is worth while, and he has no great concern for political or moral consequences or even of having influence of any kind. Like the songs of the birds which he records on his tape recorder, he feels that his voice is heard today and stilled tomorrow, and that it has no great meaning in time or in literature. Undoubtedly this attitude is the reason for the criticism frequently directed against him that he lacks warmth. Indeed the opinion has more than once been expressed in literary circles that regardless of Saskatchewan's natural desire to go Ontario one better in the field of art, the School of Seven would be improved if there were only six.

But Canada (and Saskatchewan in particular) owes Jones-Jones a great debt whatever his own poetic achievement. It is true he is the author of the Provincial anthem, "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden," which alone will ensure him honourable mention in the literature of Western Canada. But apart from that, it is through his splendid skill in tape recording that the voice of "M," or more popularly, the Muse, was first heard. As a civil servant he must to some extent preserve anonymity, and indeed it is sometime difficult to know whether some verse or other in a government publication is the result of his talent or is simply governmental routine. But when it comes to the discovery of the voice, or voices, of what scholars so-far designate as "M," we must give Jones-Jones the full credit, whether, as some maintain, he actually wrote the verses himself, or whether they were done at his request by some girls in his office.

Jones-Jones is not only an ardent bird-watcher, but, as already indicated, is an expert at tape recording, and it may well be that in Saskatchewan at least he is better known for his recording of bird noises than for poetry. He has succeeded for example in making an album of the mating call of the snearth, no mean feat since the recording of the complete series involved his being buried up to his neck in the Saskatchewan dust for several days at a time and setting out innumerable jars of peanut-butter. And it was through his ability as a tape recorder that the voice and poetry of "M" were first heard on that Dominion Day when the Regina School first met in Willowview Cemetery to celebrate the anniversary of Sarah Binks's death. The voice itself skilfully introduced the different poets as they stepped forward to pay their poetic tributes, but just whose voice it is or where Jones-Jones got the poetry is anybody's guess. But the interesting thing is that they were not only played during the ceremony, but they were also re-recorded together with the poems which were declaimed in honor of Sarah or of Willows before they were tossed on the ceremonial pyre. The result is that the complete proceedings on that occasion have come down to us on tape and have thus been preserved for posterity. It is an achievement of great literary significance not only because of the first appearance of "M," but also the recording gives us a first-hand account of the entry of Purge Potatok into the field of Saskatchewan letters.

Little need be said of Jones-Jones's own work, since, as already stated, it lacks fervour. There are however exceptions. Certainly the closing lines of "Moonlight on Wascana Lake" (which, in spite of the co-operative effort of the whole Regina School, undoubtedly bears the imprint of Jones-Jones since it was written before the defeat of the ccf Government), indicate that Jones-Jones can take a definite stand. Moreover there are times as in "You Take the Gravel Road" in which he definitely seems to express a criticism of the roads of his province.

oh you take the gravel road

Oh you take the gravel road,
And I'll take the dirt road,
And I'll be in Johnson Lake before you —
Though I think, my True Love,
We'd better take the same,
Since it's likely that I'd never see more you:
For the one road is wash-board,
And the other deep in slither,
Though there's short cuts and detours,
On both that take you thither —
And I can point you down there
And put you on the track —
Heaven help you, True Love,
If you try to get back.

Another poem in similar vein, though more lyrical is called

the road from cactus lake to pelvis

From Cactus Lake to Pelvis,
Is just a little hop,
Its graded dirt for forty miles,
With no occasion to stop —
Unless, of course, you have a fiat,
Or perhaps you just get stuck,
And if you're ever out of gas —
Oh Boy, you're out of luck.

But Jones-Jones by no means takes this defeatist attitude towards all roads. In his poem, "The Broad Highway" (incidentally he is by no means above a bit of plagiarism from time to time), he becomes enthusiastically lyrical over an improved road and calls himself the friend of all who travel thereon.

the broad highway

Give me a house by the side of the road,
Where the world goes rushing by,
The wide road, the open road,
That leads to more road, and sky,
Where the cars go, and the winds go,
And the dust flows after,
And the tires scream, and the girls scream
With young wild laughter:

And give me a house with a wide-flung door,
And six painted signs that tell,
Of hot dogs, and toasted dogs,
And pizza pie to sell —
And I'll be a friend to the passer-by
With potato chips and smokes,
And root beer and ginger beer,
And hamburger buns and cokes.

There is no doubt that Jones-Jones can be a real booster when he sets out to be. In "Lake Washkaboola," written for the Highways' Department booket, Trails to Adventure with Map, he misses none of the activities which that popular resort presents to the camper. As a bird-watcher and nature student himself, he is quick to point out some of nature not usually found in the parks, and he calls attention especially to cries of the jay and the crow as they awaken the camp to a new day, in this case a rainy one.

lake washkaboola

Come to Lake Washkaboola's quiet retreat,
Beyond the rush of city's strife and care,
With nothing much to do but sleep and eat,
Or wash the car and sit and breathe the air

Here legend tells that someone caught a pike,
And some still try their luck — there's boats to rent,
While others name the trees, or bird-watch, hike,
Or tighten pegs and fly-screens on the tent.

Here nature casts aside her old disguise,
Revealing treasures seldom city known —
Hornets, mosquitos, spiders, leeches, flies,
And a thousand jewelled beetles all her own:

Then come to Washkaboola once again,
And join with crow and blue-jay greeting dawn,
And boil your coffee in refreshing rain,
Then nap, or read an old Maclean's and yawn.

Undoubtedly one of Jones-Jones's best poems was that written at the request of the Department of Agriculture in order to promote a greater attendance at the Municipal Fairs which the Department was encouraging. The attendance had been falling off, some say, because of Middleduck's expostulation that the harness races at the Fair were "foreordained." "Come to the Fair" departs from the usual list of the joys and excitements which the fairs present, but stresses the regrets and the emptiness of life which each must inevitably suffer who has turned away from life and has not ventured to turn one of the wheels of fortune on the Midway or even had his palm read or something in the shrouded tent.

come to the fair

When autumn comes and grass is brown and bent,
And winter looms, will you then turn and say,
"So passes time! Another season spent,
And I, of all, am one who failed The Day."
There is within each summer's toil and strife,
One day that's set aside and yclept, Fair,
Just one, and yet you turned your face on life —
Fair Day has come and gone and you not there.

Is it for such as you Departments make
Their sacrifice to subsidize the beeves?
Or try incite the 4-H Clubs to bake,
And win a prize for pickled beets and sheaves?
For you no wheel of fortune turned this day
Nor dusky siren lured to shrouded tent —
No wonder now you're sad; you stayed away,
And spend your time in wishing you had went.

Jones-Jones's poem, "The Premier," was never published. It was meant originally as campaign literature during the last election, but when it became apparent that the Government might possibly be defeated Jones-Jones himself decided that it would be better to withdraw it and keep it for the next election. It was only by accident that it was found. Like most of the poetry of Jones-Jones when done to order it is not of any particular literary merit. But it is typically Laureate and illustrates his facility and versatility. Incidentally it throws light on the Premier;

the premier

Some day, My Friends, I'll lay this burden down,
And turn away from politics and strife,
Admit that even I must doff the crown
Of Premier and return to private life;

But not right now — big issues rise anew,
Problems of agriculture, and the miles
Of gravel roads, to mention only two —
So turn deaf ear to opposition wiles.

Believe them not! They say, and here I quote
"The time is ripe for change!" But I say "No,"
Not in the middle of the stream the vote
That brings about a change and overthrow;

Four years ago, My Friends, I dared to state
With confidence, "The future lies ahead!"
And that same thought I now reiterate —
But what have they to offer you instead?

They just keep saying, and I quote again,
"The Province needs a change!" But why, I ask,
It isn't change we need so much as rain,
And honest men to bravely face the task.

I wouldn't trust that bunch! They're out for spoil
They'll miss our glorious heritage, the bums!
Which ain't just wheat, but sulphur, potash, oil,
And colour-television when it comes.

And so, My Friends, I know you'll do what's right
Comes voting day, and give them their desert,
If they want change, hell, plough them out of sight,
And learn them to go spreading lies and dirt.

One of the most interesting of the poems from the versatile pen of Jones-Jones is "To a Gowpher," written for a Burns Night Dinner in Regina at which a number of the descendants of the early Scottish fur traders as well as a number of descendants of Burns himself were to be present. Jones-Jones was commissioned to write a poem for the occasion, preferably, if he could manage it, in the Burns dialect. And he managed very well. Despite the fact that he knew little about the fur trade of early Western Canada he had, as a boy in Saskatchewan, kept himself in pocket money by snaring gophers with binder twine for the sake of the one-cent bounty on their tails. It was the custom, however, among the boys of his day to collect only the tail and let the rest of the gopher go so as not to deplete the natural resources of the neighborhood, and in his poem Jones-Jones tells of his fur trading activities and mentions some of the frustrations. "To a Gowpher" is quite evidently modelled after Burns's "To a Fieldmouse," and was a great success at the dinner. As the evening progressed it was variously described by the descendants as being either "the best damn thing that Burns ever wrote," or as "better than any damn thing that Burns ever wrote," the opinion depending upon the particular slant of patriotism towards either Saskatchewan or Scotland which the literary critic happened to have at the time. It is a poem which, as far as known, is the only one over which blows were almost exchanged, and might indeed have been, had not the next series of three toasts been proposed. These, to Burns's great-grandfather, to his great-grandchildren, and to the North-West Fur company followed shortly after by three more toasts to Burns's great-grandfather again, "The Great Fur West North Com'ny" and finally, to "Our Great Four Fathers who built the cpr," shifted attention from literature to Canadian history.

to a gowpher

Wee gowpher, leetle fur-tailed moosie,
Could I but follow doon yer hoosie,
Or send behind you a wee pussy,
I'd hae your tail;
But since I canna', aye, I'll stick it
And snare ye wi' a string on picket,
Through bliss and bale;

Ye'll gie your brush, though dinna ken't
A tail's a tail, and worth a cent,
And furred or no, and broke or bent,
Ye'll just maun rue it;
So stick your haid within the reel,
A cent's a cent — och, slippery eel,
Some lousy, sawed-off, dirty de'il,
Hae beat me to it!

10   Purge Potatok, D.P.

Purge Potatok's sudden appearance on Saskatchewan's scene of Arts and Letters (See Appendix I) was one of these literary events which can never happen outside of fiction. Yet it not only happened, but it happened in such a way as to project him almost immediately into public recognition and to win for him inclusion in the prestigious School of Seven and the award of the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. The truth is that, at the time of his discovery as a poet, Potatok was completely unconscious of his poetic talents and had, in fact, seldom written any poetry. It is only recently that he has learned to write in English at all. Alone and unrecognized and even uncaring, he had been pouring forth his poetic effusions to the wind and the stars in an ecstasy of joy and appreciation of his adopted land, naively unaware that, as far as Saskatchewan was concerned, he had a precious gift.

Purge Potatok, whose real name is Purgatov Podolnik, but which he immediately anglicized to Potatok on his arrival into Canada, came to this country as one of the "displaced persons" or D.P.s after the last war. He is very proud to be known as a D.P., and so calls himself. He lives on the quarter-section of sand and alkali which adjoins Willowview Cemetery on the north, and it is probably to this fortunate fact that he owes his recognition as a poet. No one seems ever to have wanted the particular piece of land on which he lives and no one had ever filed a homestead claim again it, even in the early days when the country around Willows was first thrown open to settlement. As a result Potatok owns the land and has prospered to the extent of owning a cow, who seems to thrive on the Russian thistle which the land produces in abundance, and a pair of scrub horses, somewhat aged and spavined, but still powerful enough to pull his single-shared plough across his vegetable patch every spring.

Purge is exceedingly happy on his stretch of land, and practically all of his poetry is in praise and appreciation of this wonderful Canada of his which he regards as a paradise on earth, because of its freedom and the fact that the land is actually his own. Time and again in his poetry, his favorite adjective, "fine," occurs in connection with the land of his adoption, and no promised wealth could ever induce him to leave it.

dis land of mine

I wouldn't trade dis land of mine,
By Willows here for any gain,
If some guy says, "here's Argentine,
Or Rostov-on-the-Don, Ukraine,
Come trade." I'd say, "You city slicker,
You tink you're smart. You tink I'm fool?
You trow in Poland, I don't dicker —
Go way, smart guy, go back to school!"

And if next day he comes wit Burma,
And say, "Dis land here what you have,
Is just some dried-up terra firma,
No good for crop — here's Kubishev,
And here's Smolensk and fifty dollars,
And Minsk and Pinsk, and I trow in Priehl,
And a team wit harnesses and two collars —"
I say, "get out! I don't make deal."

As is apparent, his English is still weak. He speaks fluent Polish as well as his native Ukrainian, but he writes as he talks with a definite accent. This, however, has not been to his literary disadvantage. The Saskatchewan Government, recognizing the importance of the various ethnic groups in the province (especially around election time), has encouraged Potatok to continue writing in his present style, hoping too that he will do for Saskatchewan what William Henry Drummond did for the French-Canadian habitant of Quebec and that through his poetic contributions, the cultural life of Canada will be further enriched. This bids fair to be successful in more respects than the mere blending of a new accent into Canadian literature. No poet of Canada has ever expressed such unbounded joy in Canada as has Potatok, and in this respect he rises above all provincialism. It is true that, like all Saskatchewan poets, he must needs say his word (repeatedly, in fact) about the cow and there is definitely a strong suggestion of innerness in his reference to the planting of dill and "potatoes for make wine" in his lovely "I Tink She's Spring." But his joy in the Canadian scene soars beyond provincial boundaries. And most certainly if we are to have a true Canadian literature, it must eventually be distilled from that very melt and blend which Potatok with his proud D.P. represents.

Potatok's first attempt at writing in English was, as we would expect, a translation. One of his neighbors, making the common mistake of thinking that all settlers from east Europe must of necessity be Russian and that all languages not French or German must also be Russian, presented him with a calendar which he had picked up in Regina. It turned out to be Polish. Potatok thanked the donor by writing a little verse in which he translated some of the months and days of the week into English. Yetbep and Bibtopok are rendered into their English equivalents as Thursday and Tuesday respectively and strangely enough Potatok makes them rhyme. He points out that the gift of the calendar marks the passing of another year and that, although the end of the year is the "worst day" and winter is at hand, the passing of the months in their succession from Styczen to Czerwiec will bring a more cheerful mood, and that the natural tendency to take arsenic during the long months will also disappear with the arrival of summer. It is given here not so much as an instance of his talent as to show some of the first steps in his development.

is polish, the calendar

Comes year's sad end, is worst day,
Time's passing marks the clock,
Then Yetbep comes it Thursday,
And Tuesday Bibtopok;

When snow and ice is mixen,
And snow she got no beauty,
Is then the month of Styczen,
But in thirty-one days comes Luty,

And after Luty Marzec,
And Kwiecien, Maj, Czerwiec,
And nobody takes no more arsenic,
Comes it summer then that week.

Another charming translation is "Umski," or "Lullaby," from the Ukrainian which Purge seems to have remembered from his early childhood and translated for the neighbour's children of whom he is very fond. Purge himself has no children, since he never married, although in one of his poems — in fact the very one he declaimed in the Willowview Cemetery when he was first discovered (See Appendix I) — he states that if the beer parlour in Willows, or "beer room" as he calls it, were to give trading stamps "like in city" he might thus be able to acquire enough household goods to get married and, as he says, "raise some keeds."

"Umski" is truly Russian in spirit. It is the song of a mother to her little boy, Thomas (or Tomsk in the Ukrainian), in which she sings of the father Ivan's return from the big city, Omsk. He is approaching home in successive verses, being first seven versts and then twenty versts from Omsk, being always by that much closer home to his little Tomsk. Finally in the last verse the mother, Gashinka, hears the bells of the droshki which mark Ivan's return and Tomsk is awakened and given a glass of tea by Katrinka, the maid, or it may be that the tea is for Ivan. In any case the long journey is over.

umski

In his droshki singing,
Seven versts from Omsk,
What is Ivan bringing,
To his little Tomsk?

Chorus;
Sleep, Tomsk, Tomsk,
Ivan's gone to Omsk.

Cold the moon is sinking,
Twenty versts from Omsk,
Ivan will be thinking
Of his little Tomsk.

Chorus;
Soon, Tomsk, Tomsk,
Ivan's home from Omsk.

Hear the bells, Gashinka,
Waken little Tomsk!
Stir the tea, Katrinka,
Welcome home from Omsk!

Chorus;
Wake, Tomsk, Tomsk,
Ivan's home from Omsk.

So far we have comparatively little of Potatok's work which has been published under his own name. Much of his poetry has been, as it were, "wasted on the desert air," or has been stolen by lesser poets who take down his verse and, after rendering it into English, pass it off as their own. There is even the suggestion of poetic piracy at his first appearance (Appendix D in the Cemetery and his discovery by Jones-Jones. It was however immediately disallowed by John Swivel who declared emphatically, "Not as long as I'm Dean."

But Purge Potatok has the happy faculty of being able to turn on poetry like turning on a tap without ever actually writing it. He not only then forgets what he has spoken, but is unconcerned as to whatever becomes of it. The temptation to make use of such talent by others not so endowed with the same poetic facility is naturally great, and it has more than once been claimed in justification that as long as it finds its way into literature it does not really matter who gets the credit. Certainly Purge does not care. His joy is not so much in poetry as in the wonderful country of his adoption. Here he is free not only of oppressive taxes, but also of regulations and of police supervision. Again and again we encounter in his works the "dis country fine," or "dis country good," and it is this which makes him so refreshingly Canadian. In two successive poems, "Is Not Rooshia," and "I Swing Flag," he tells of his appreciation and draws a contrast between life in this country and the one in the Ukraine, where he was kept in poverty by high taxes and bothered by officialdom. His own land near Willows has not been assessed, and consequently he pays no taxes, in spite of his holding title to the whole quarter section. In the poem, "Is Not Rooshia," he tells of the freedom from anxiety if his cow wanders away, and how easy it is to find her again:

is not rooshia

In Rooshia all the cow got bell,
If cow get lost there, hunt like hell,
Maybe she stole, maybe she took police,
Maybe no get back — no milk, no sheese,
No notting, go starve — but here she's good,
Dis country here she's like she should;
If cow go way, is notting, smile,
Cant get far lost, can see one mile,
Can see ten mile if not its black
Or blow some dust, can get her back,
Bring home to milk, dont need no bell —
Boy, I tink dis country swell.

Although Purge likes to refer to himself as one of the "displaced persons" and even signs his name on occasions as P. Potatok, D.P., he is nevertheless completely accepted into the community as a fellow-Canadian. In spite of his broken English no one regards him as a foreigner or suspects his loyalty. On public holidays such as Dominion Day and May 24th he joins wholeheartedly in the celebrations at Willows and buys even more than his share of rounds at the Clarendon Hotel beverage room. Rain or shine he expresses his unbounded love for this country, and if, as occasionally happens, someone complains of too much shine and not enough rain, Purge is always quick to point out that it will rain some other year and that the soul of man must be quickened as well as the land. Here is his "I Swing Flag" written last Dominion Day:

i swing flag

I swing flag 24th of May,
I swing him too Dominion Day —
Dis country got good King and Queen
But best is here Saskatchaween;
No pleeceman say, "You dam muzhik,
You pay me twenty roubles quick,
An' you dont pay, you understand,
I take you to Siberialand."

No man here say, "You raising flax?
Or wheat? Come on you bastard, tax!"
And never comes here priest to tell,
If dont pay now I go to hell;
Dis country good, if comes no rain —
Oh well, dont cost much, no complain,
Maybe it rain some other year —
Come on, for now we have some beer.

Such poetry with its melodic appreciation of cows without bells and tax-free land across which one can see for a full ten miles if there isn't a dust storm, together with its unbounded optimism written in the face of so much of today's sad and existentialist free verse, is the mark of a country which is still young. It dares to swing the flag of Canada regardless of whether that flag is Maple Leaf or Red Ensign and rises above all political differences in taking joy in freedom whether it rains or not. Truly splendid contribution to Canadiana! But there is another side to Potatok's poetry. It is the kindly intimate love of living things which we have already seen in the lullaby to little Tomsk. It is the fellow feeling of one of God's creation for another. John Swivel, the Great Dean, may indeed hold forth in lofty terms concerning time's inexorable sweep, and the charming Wraitha Dovecote may shed her own sad tears for the love that never was, but in Purge Potatok, the lowly D.P., we have an approach to the intimacy of the human heart which, with the possible exception of Sarah Binks's tribute to motherhood, "Little Papoose," has never been expressed in Saskatchewan literature. "Boy Cow" is very definitely a case in point.

The cow, that leitmotif of so much Saskatchewan poetry, is in Potatok's case the symbol of economic freedom, since from her he generally gets milk. But the little bull-calf, which the cow evidently begat, is something else again. It is almost a personal friend. And in "Boy Cow" Potatok tells of the problem of the calf being separated from its mother, and although the poet seems to scold the creature whom he affectionately calls "that little baster," he nevertheless expresses his sympathy and understanding of a very natural thirst and he ends by offering to share his bed.

boy cow

The cow she give no milk to drink,
Boy-cow take it all, I tink,
I slepp him six times on de pents,
Every time he jump dat dam fence,
But he got no dam sense;
Last night he jump dat fence some more,
Boy, dat little baster make me sore!
He too big for drink dat cow,
I say to him, what t'hell you tink you are anyhow,
You're too big, you're big like a mountain,
Don't tink I'm not running here no dam soda fountain,
If you're so dam thirsty why don't you go down to the slough?
What about me — I got to go all the way to the saloon.
And how am I going to pay for it? Yah, Moo!
Moo, yourself you little so-and-so!
Oh well, we all get thirsty, don't I know.
But I'm telling you, don't get here too dam free —
Come on, don't cry — tonight you can sleep wit' me.

How universal is the poetic spirit! It knows neither time nor distance, but leaps across the centuries and continents. And one cannot read Purge Potatok's lovely poem to spring in Saskatchewan, his "I Tink She's Spring," without being reminded at once of the lines of the Persian Poet, Omar, who wrote in the 10th Century:

Come fill the cup, and in the fires of spring,
The winter garments of repentance fling,
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter — and the bird is on the wing.

Omar's poem is over a thousand years old. He spent much of his life meditating on the joys of the cup and on the vanity of life. But spring touched him as it does all poets. Spring, in Persia, may have been a lush and long-drawn-out season in Omar's day for all we know; or it may have been, as in Saskatchewan, a single day tucked in between winter of one day and summer of the next. But, regardless of time or place, on that day the poetic sap begins to flow. And although the poet of Saskatchewan cannot, like Omar, afford to build a bonfire and fling his winter garments into it for the simple reason that he has to wear them next winter, he can at least write about the return of the birds which mark the return of spring. We do not know exactly what Omar's "bird of time" was like, but there is no doubt that, like the snearth in Saskatchewan, it announced the end of winter. And it is quite possible that just as Purge Potatok writes of spring in broken English, Omar wrote of his spring in broken Persian. One likes to think that it is so. Saskatchewan and Persia may be miles apart, but the same sun which once shone upon Omar's vineyard in the tenth century shines today upon Potatok's vegetable patch, warming, as it once warmed Omar's grape, the humble potato from which Purge will make his own wine, if anything, whiter and more powerful than that of Omar. And those winter garments which the Persian poet was able to fling so casually upon the spring fires have their Western counterpart in the "overhauls" which Purge will also burn since they are, as he says, "too shot" for the churn which does double duty in his simple and unpretentious household. But where Omar was pensive, moody, and even sad, given over to the sense of the futility of endeavour and the vanity of life, Purge Potatok, the New Canadian, raises his voice as has so often raised it to echo and re-echo his glad refrain, "Dis country good!"

i tink she's spring

I tink she's spring, de, how you call him, sneart,
Come back again, tomorrow winter go,
And soon again we see some garden dirt,
And stuff from stable come from out de snow;

Dis country good; In Rooshia not so fine,
No sneart-bird dere come say, "Go 'head and plough,
Go put in dill, potato for make wine,
And beet for borsht, soon comes it fresh de cow."

I tink I buy new overhauls dis spring,
Dese far too shot to wash dem in de churn,
De underwear I keep — but dese I fling
As soon as tings get dry enough to burn.

APPENDIX I
Willows Revisited

editor's note.

The direct transcription of the tape recording made by Osiris Jones-Jones of the now-famous meeting of the School of Seven at Willowview Cemetery, July 1st, 1954, is given here. The six poems which were read on that occasion together with the seventh written by Bessie Udderton later that evening after the duck dinner are those published in the Saskatchewan Government booklet, Fifty Years of Progress in the section entitled "Willows Revisited." The poems of "M," or the Muse, have not hitherto been published. It must be remembered however that "M" was not actually present at this meeting, and that her poems had been pre-recorded and were played from a separate record by Jones-Jones to introduce the speakers as they stepped forward to read their tributes to Sarah or to Willows before casting them on the ceremonial pyre. The whole proceedings, including the voice of the Muse, was then recorded on another tape, and it is this which is given here.

A circular letter had been sent around some weeks before the actual ceremony to various writers and poets of Saskatchewan inviting them to be present at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sarah's death. They were asked to write a poem in honour of Sarah, or, as a second choice, of Willows, her birthplace. It was explained that the author would be expected to declaim his own work and then, after the manner of the Elizabethan poets who tossed their sonnets into the tomb of Edmund Spenser, cast it on the ceremonial pyre which would be built at Sarah's feet.

Nothing had been said in the circular sent out of the possibility that the poems might later be published by the government, and this may account for the fact that only the six members of the original Regina School were present, in spite of the roads being in fairly good condition. These six are said to have been tipped off, although John Swivel, who was the first to make the announcement that the government was considering publication, denies any previous knowledge of the government's intention. The fortunate incident of Purge Potatok's appearance at the meeting which changed the Regina School of Six, into the more formal Saskatchewan School of Seven, is also recorded here for the first time. For this reason, if for no other, the tape recording of the ceremony is of great historical and literary significance.

The day, we are told, was very hot, as Dominion Days in Saskatchewan always are, and there was the usual high wind. Visibility, however, was still fairly good, and the two elevators of Willows could still be discerned from the cemetery. No one had any difficulty reaching the scene although, because of a broken culvert, it was necessary to walk the last quarter of a mile and carry the lunches and the pail for coffee. (Fortunately the cemetery had a pump which, if worked very fast, would pump water after three or four minutes without being primed.) Nevertheless, all arrived on time, and John Swivel was able to call the meeting to order at eleven o'clock as planned. Except for the coffee, which was boiled on the ceremonial pyre, each of the poets present had brought his own lunch, although there was a community jar of pickles donated by Bessie Udderton.

The afternoon was regarded as "free" and was spent by Jones-Jones in bird-watching, and by some of the others in a last-minute polishing-up of their poems which, after John Swivel's announcement that they were to be published by the Government, were now being scrutinized with care. John Swivel himself spent the afternoon carving his name on Sarah's monument, and Mrs. Martha Waffle took a nap. On the whole a pleasant afternoon, marred only by the incident of the ceremonial pyre which all believed to have by this time died down, creeping through the grass into an adjoining field of what was later called in the statement of claim to the Department of Agriculture and to the Canadian Authors' Association "first class hayland." Actually, like Potatok's own farm, this hayland was mostly Russian thistle, and no great damage was done; in fact the pasturage was considerably improved by the fire. But all writers, not only poets, were in disrepute around Willows for a long time after, and the Town Council of Willows refused to pass its annual appropriation for the straightening of Sarah's monument for two years in succession.

No serious attempt to extinguish the fire could have been made, since by this time all the coffee had disappeared and the cemetery pump had long since lost its priming. Dr. Bedfellow at least tried valiantly to beat out the flames with his leather windbreaker, but he succeeded only in spreading them further and, in the end, in setting fire to Wraitha Dovecote's skirt. Since, however, everybody — with the possible exception of Jordan Middleduck — immediately came to her assistance, Wraitha soon emerged without damage to herself; but she was obliged to improvise a somewhat inadequate skirt from Dr. Bedfellow's Ph.D. hood. (That scholar had been wearing it throughout the afternoon, together with his windbreaker, despite the heat, to prevent Mrs. Waffle from requesting the use of them as a pillow for her nap.) The hood itself had become somewhat damaged, but Wraitha was still able, with the assistance of Mrs. Waffle, who always carried a generous supply of pins, to appear at the duck dinner that evening, which, after retiring for a while behind Sarah's monument, she had despaired of doing.

Arrangements had been made for the duck dinner at the Clarendon Hotel. At this dinner John Swivel made a speech in which he expressed the hope that the School of Seven might some day affiliate with the Canadian Authors' Association, and a vote of thanks was passed to the Committee in charge of the arrangements. After the singing of "God Save the Queen" and "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden," the meeting adjourned. No minutes were kept of this dinner or the proceedings, Jones-Jones having run out of tape during the afternoon in recording some new noises which at first were thought to be those of birds, but which have later been shown to be those of a new type of cricket recently brought into Saskatchewan with the oil rigs from Texas. Fortunately the omission of the proceedings at the dinner are not serious since we are told that no poems were recited, the one which was omitted at the ceremony that morning by Bessie Udderton not having been finished as promised on account of a headache. (It is given in Appendix II.)

History will mark the day. The sonnets, the odes, the triolets, the roundels, tossed so carelessly and casually into Edmund Spenser's grave these four or five centuries ago have been lost to posterity, and perhaps we are none the poorer for it. But the dedicated School of Seven who stood around a hot fire under the blazing Saskatchewan sun and tossed their quatrains, ribbons and all, in eloquent gesture at Sarah's feet (or at least where they thought her feet might be), deserve our undying gratitude, not only for their having prudently kept copies, but for their willingness to give these copies to the Department of Agriculture without thought of reward or remuneration.

The Tape.

There is a faint scratching sound, followed by a few faint chirps, Finally the wind is heard, and this sound of the wind remains as a background throughout the recording. Tapping of a spoon on a cup. This is followed by the voice of John Swivel.

swivel: Ladies and Gentlemen and fellow poets! Will you come to order please. It's getting on and it's going to be a sizzler, so I think we'll just dispense with any formalities. You all know each other, and you all got the circular we sent out or you wouldn't be here. I'm only sorry that more couldn't be present on this occasion, but then I know, this being Dominion Day, there are a lot of counter-attractions, especially the Fair at Regina. Still, it seems to me that since we don't have the opportunity very often to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of a great poet like Sarah Binks, we might have had a little better attendance, however, as I said...

bedfellow: Get on with it, Swivel.

swivel: In a minute, Dr. Bedfellow. I have an announcement to make before the regular proceedings which affects us all, and I want to make it before we get under way with our program. The Government has just informed me that they intend to publish the poems which we recite here. That is, Dr. Bedfellow, if they are fit to be published.

bedfellow: And just what in hell is that crack?

swivel: Well you see, Doctor, next year, 1955, is going to be the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Province, and the Government intends to get out a commemorative book about the fifty years they have been in business. And of course they're going to give the different activities, education and industry and the churches, things like that, a write-up to show the improvement they have made in the last fifty years. Now we've been after them to do a chapter on the cultural growth in this province, especially poetry, and when I told the Department about the celebration here today, they seemed to be very keen on it, and were willing to sponsor it providing we gave them the poems. But as I said, Dr. Bedfellow, they've got to be fit to print because this Willows-Quagmire district is the Premier's own constituency, and they don't want anything offensive or communist or something like that, what with an election coming on. But what I wanted you all to know is that there is a reasonable hope of our poems here being published.

There is a smattering of applause followed by an especially loud howl of wind which then dies down again.

bedfellow: I can see that damn bunch publishing any of my stuff.

wraitha dovecote: Pilt, do you have to be like that?

swivel: Well, don't say I didn't tell you. Now about the rest of this program. First we…

bessie udderton: When do we make the fire?

swivel: All in good time, Mrs. Waffle.

bessie udderton: I'm famished.

swivel: If you'll just let me finish. Now we are gathered here to do honour to our great predecessor, and I think we should open with ten minutes of silence to her memory. Then we read our poems. Now there is no particular order of precedence, although I think that as Chairman I had better start, and you can see how it's done. Then I'll call out the names, and the person called will step forward and read his poem. We're going to build a small ceremonial fire — and I mean small what with this wind — at Sarah's feet; and as each poem is read, we toss it into the flames as our tribute to her and to mark this occasion, and you'll have to watch once it's on, that it doesn't blow all over the place.

jones-jones: What about the Muse?

swivel: Oh yes, that's another thing I wanted to mention. Now we thought it would be a nice poetical idea and in keeping with the poetical tradition if we had a Muse here, because poets are always supposed to be inspired by Muses and things like that. Of course I needn't tell you that Muses aren't real; they're just supposed to be something like a girl or other which inspire poets. Personally I've never held much with the idea — I've always done my best work in connection with this question of time, but it's the poetic tradition which matters here, even if we don't take it too seriously. I don't know where the idea originated, Egypt or Greece or something like that, way back in history. Do you happen to know, Mr. Middleduck, since you're something of an authority on history, they tell me?

middleduck: "While I was musing, the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue."

swivel: Where's that from?

middleduck: It's from one of the Psalms. It's from the thirty-ninth.

swivel: I didn't know she was Biblical. I always thought she was from the Latin or from Greece. Anyway, it's most appropriate especially that bit about the fire, and Mr. Jones-Jones is going to do the Musing for us here today.

bedfellow: Get it right, Swivel. The Muse was not Jewish; she was Greek.

swivel: Look, Dr. Bedfellow, let's not start arguing about things like that here today. We don't want anything that smacks of anti-Semitism. The Department is sure to hear of it, and what we are concerned about is getting these poems across. And, after all, we don't really care about the Muse, because, as I pointed out, she really didn't exist and was just meant to give inspiration. She's like a lot of these things which we don't believe in and never happened, but we believe in because they're symbolical. If you were ever to go to Church, Dr. Bedfellow, you would…

bessie udderton: I'm famished. When do we light the fire?

swivel: In a moment, Mrs. Waffle. I'm being interrupted continually here, and I want to get on with what Mr. Jones-Jones has prepared for us. As I said, we want to be in keeping with the poetic tradition and it's a good idea to have a Muse, even if she is Jewish and Mr. Jones-Jones here has gone to a lot of trouble and got some poems here on tape, and he's going to play them back to us at the proper moments like she's the Muse. Of course it would be better if we could have rehearsed this whole ceremony, but what with the heat and it's getting on anyway, we had better get under way. Now, did I understand you to say, Mr. Jones-Jones, that you had made a preliminary one just to try out so that we can see how it's going to go?

jones-jones: Yes, it's kind of a dry run, as it were. Then we can get the hang of it.

swivel: Let's have it.

There is considerable static for a moment or two, and then the voice of the Muse comes on. It is a rather pleasant feminine voice with somewhat sad overtones.

the muse:

Break not the lute — the poet's spate
Shall flow as thesis for the Doctorate,
And minstrel's tears, a-shedden 'til he dries,
Embalmied be in Universitys:

If so, let voice of learning speak,
In dialectic and critique,
That thus the songs for learning's use
Be squeezed of every living juice;

And if not thus, may poet find
A song to toss upon the wind,
To drift — forgotten in a day,
With kisses blown to speed their way:

Speak up then, poet, let us know
Do fresh poetic winds still blow,
Across the prairie and the West?
Step up then, poet, do your best!

wraitha dovecote: Pilt, that's rather good. I like that third verse that says, "Kisses blown to speed their way." Don't you think it's good, Pilt?

bedfellow: I hate rhyme, you know that. And especially I hate this damn stuff of rhyming "wind" with "find." And "Universitys" rhyming with "dries" is just affectation to go with "a-shedden." Who did it for you, Jones?

swivel: Now let's not criticize, Dr. Bedfellow. It's the way Muses talk, if you don't know, and in any case it's just a dry run as Mr. Jones-Jones has just pointed out. And we don't want to waste any more time. I hope you've got this Muse business straight, and the rest is more or less what was explained in the circulars we sent out. The idea, as you know, is to follow the traditions of the Elizabethan poets who tossed their poems and sonnets into the grave of William Shakespeare. Unfortunately we haven't got an open tomb here as they had, and I don't suppose they'd let us open it if we wanted to, not that we want to in this heat. But the ceremonial pyre will do just as well. The main thing is to get rid of these poems we've written, and we don't have to slavishly follow tradition as long as we're in the spirit of the thing as poets. You all have copies of what you wrote, and if you didn't, you'd better. The Elizabethan poets didn't keep copies of what they tossed into the tomb, and I suppose they figured there was a lot more where that came from, or perhaps they figured that what they wrote that day wasn't really so hot and not worth keeping. Anyway, when they stepped up to the tomb of William Shakespeare as we are going to do to Sarah's —

bedfellow: Look, Swivel, you might as well get it right. It wasn't William Shakespeare, it was Edmund Spenser.

swivel: Who?

bedfellow: Spenser. Edmund Spenser. Want me to spell it for you?

swivel: What did he write?

bedfellow: Plenty. He was a poet.

swivel: A poet? You say he was a poet? Well then, that's all right. It comes to the same thing. I'm not going to argue with you. I can check it when I get home. I don't profess to be up on these things, and after all you're a professor and should know. I'll concede the point for the present. If you say it was William Spenser —

bedfellow: Edmund!

swivel: Sorry! If you insist it was Edmund Spenser and that he was a poet, I don't see what difference it can make as far as our program here is concerned; although there is no reason to believe they didn't toss their poems into William Shakespeare 's grave the same as they did to this man Spence's. It seemed to be the custom at funerals in those days. Now if anybody has a match, we'll light the fire at Sarah's feet and start the thing off.

bessie udderton: Where do you suppose her feet are?

jordan middleduck: Let's see. That is East, isn't it? They should be about here. If they done it right in a God-fearing country she should be facing that way.

bessie udderton: There's a lot of ants. If we shifted it a bit, we wouldn't be bothered so much with them when we have lunch. What about here?

swivel: We'll have to stick to the rules, Mrs. Waffle. Build it where her feet are. Now who's got a match?

jones-jones: Just a minute, Mr. Chairman. I've got the Muse on that.

swivel: Quite right, Mr. Jones-Jones. I had forgotten about that. Turn her on.

the muse:

Too long delayed, too slow the match,
Oh chips, oh grass, that mark the pyre,
Give tongue to will the final scratch,
That lights the soul's poetic fire;
Come forth, oh flame, to warm the chills,
Of learned talk — the scene is laid,
Bring wind to run poetic mills,
And heat — a hundred in the shade.

wraitha dovecote: Pilt, who wrote those things for him do you think?

bedfellow: Who wrote them, Jones?

swivel: Mr. Jones-Jones is committed not to reveal the authorship of the Muse. To do so would defeat the whole idea of a Muse.

bedfellow: Well it wasn't the Psalmist, you can bet. If that's Jewish, I'm Ukrainian.

bessie udderton: Mr. Chairman, do we have to put up with this? We came here to do the right thing by Sarah Binks and to have a bit of lunch and a good time generally, and all we're getting is a discussion about the Spensers and who wrote the Psalms. I'm going to light this fire right here and now.
There is the sound of a crackling fire.

swivel: Okay, okay, we got the fire lit. Now we'll get going with these tributes. Did you want to bring the Muse in now, Mr. Jones-Jones? I understood you to say that they were going to be introduced as a group before each says his piece. Or are you going to play that other one over again? You know, the dry run one you gave us before?
There is a lot of static and the sound of tearing paper from Jones-Jones's tape recorder, and finally the voice of the Muse is heard again. It is a different voice from before with a kind of wailing quality and sounds as if it were coming from a long way off.

the muse:

Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo!
I am the Muse, the Muse,
I am the poet's love, the mistress in the garret,
The wine of spring, the vodka, and the claret,
The sigh, the tear, the spirit of youth, the chaser,
The unsullied page, the pen, the ink-eraser;
I am despair and hope and the lonesome treadle,
The lute, the laurel, the Governor General's Medal —
Yet I am but voice — who woos me woos the Muse,
Alas, I'm only voice, who woos the Muse woos ooze.

wraitha dovecote: Sounds like an owl to me.

bedfellow: My God, Wraitha, you don't think it's an owl, do you? If there's owls around here, I'm going home.

wraitha dovecote: Don't be silly, Pilt, it's not owls I'm afraid of, it's snakes. You don't think there might be snakes around here. If there's snakes around here, I'm going home.

bedfellow: You and me both. Let's go back to the hotel.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman. What about the ten minutes' silence?

swivel: Yes, of course. Thank you, Mr. Middlechick. I had forgotten all about the ten minutes' silence. All this argument about William Spenser.

bedfellow: Shakespeare.

swivel: I thought you said Spenser.

bedfellow: I did, but it's not William.

bessie udderton: Are we going to have this all over again? Because if we do, I'm having lunch, and the rest of you can just starve for all I care.

swivel: Well, get the coffee on. It can be boiling while we have our ten minutes' silence.

bessie udderton: Mr. Swivel, couldn't we have the ten minutes' silence after lunch? Then those of us who wanted to, could make it a full half hour and have a bit of a nap, or we could just sit around.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, this is all irregular. Just for the sake of the record, wouldn't it be better if we went into Committee as a whole for half an hour after lunch, and then if Mrs. Waffle or anybody else want to take a nap or do some revision for the Department, it could be done then. In the meantime, let's have a kind of token silence here and now, so that it can be recorded in the minutes. I therefore move, Mr. Chairman, that we have a token silence here and now, and if the coffee boils over when we're having it you can call us to order.

bessie udderton: I'm starved.

swivel: Okay, okay, it has been moved and seconded that we have a token silence right here and now before beginning with the reading of the tributes. And just watch that fire. Now, if you'll all just keep quiet for a second we'll have the silence. I'll tell you when to quit.
There is silence for a moment. The wind rises again to a howl and after a bit of static the voice of the Muse comes in.

the muse:

Sarah, can you hear the wind?
Oh rare the gift within their giving,
That of silence — they have dinned,
Endless verses to the living;
But to you, beyond their seeing,
Now their greatest gift bestow,
And in silence yield their being —
Sarah, can you hear it blow?

swivel: That's it, Friends. I think that was a real tribute. I always think there is nothing like a few moments' silence when it comes to tributes. And that Muse wasn't so bad either. I think you are to be congratulated on that Muse, Mr. Jones-Jones. We'll have to give you a vote of thanks when it's all over. I suppose that's Government tape you're using. That stuff is expensive.

wraitha dovecote: Pilt, I thought I heard that owl again. Pilt, do snakes make noises like owls?

bedfellow: You're hearing things. I didn't hear anything that time.

bessie udderton: I didn't hear anything.

swivel: Look, Folks, let's not start worrying about things unless it's that fire. I don't like the looks of the grass. Did you have to make it that big, Mrs. Waffle? After all, it isn't as if we were at a cremation.

bessie udderton: We've got to keep it fairly big to ever get that coffee boiling on time. Anyway, it's clearing out the ants. All the same, I'll watch it. I don't want to set the cemetery on fire.

bedfellow: Some cemetery!

bessie udderton: What did you expect — Forest Hill?

swivel: Just watch it, that's all, Mrs. Waffle, since you seem to have taken charge. It's certainly plenty big enough for all our poems.

bedfellow: I suppose that's his idea of being funny.

swivel: I'll ignore that, Dr. Bedfellow. We want to get going. Now I'll begin. This poem is called "Willows Revisited."

bedfellow: After Wordsworth, I suppose.

wraitha dovecote: Shut up, Pilt, I want to listen.

swivel: As you see, Friends, I'm stepping up to the fire…

middleduck: Mr. Chairman!

swivel: Yes, Mr. Duckmiddle.

middleduck: Before we go on, shouldn't we first have the minutes of the last meeting?

swivel: There was no last meeting. This is our first meeting. There can't be any minutes of a meeting if there was no meeting held.

middleduck: In that case, Mr. Chairman, I move that the reading of the minutes of the last meeting be omitted. We can't do anything else but omit them since there aren't any, but at least we keep the record straight.

bessie udderton: Why not omit them later? This coffee is getting hot.

swivel: Look, Friends, this is all getting to be too technical. We want to get on with this ceremony, and as I said, I'm stepping up to the fire, and it's called "Willows Revisited" and I'm damned if I'm going to stand for any snide remarks that it was written by Wordsworth or anybody else. These are our own poems or the Department doesn't want them. Just let me stand there, Mrs. Waffle, so that I can hit the fire when I'm through. We don't want to chase them all across Saskatchewan in this wind.

jones-jones: Wasn't the Muse to introduce you first?

swivel: Oh yes, Mr. Jones-Jones. I forgot. Turn her on.

the muse:

Untie the ribbons now, and string,
That binds each treasured scroll, and fling
Upon the fire with loud declaim,
The rhymed and metred bid for fame;
Revisit Willows, call alive
Once more the spirit from the grive…

Much static and a shocked pause.

jones-jones: Sorry about that. We had to re-do it and I didn't have time to go over it all. Just a minute…

the muse:

Revisit Willows, call alive
Once more the spirit, and revive
Once more the soil and hallowed sod
Where once poetic feet have trod —
Here, hot sun and prairie rain,
Nurtured genius — call again,
Her own blithe spirit, free of drivel,
Speak, poet, now — let's hear from Swivel!

The wind rises to a shriek and then dies down to a sigh.

swivel: Now I'll do mine. I think I mentioned it's called "Willows Revisited."

bedfellow: As if we didn't know by this time.

wraitha dovecote: Shut up, Pilt, I want to hear him.

swivel: (Very slowly and portentously):

Here then is Willows; through the years' long run,
Serene and sere, brooding on time's long last,
Battered by storms, baked by the prairie sun,
Holding in ageless hands the past,
Holding in ageless hands the trust,
Of once proud day, austerely rugged pile,
Twin elevators in majestic rust,
Guarding the railroad's mile on mile,
Stand like colossi looking on the Nile,
Keeping the vigil of eternal dust.

There is a smattering of applause.

bedfellow: Not bad, Dean, I've known you to do worse.

swivel: Thank you, Dr. Bedfellow. Coming from you that's really appreciated. Look, Friends, I'm tossing this on the ceremonial pyre. Remember to allow a bit for the wind. Now I think Miss Dovecote it's your turn next. Just don't get too close to that fire. Rayon is pretty inflammable stuff, you know.

wraitha dovecote: It's not rayon.

swivel: Well, whatever it is, be careful. A nice mess it would have been if anyone had caught fire at Edmund Shakespeare 's tomb. We don't want anything like that, even though it might set a precedent. Get set.

jones-jones: Just a minute. We've got a Muse on that.

the muse:

Wraitha with the broken heart
Step right up and do your part,
Love must come, but love can cease —
So Wraitha, come and say your piece;
Ring the long forgotten bell
In sad nostalgic tones, and tell,
Of love in sweet poetic fluff —
Wraitha, come and do your stuff.

wraitha dovecote: I'm not sure I like that Muse. She's a damn cat.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman!

swivel: Later, Mr. Duckcote, Miss Middledove is going to recite. Are you ready Miss Duck - - sorry, Miss Dovecote.

wraitha (Very sadly):

Weeping Willows, Willows weeping,
Here within your timeless keeping,
Lies a gentle maiden, sleeping —
Maiden take your rest;

Hurried winds above you blowing,
Far beyond all care and knowing,
Spread their dust upon your going —
Dust is dust, and best.

Maiden, who of us can borrow,
Of your dreams without their sorrow,
Or have known love's wakened morrow —
Sleep alone — and best.

bedfellow: Wow!

swivel: Thank you, Miss Dovecote. I hope you will keep the Department in mind when you make revisions. You may now consign it to the flames.
There is a gasp.

bedfellow: Smack in the coffee.

bessie udderton: Did you have to do that? How do you think that coffee is going to taste with your poem in it?

wraitha dovecote: Fish it out, can't you. I can't get close to that holocaust of yours without burning up. What did you think you were when you lit it? Mrs. O'Leary's cow?
There is loud laughter from Dr. Bedfellow.

middleduck: See if you can get it out with this stick.

bessie udderton: It doesn't look very clean to me. Where did you get it?

middleduck: Just here over the fence.

bessie udderton: And all those cows? No thanks. There's a fork here in my lunch if I can get at it.

wraitha dovecote: What's that other stuff? Looks like leaves. I can't imagine how leaves could get in. It isn't as if there were trees in this country.

bessie udderton: Oh Lord, it's some of that bay.

wraitha dovecote: Bay leaves?

bessie udderton: I suppose so. You see I bought some on the way down. I was going to make a wreath.

wraitha dovecote: What on earth?

bessie udderton: Well, you see, I thought it would be nice if one of us could wear a laurel wreath like the poets used to, but then you can't buy laurel in this country. Everybody flavours with bay, and so I bought bay and was going to sew it together, but it's so darn dry that it won't sew and I had to let it go. And now a bunch of it got in the coffee. I should never have left it in the same bag with the lunch.

wraitha dovecote: It might not hurt it. After all it isn't poison, is it? Leave it in. It's too small bits for the fork.

bessie udderton: It might be worth trying at that. I don't mind it in soup.

swivel: Come to order please. It's your turn Mr. Middlecluck.

middleduck: Middleduck, if you please.

swivel: Sorry, Mr. Middleduck. It's your turn now. Mr. Jones-Jones, have you got a Muse on Middleduck?

jones-jones: Just a minute. Something's stuck here. (There is a long pause and the usual static.) Okay. Here she goes.

the muse:

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit,
Of that forbidden tree we now will hear —
Say this about the stern and rock-bound coot,
The usual thing, he's dull but he's sincere,
And if he wanders from the lyric way,
Count not his songs among these other screeds,
Just tolerantly smile, and nod, and say,
'Tis written in the Book of Golden Deeds.

bedfellow: She may have not written the Psalms, but at least she knows her Milton. Where did you get this Muse, Jones? She might be worth knowing.

wraitha dovecote: I said it before, and I say it again. She is a damn cat.

swivel: Come and declaim your poem, Mr. Duckcentre.

middleduck: It's Middleduck, if you please.

swivel: Sorry! How about declaiming.

middleduck: This is called "Willows Revisited."

swivel: But you can't do that, Mr. Middleduck. I've already called mine "Willows Revisited." We can't have two poems with the same title.

middleduck: Well, it deals like yours with the change which has come over this town of Willows since Sarah Binks lived here. It's what one notices after coming back to it, and if that isn't Willows being revisited I'd like to know what is?

swivel: All the same, you can't call it "Willows Revisited" after what I called mine. You may be right enough, but it's a matter of poetic consistency. Just how is the Department going to know one poem from another if they have the same name. Why don't you just call it "Come Back to Willows," or "That Dear Old Willows of Mine"? There must be dozens of names you can call it without using the name I chose.

bedfellow: Let me call it something.

wraitha dovecote: Shut up, Pilt, you haven't even heard it yet.

bedfellow: I can still think of things to call it — the pious old bastard!

middleduck: This Poem is called, "Willows Revisited Again." It is written by Jordan K. Middleduck. I wrote it in pencil. Does that matter?

swivel: Not here. It's the one to the Department which has to be typed.

middleduck:

Oh Willows, given up to play,
Oh Willows, lost in pleasure's aura,
Take heed, take heed, recall the day,
That happened to Gomorrah;
For Sodom's fate may yet befall,
A town that thinks alone of lucre,
To pay for dances in the hall,
And hockey, curling, pool, and snooker.
The bingo games and harness race,
That Fair Days bring, invite the doom,
Descending in its own sure pace,
On rink and hall and beverage room.

bedfellow: Amen!

swivel: I hope you'll keep in mind, Mr. Middleduck, that this is the Premier's own constituency. However, chuck it in, and let's not have another in the coffee. Who's next? Let me see, there's still you, Mrs. Waffle, and you, Dr. Bedfellow, and what about you yourself, Mr. Jones-Jones? You've been so busy running these tapes we're likely to forget all about you. Perhaps you better come on now. What about the Muse? Did you get a Muse on yourself?

jones-jones: Well, not really on myself. I thought it might be appropriate to have the Muse give another one to the group as a whole. Just a minute.
The usual static.

the muse:

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater,
Food is good, but love is sweeter,

And at night when put to bed,

Peter, Peter…

jones-jones: Sorry, that was something else. These darn girls at the office are always fooling with this recorder. Let me see, here she is. As I said, it's to the group as a whole and not just me.

the muse:

Away, let once more poets sing,
And ring as once their voices rang,
And drink at that pellucid spring
From whence their inspiration sprang;
Revisit Willows, let the choir
Give forth again as once they gave,
And fan to life the lyric fire,
They build today on Sarah's grave.

So cry your rhyme above the breeze,
And though but coffee, brim the cup
Like wine from old Hesperides
In wild abandon drink it up;
And should your talent fail the Muse
With spirits flagged and voices limp,
Reach deep the sandwich in the cruse,
With pickles, olives, and canned shrimp.

wraitha dovecote: She even makes me hungry.

bessie udderton: No wonder I'm famished.

swivel: What about the poem, Mr. Jones-Jones? Have you got one to put on the fire?

jones-jones: Well, I wasn't going to, but it might be just as well. I've got a bunch here, and I'm not sure which I better choose. It is supposed to deal with Willows, isn't it?

swivel: Willows or Sarah. Just one, though.

jones-jones: I think they'll like this one. It's called "The Willows-Quagmire Constituency." You see it's the one represented by the Premier himself, and I think it pays tribute to the community as well as to the bier of this poet. I did it in a hurry, and some of the lines can be improved, although I don't want to change any of the ideas. The rhymes are good.

swivel: Well, that's what we've got the afternoon for. Let's have it as it is.

jones-jones:

This place, where never tyrant trod,
Nor bigot forged a chain,
Has Government ordained by God,
And a cabinet appointed by same;
Its car licences cost less than most,
Everywhere new roads are made,
And the one that leads to Willows boasts
Oil gravel with a good wide grade;
And everywhere under this Government's rule
Are signs of progress and pep —
Willows itself has a consolidated school,
And an agricultural rep;
And perhaps affairs like this today
May bring some tourists here,
To visit this poetic shrine and pay
Respect to Sarah's bier.

swivel: Nothing wrong with that as far as I can see. I particularly like that part about "never tyrant trod, nor bigot forged a chain." What gets me is how you fellows think of these things. I don't mind saying my own ideas sometimes come hard. Not that they aren't worth while when they come. I think the Department will like it too. Well, get it burned up, and we'll get on with Mrs. Waffle, here. Your turn next, Mrs. Waffle. I hope you have something good for us seeing as how it's getting on towards lunch, and you being the representative of innerness and all that. We'll have the Muse first. Go ahead, Mr. Jones-Jones.

the muse:

What have you planned for tonight, Bessie,
A roundel with sherry and cream,
Or a deep-fried sonnet
With minced chives on it,
Or a couplet in sauce-supreme?

What is your menu of rhyme, Bessie,
To toss on the fire and tell,
In verse a la mode,
Of a deep-fried ode,
Or a jellied villanelle?

But give us a song of joy, Bessie,
Spiced quatrain and marinade ballad.
With eggs sub-gum,
And chicken yum-yum,
Avocado and lobster salad.

wraitha dovecote: Say this for that cat, she certainly makes one hungry. Are you sure you didn't do it yourself, Bessie?

swivel: Are you all set, Mrs. Waffle.

bessie udderton: Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, this gathering at the tomb of Sarah Binks has touched me very deeply, though I must say that at the moment I'm more hungry than anything else. But I want to say that in spite of what the Muse has just said, words cannot express my feelings on this occasion. I don't think that even poetry can do it justice, at least as far as I am concerned, though I must say you have all done very wonderful so far at least. But I just can't find words to show how deeply I am moved, and so, if you don't mind, I'll just throw this blank scroll on the ceremonial fire, and let my thoughts go with it. The unwritten page, I always feel, is in itself so very expressive. It's so, well - - virginal, if you know what I mean?

bedfellow: Oh we know what you mean all right.

wraitha dovecote: Pilt, you're just being nasty. She doesn't mean it that way.

bedfellow: What way?

wraitha dovecote: The way you mean it.

bedfellow: What other way is there?

wraitha dovecote: Well, certainly not quite.

bedfellow: Look. There is no such thing as not quite. Either you are virginal or you aren't. It doesn't lend itself to this not quite business. It's like being or not being just the least bit pregnant.

swivel: Dr. Bedfellow, please! We are not here to discuss problems in semantics. Will you go ahead, Mrs. Waffle, not that I like the idea of the blank page.

bessie udderton: Well, it's expressive. It tells of things to come.

bedfellow: Virginal!

wraitha dovecote: Pilt!

bessie udderton: I always feel that once a thing is written it's so committed, if you know what I mean. It's a case of the moving finger that moves on. So if you don't mind I'll just throw this scroll on the fire as it is. You can see I have done it up in ribbons just like Edmund Spenser used to do, and it's kind of parchment-like, and it should burn all right, although I'm not sure of the ribbons, because they're from some of that metallic stuff left over from Christmas, but I guess I'll just toss it on the fire, because it's the best I can do at the moment.

bedfellow: It's an idea.There's a lot to be said for it.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, I move that Mrs. Waffle's contribution be taken as read and be so recorded in the minutes.

swivel: We can't do that, Mr. Middleton. We can't just take as read something that has never been written. You should have told us about this before that you weren't going to write anything. What about the Department?

bessie udderton: It isn't as if I was going to let this group down. I'm going to write it, all right. I had intended to do it this morning, but then I got thinking about the dinner arrangements tonight — it's at five thirty, by the way, and not at five as first announced — and there was all this hurry about getting here on time, and anyway I can never write anything before breakfast. As you know, it's going to be a duck dinner, and I'm sure we're all going to enjoy it, but when I started thinking about what I was going to write, I got thinking about whether we were having lemon pie or not, because there was something said about it being rice pudding, which I think can be all right if you put enough eggs and nutmeg in it and serve it with whipped cream, but then you can't expect the hotels to know that and they can't go very far wrong on lemon pie, even if you have to leave the pastry. I started the poem and it's going to be called "Duck Dinner at Willows," in keeping to our tribute to Willows, and I'll finish it tonight after we see how the dinner goes; and if necessary one of us can always slip back and touch a match to it. But I don't see why we have to do that if, as Mr. Middleduck suggests, it is taken as read, even if it's not taken as burned.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, I think this all highly irregular.

swivel: It's a bit irregular, all right. You don't suppose, Mrs. Waffle, you could give us something else. What about that one you were telling me about called "Spring"?

bessie udderton: But "Spring" has nothing to do with Sarah or with Willows. It's an innerness poem.

swivel: Could you call it "Spring on Sarah's Grave"?

bessie udderton: I'd rather not. This isn't exactly a vegetable garden.

swivel: Call it "Springtime at Willows."

bessie udderton: Will I have to write it up on my scroll? It's all done up with these ribbons.

middleduck: You will unless you want to be irregular.

bessie udderton: All right. I'll recite it now, and then I'll write it up and slip it under the coffee while the rest of you are finishing up. This coffee is almost boiling. The trouble with buffalo chips is that they are slow. They glow all right once you get them started. Somebody should have brought some old shingles or something.

swivel: That fire's plenty big enough. Come on, recite.

bessie udderton: "Springtime at Willows" by Bessie Udderton. They know me best under that name.

New peas, and beans and baby beets,
Must still await…

I'm sorry. I forgot. This has already been published in Vestal Verses.

middleduck: Now I know she's irregular.

swivel: Let it go. If you send in "Duck Dinner at Willows" to the Department, or better, hand it in to me I can fix things. In the meantime, what about you, Dr. Bedfellow, seeing that you're here? Have you got something?

bedfellow: Seared Land. Seared Land. Seared Land!

swivel: I hope, Doctor, you are not going to give us your "Seared Land." The Department expects us to do something new for this occasion. They don't want to publish something which has been published before. It's a waste of public money. They are pretty tax-conscious these days. Anyway, "Seared Land" hardly applies to Sarah and Willows which our efforts here today are more or less expected to do.

bedfellow: Oh I wasn't going to give them "Seared Land." I wouldn't waste "Seared Land" on that bunch, if they printed it in gold leaf.

swivel: Seems to me I've heard that remark from you before. Have you got anything that's fit to go into ordinary print?

bedfellow: I've got something here all right, and I don't mind telling you it's called "Willows Revisited, Ouch!" And I'll tell you another thing, it's done in rhyme.

swivel: Apart from your calling it "Willows Revisited" even if you add "Ouch," to which I object, and which will have to be changed even if I have to do it myself, just what has rhyme got to do with it?

bedfellow: It's Mother Goose stuff. Anybody can write poetry that rhymes. It's the mark of poor poetry. Shakespeare didn't rhyme, and most of the moderns don't rhyme.

swivel: Did this man Spenser rhyme?

bedfellow: Sure, and so did the rest of them, and that's why they tossed their stuff after him. It wasn't worth keeping. And if you think I'm keeping a copy of "Willows Revisited, Ouch!" you're damn well mistaken.

swivel: I don't think this is the place to discuss it. This whole business of to rhyme or not to rhyme is open to debate, and I'm willing to meet you any day you decide and debate it. But not here. I know your "Seared Land" is highly regarded by some who like that sort of thing. But on the other hand, I know you have written some excellent bird poems in which, I am willing to admit, the rhyme is as good as anything I myself have done.

bedfellow: You know I hate birds.

swivel: Well, we won't be bothered with birds here this morning. They couldn't fly in this wind.

bedfellow: They could crawl.

wraitha dovecote: Pilt, are you quite sure there are no snakes? Snakes crawl, don't they?

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, I rise to a point of order.

bessie udderton: I'm hungry.

jones-jones: I've got a Muse here if he'll just get going.

swivel: Play it and to hell with it!

the muse:

What comes? What gives? What now the gist?
The poet, or existentialist?
One never knows, these men of learning,
Are hanged 'twixt cosmic mind and yearning,
They tread not earth nor touch the stars,
But shout their longing from afar,
In tortured verse — but we shall see,
Speak, Piltdown Man, with PH.D.

swivel: Go ahead, Doctor. Remember it's to deal with Sarah or Willows.

bedfellow:

So this is Willows! Call this a town?
I don't suppose I've ever been in a place that is
more rattletrap and run down,
And I've certainly been places.

Broken implements, coal sheds, a beer parlour that serves warm beer,
And as for faces —
Hells Bells — I haven't seen a woman's face in all five blocks,
That won't stop clocks!

So this is Willows! Just why anyone would want to live here for, gets me,
Especially anyone with any vestige of Freudian id,
And what gets me even more is how anyone like
Sarah managed to keep alive here as long as she did.

Get that damned coffee out of the way. I want to burn this, and I just want you to know I'm not keeping a copy.

swivel: It's just as well, Doctor. The Department will never stand for that one. Don't even bother burning it.

bessie udderton: Put it on, Doctor Bedfellow, we're out of chips and it's almost boiling.

wraitha dovecote:

Cows! Whiter than shrouds,
Swifter than clouds,
Beautiful cows!
I greet you!

middleduck: Oh, but, Miss Dovecote, you can't recite that. I wrote it. It's from Noah.

wraitha dovecote: I wasn't reciting it, Mr. Middleduck. I was just quoting it. I know you wrote it, but it just struck me as so appropriate. The sky and chips and things.

middleduck: In that case, I thank you. I didn't think you had read my Noah.

wraitha dovecote: Oh yes, all last week. Pilt, I thought I heard something in the grass. Pilt, are you quite sure there are no snakes?

the muse:

So that was it! I gathered from his look,
He'd seize occasion here to blast the snearth,
Or at least some bird — for once I was mistook,
He touched no stars, but certainly trod earth;

swivel: How on earth did you get an extra Muse in there?

jones-jones: The this one at least seemed to have an idea as to what Dr. Bedfellow might say. I should have gone over it more carefully. I was in a hurry and they finished it only yesterday at noon. Just let me run the rest of this seeing we're finishing up. I meant to check it.

the muse:

So hail thee, Prof, the hour was spent
Not quite asleep, but somnolent,
And barring sound of wind and grass
I heard but little. As in class
This talk of Shakespeare, Spenser, cows,
Has lulled me into usual drowse;
Though splendid stuff to grace a thesis,
For me at least it spells amnesis:

But Piltdown Man's poetic surge,
Awakens once again an urge,
And primate, barely anthropoid,
Calls loud to me in warmed-up Freud.

wraitha dovecote: Pilt. I'll bet that damn-cat Muse was once a student of yours.

bedfellow: Are there any Home Economics graduates in your office, Jones?

swivel: Is that all there is to it, Mr. Jones-Jones?

jones-jones: I think so. I'll just try it.

the muse:

There was a young girl of Nantucket,
Who lived in a…

jones-jones: Sorry, it's those darned girls. I should have checked it.

bessie udderton: Well, I never…

bedfellow: Why didn't you let her finish, Jones?

wraitha dovecote: Pilt. You're being obscene!

bedfellow: Remind me, Wraitha, to tell you that one about the young girl from Trail.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, I move that the Muse be deleted from the minutes.

swivel: Don't worry!

bessie udderton: It's boiling!

swivel: We're all hungry, Mrs. Waffle, I'm sure. And we'll just wind up this part of the program and have lunch. Now we have all had our turns, and I think, on the whole we've done very well. There's no one left to recite and we'll just sing the National Anthem and then we'll…

bedfellow: What about this guy?

swivel: Which guy? Where did he come from?

purge potatok: Me?

swivel: Yes, you!

purge potatok: Me I come too. Me I'm dee-pee. Is name Potatok. I come too.

swivel: You can't come too. Look, Mr. Deepy, this is a private party. We are holding a meeting.

purge potatok: Sure, I know. I come meeting.

swivel: But you have to be invited to this meeting. You have to get a notice.

purge potatok: Sure. I get notice. I got him here.

swivel: But I did not send you any notice. You say your name is Deepy?

purge potatok: Name not Deepy. Name Potatok. Is Purge Potatok. In Rooshia is not Potatok. Is Podolnik. I make him English. I make him Canadian. In Rooshia is Podolnik; in here is Potatok. Is same. Me I'm dee-pee. Two year, tree year, I come Rooshia. I no go back. Dis country good. I'm dee-pee.

bedfellow: He means he is a D.P. He's one of the New Canadians.

swivel: But how did he get the notice?

purge potatok: I get him dis morning. Wind blow him on fence. He come my farm. I live dere. I come too. I get notice. So soon I get notice, I make come too. Is my farm dere.

bedfellow: Where?

purge potatok: Dere. I come too.

swivel: Mr. Potatok, I'm sorry, but you can't just come too. You have to be a writer to come to this meeting. You have to be able to write poetry. You know what that is? You savvy poetry?

purge potatok: Sure, I know. In Rooshia I write poetry in Rooshian. In Canada I write poetry in Canadian. Is same. Me dee-pee.

swivel: Did you ever hear of Sarah Binks? Well, we're here to read verses about her. And we're going to have lunch shortly.

purge potatok: Oh sure. Me poet too. I bring lunch. I bring notice. I bring poem.

bessie udderton: What did you bring for lunch, Mr. Potatok?

swivel: What poetry did you write, Mr. Potatok?

purge potatok: Sausages, plenty. I write "Boy Cow."

bessie udderton: What kind of sausages, Mr. Potatok?

swivel: Have you got "Boy Cow" with you?

purge potatok: No got. No write. Got in head. All time got poetry in head.

bessie udderton: Did you make the sausages yourself?

bedfellow: I'll bet he's got those in his head too.

purge potatok: I make him myself. I smoke him myself. Is very good sausage. Is just like Rooshia. You want I should say "Boy Cow"? Maybe you write. Maybe I trow on fire. You want sausage, Missus?

bessie udderton: I'd certainly like to try them. Of course, I don't want to rob you of your lunch, but if we could just have the least bit.

swivel: Mrs. Waffle, could you just let this matter of sausages go for a moment. We want to get this matter of his poem settled first. It's just possible that the Department would not like to pass up the opportunity. After all there's just six of us. We could try him out, and some of us could put it into English. Mr. Deepy, you got anything else except about cows? Have you got any poems about Sarah Binks or about Willows? After all, you live here.

purge potatok: You want I should say, "Dis Town of Villows"?

bedfellow: What about this "Boy Cow'?

wraitha dovecote:

Cows, whiter than clouds,
Swifter than ploughs —
Beautiful Boy-cows,
I greet you…

middleduck: You've got it wrong, Miss Dovecote, it's not "beautiful boy-cow."

bedfellow: Shut up, Wraitha, I'm interested in this D.P. Let him do his stuff. Go ahead Deepy! Give us "Boy Cow."

swivel: Give us your "This Town of Willows," Mr. Deepy.

purge potatok: Is Potatok. Is dee-pee too.

swivel: Well, go ahead, Mr. D. P. Potatok. I'm sorry we haven't got a Muse for you like the rest, but then how could we know you were coming. Come up close to the fire anyway.

purge potatok: Is called, "Dis Town of Villows."

Is Villows, dis, I tink dis town she's good,
I tink she's got good pool-hall — I no play,
Is cost too much, but beer-room maybe should
Give like in city coupons; den some day
I catch him nuff and go say boss, "I got
Much coupon now, you give me toaster, no?
You give me kettle, frying pan, and pot,
Someting for house," and when I get I go
And catch him nice big vooman for help farm
And raise some keeds for help wit' milk the cow —
Dis country good — in summer at least she's warm,
And all she needs is water so can plough.

bedfellow: Boy! Right from the grass roots. Let's keep him.

swivel: It might not be a bad idea. After all, if we are going to develop a Canadian literature, these ethnic groups should be represented. I'm thinking of the Department as well as of ourselves.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, what has he got to put on the fire?

bedfellow: Got a copy of that, Mac?

purge potatok: Sure, got six copy. Each time different. No write.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman. If as this man says he can't write, then he can't put anything on the fire, and the whole thing becomes irregular. If we are going to keep Mr. Potatok in our group I move that a small committee be appointed to write out his six copies and average them and then the best could be put on the fire.

swivel: It's been moved and seconded that a small committee be appointed to go over Mr. Deepy's poetry after lunch.

bessie udderton: Does that mean he's staying for lunch?

purge potatok: Sure I stay lunch. I bring sausages, plenty.

bessie udderton: Just sausages, Mr. Potatok?

purge potatok: Bring dill pickle, Bring bread wit' kimmel. Bring butter. Bring apple perooshkie — you know, small, like pie, but better. Bring pail cold bortch, bring liquor, bring horse radish, bring how you call him, perogies wit' cheese. Bring lunch.

bedfellow: Did you make the liquor too, Mac?

purge potatok: Make everything too, is better.

bedfellow: What did you make it from?

purge potatok: Potato. In Rooshia learn. Is good. Maybe put in a little kimmel, make better.

bessie udderton: What is this kimmel?

bedfellow: Caraway.

bessie udderton: Of course. I might have known.

bedfellow: Is that it in the jug, Mac?

purge potatok: Sure, bring plenty, Plenty everything.

bedfellow: I'll say he's staying for lunch.

bessie udderton: It would certainly be nice if we invited him to have lunch with us. Are you married, Mr. Potatok? You got wife?

purge potatok: No. You not married too?

bessie udderton: Widow. Man dead, long time.

purge potatok: You like see my farm?

bedfellow: Wow!

swivel: After lunch, Mrs. Waffle. What I'm interested in, is this man's poetry. Do you mean to tell us, Mr. Deepy, that you hadn't written your poem about Willows before you came here? Do you mean that you just made it up as you recited it?

purge potatok: Sure. Next time maybe is different. Is always different. Can maybe write leedle. Sometime I write. Sometime no write. Is no matter; is always different. Is not same poem each time.

swivel: Much different?

purge potatok: Is different. Dis time comes how you hear "Dis Town of Villows." Maybe say again comes, "Villows in Vinter," or "Dis Country Good by Villows," or maybe come "Rolling Home to Villows." Or maybe comes something about cows. Is always different. I don't keep.

bedfellow: Holy Mackerel!

swivel: By God, what a talent!

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, what about copies for the Department?

swivel: We'll turn him on after lunch, and then we can all copy for all we are worth, and we'll pick out one for the Department.

jones-jones: Perhaps we could make use of some for ourselves. You heard him — he don't keep. It isn't as if he wanted to publish. He just seems to be a poet for the fun of it.

swivel: Not as long as I'm Dean.

bessie udderton: Mr. Potatok, when your poems come this way, do they ever deal with things that grow — you know, things that you can cook and eat?

purge potatok: Oh sure. At home comes most about tings to eat.

bessie udderton: You say you've got a nice farm, Mr. Potatok?

wraitha dovecote: There goes Purge Deepy!

swivel: I think, Mr. Potatok, I speak for all of us when I say that we will be glad if you join our little group; and as you brought your lunch, we would be glad if you would join us for lunch. We didn't bring much because, you see, we're having a more formal dinner at the hotel tonight, but we're glad to have you all the same if you care to stay. And you can come to the dinner tonight too.

bedfellow: And bring some of your home-made.

purge potatok: I bring wine. Is better. Is stronger.

bessie udderton: How do you make the wine, Mr. Potatok? You say your first name is Purge?

purge potatok: Make from potato too. Add more sugar; add little beets for make colour, add rhubarb, add choke-cherry, add maybe a bit barley.

bedfellow: Holy Cow! Don't forget to bring it.

bessie udderton: How far is your farm, Mr. Purge?

middleduck: I think this whole thing is irregular.

swivel: Is that coffee boiling, Mrs. Waffle?

bessie udderton: It was, but it died down again. I wish we had some wood. Those chips just glow. Anyway, we're out of chips again.

purge potatok: In pasture is plenty chips. I get.

swivel: Well, get it boiling. And while you're getting it to boil again, I just want to say that, since we have concluded the ceremonial part of our program, I suppose I should thank you all for your co-operation, and I had prepared a few words to that effect but somehow or other they got mixed up with that "Willows Revisited" I threw on the fire, and I suppose like all things they have turned to dust and ashes by this time. I think we can omit the Chairman's remarks just now since we are all getting pretty hungry. So I think we'll just bring the formal part of our program to a close by singing the National Anthem, and then we can have lunch.

middleduck: Mr. Chairman, I object. We are getting more and more irregular at this rate. The duck dinner at the hotel tonight is just as much part of the program as any of this and the vote of thanks to the Committee and things like that will have to be recorded in the minutes. The National Anthem should come then unless we want to sing it twice in one day which is definitely irregular.

jones-jones: Why don't we sing "Saskatchewan, Thou Golden" instead?

swivel: I never heard of it. Who wrote it?

jones-jones: As a matter of fact, I wrote it. I was going to propose it tonight at the dinner, but it might be better here since this part of the program is the one that goes to the Department. I'm hoping it will be officially adopted as the Provincial Song. You see, next year when the Government is holding its fifty-year anniversary they are going to adopt a provincial flag. It is going to have a crest with a snearth laying an egg on a nest made of maple leaves and fleur-de-lis, and I understand they want a provincial song to go with it. If the Department were to print it on the outside of their anniversary booklet together with the snearth and the provincial flower, we would be that much ahead.

swivel: I never thought of that. It's an excellent idea. How does it go?

jones-jones: I have it here on the tape. It's sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

the muse:

On her bosom the maiden from Trail,
Had tattooed the…

jones-jones: I'm sorry, folks. That's not it. It's those damn girls in the office. They're always up to tricks with this recorder. I can't leave it a minute. I'm sorry, I should have checked. This is not the one I meant for the Provincial Song.

wraitha dovecote: I should hope not. Is that the one you wanted to tell me, Pilt?

bedfellow: It might make a good Provincial Song, at that.

jones-jones: It goes like this, and it's to the tune of "Yankee Doodle." What with all these Americans moving in, not to mention those that came from South Dakota it's more likely to appeal to the Government than a tune somebody makes up;

(Sings)

Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan,
Saskatchewan, thou golden,
Thou art the province beautiful,
To thee I am beholden.

And then there's the chorus and it's to the tune of the chorus of "Yankee Doodle" too. But in the chorus Saskatchewan is given its old Indian pronunciation with the accent on the third syllable. I thought that would be a good historical touch, linking the present with the past.

(Sings)

Saska-che-wan, keep it up,
On thy plains so tender,
Rich or poor, or just hard up,
We always will defend her.

If you see what I mean.

swivel: Friends, let us all bring this moving ceremony to a close before we have our lunch (and I see the coffee is boiling again), by joining here in a circle around Sarah's grave and singing the new Provincial Song for the first time in her honour.

all (Sing):

Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan,
Saskatchewan, thou golden,
Thou art the province beautiful,
To thee we are beholden.

swivel: Now let's have the chorus good and loud.

all (Sing):

Saska-che-wan, keep it up,
On thy plains so tender,
Rich or poor, or just hard up,
We…

At this point the tape becomes confused. Purge Potatok's voice which has joined in the singing, a rich bass, but considerably off key is heard in loud Ukrainian. There is a cry of "snake" from Wraitha Dovecote, a cry of "Wraitha, your skirt!" from Bessie Udderton, a loud unprintable stream of profanity from Doctor Bedfellow, something resembling a prayer from Middleduck, considerable extra static from the tape recorder, and John Swivel's voice above the wind and the hissing of coffee boiling over, "I told you to watch that fire!"

APPENDIX II

"Duck Dinner at Willows," which Bessie Udderton had promised would be finished that evening after the dinner in the Clarendon Hotel, was not written until the following morning. It was not thrown on the ceremonial pyre, but has been published nevertheless together with the other poems of the School of Seven in Fifty Years of Progress. It exemplifies innerness at its best.

duck dinner at willows

Ah life, whose humblest in-between collation
Holds promise of the ecstasy of days,
When stomachs rumble in anticipation,
And spirits rise, and voices lift in praise —
This is the duck! Crisp on its gilded platter,
Filling the air with incense — on the plate,
Browned to its ultimate browness lies the batter,
Studded with raisins, each as a jewel of state;
Celestial gravy! And like dew at dawning
Upon the flowered heaven where angels sang,
Glisten and gleam, the promised joy prolonging,
The pearls upon the lemon pie meringue:

And then the nap, in dreaming and forgetting,
A peaceful, quiet sleep that locks away,
All frets of the begotten and begetting,
And all the cares that mark the passing day —
Rest then, and wake again replenished,
With soul restored, to face the week anew —
And rise again, with fortitude — but famished
To meet the hash, and shepherd's pie, and stew.

APPENDIX III

Souvenir Menu of the Duck Dinner,
July 1st, 1954

APPENDIX IV
Mathilda

Of the thirteen Schwantzhacker sisters who were at one time neighbors of Sarah Binks, only the youngest, Mathilda, is still alive. She was the only one of the thirteen who ever married, but her husband died some years ago, and she now lives alone at Leader, Saskatchewan, on the proceeds of her father's farm which was purchased on his death by an American Wheat Syndicate. Having in her youth been a friend and companion to Sarah, Mathilda now lives to some extent in the reflected glory of that great poetess. She is occasionally visited and interviewed by literary historians, and although she has nothing new to add to her reminiscences of Sarah, she takes great pride in having been the inspiration for the famous Grizzleykick Symphony of poems, but even more in having been a co-worker and collaborator in the translation from the German of some of Sarah's published work. It had undoubtedly been a joint effort since Sarah herself knew no German.

Mathilda still owns and treasures the German-English dictionary of her father's with the aid of which she and Sarah translated so successfully the "Lorelei" into "The Laurel's Egg" and Goethe's "Du Bist Wie Eine Blume" into the well-known "You Are Like One Flower." She has promised to give this dictionary to the Binksian collection when she has no further use for it, but in the meantime she occasionally does use it to translate a German poem or so on her own. She does this, not because of any love for German poetry, but in order to maintain and perhaps re-establish her connection with Saskatchewan's greatest poet which, in the lapse of years tends to be forgotten.

By no stretch of the imagination can Mathilda Schwantzhacker be called a poet in her own right. Even the Saskatchewan Government, always conscious of the importance of the various ethnic groups in the political community, rejected the suggestion that she be included in the School of Seven, pointing out that her translations do not represent, as in the case of Purge Potatok, any poetic feeling for Saskatchewan, or for that matter, poetic feeling of any kind. Of late, however, this has been questioned. It is true that her translations tend, as in the case of her early efforts with Sarah, to be extremely literal, and it is also true that as a Dakota-German she occasionally misses the meaning of German words themselves. But it is to be observed that in some of her more recent translations she begins to take liberties with the original German texts and give a more free translation which suggests that she may even have some poetic talent of her own. It is always possible that this seed of poesy may some day burgeon into something worth while, but in the meantime her request to the Saskatchewan Government that she be included in the New Year's honours list and be awarded the s.o.m. has been denied.

Mathilda has stated her intention of having all her translations published in a booklet at her own expense as soon as she can afford it. Some however have already appeared in Swine and Kine, and also in The Horsebreeder's Gazette, the old publications in which so much of Sarah's poetry first saw the light of day. The few samples of Mathilda's translations given here with her enthusiastic permission are presented not so much for their intrinsic worth or for any contribution to Saskatchewan literature, but rather to point out the thematic possibilities of which aspiring poets may take advantage. One of the great difficulties of the embryo poet is to know what to write about.

As is to be expected, it is the best known of the German lyrics which have received Mathilda's first attention. In the interest of sound scholarship and to assist the reader in knowing what these translations are all about, notes and references have been added. These have been taken from Professor Wotan Scheisske's Bilderbuch des Deutchen Volksmischmasch for Colleges, by permission of the publishers.

heidenröslein

Saw a boy a Rosie stand,
Rose among the heathen¹
Was so young, like morning grand,
Fast to see her close he ranned,²
Saw her with much feelin'

Rosie, Rosie, Rosie red,³
Rose among the heathen.

"Rose," he said, "I'm breaking you,⁴
Rose among the heathen."
Rosie said, "Just try and do,
Think I don't know a thing or two?
Me, I'm not just leavin'."

Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, red
In among the heathen.

And the wild boy went and broke,
Rose among the heathen,
Rose defended self with stroke,
Helped her yet no tear and choke,⁵
Had to take it even;

Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, red,
Rose among the heathen.

der gute kamerad

I had, I had one comrade,⁶
A better find you not,
The drum it struck for trouble,
By my side walked he double,
In self-same step and trot.

A bullet came a-flying,
Owes me or owes it he?
Him has it now away torn
He lies me at the feet borne,
As if a piece from me.

Will me the hand yet reach up,
While yet I'm even sad —
"I can you hand not give it,
Stay you long time and live it,
My good, good, comerade."⁷

o tannenbaum

Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree,
How true are all your pages,⁸
You green not but in summer's throes,
No, too in winter when it snows,
Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree,
How true are all your pages.

ein gleiches     a smoothy⁹

Over all tree-tops is rue,
In all the hill-tops feel you,
Hardly a huff,
The birdlets shut up in the forest,
Just you wait, Horace,¹⁰
You'll sleep enough.

————

Footnotes:

¹ This is one of Mathilda's mistakes. It should be heath. →

² ranned, here evidently stands for "had run." →

³ the suggestion here is that Rosie was a communist and therefore the boy was justified in deserting her. →

⁴ The German is brechen, to vomit. A more literal translation would be, "I'm getting rid of you." →

⁵ choke, here is a free rendering of ach, meaning, ouch. A better translation would have been, "helped her yet no pain and ouch." →

⁶ The impression is given here by the use of I had, I had, that there may have been more than one comrade. Mathilda however disposes of this idea by the use of one, in the first line. In this she is true to the original. As far as known there was only one comrade. →

⁷ Notice the spelling of comrade here into comerade. This is ingenious on the part of Mathilda since it therefore rhymes with sad in the second line. The repetition of good has no particular significance since the possibility of there being two comrades has already been dealt with. →

⁸ "Pages" might better have been translated as "leaves." →

⁹ Mathilda was unable to translate Ein Gleiches and simply called it, A Smoothy which is completely wrong. →

¹⁰ This also is wrong, although it makes more sense than the original. Mathilda translated balde, as Baldy, the popular appellation for a man who is bald. She had learned somewhere that the Latin poet, Horace, had been bald, and she selected this name in preference to Elisha, which she had also been considering, because it rhymes better with forest. →