The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Page 23

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
21
of the intellect and the imagination.
No Canadian poet in any language has
excelled his portrayal of Canadian
landscape. His verse description of the
Rockies, for example, draws on the
old saga literature for its craglike
qualities of rigour and power. In his
approach to the social issues of his
day, he was a stern, unbending realist,
yet he was capable of deep tenderness
towards the ancient land of his people.
Some of his poetic tributes to Iceland
are unforgettable:
T hough you have trodden in travel
All the wide tracts of the earth,
Bear yet the dreams of your bosom
Back to the land of your birth,
Kin of volcano and floe-sea!
Cousin of geysir and steep!
Daughter of downland and moorland!
Son of the reef and the deep!
The poet most closely comparable to
Stephan G. Stephansson is my old
friend, Guttormur J. .Guttormsson, of
Riverton, Manitoba. This I can as-
severate from having visited in his
home and discussed with him the
forces that have shaped his poetry. He
is the only Icelandic poet to have been
born in Canada; and the hardships of
a pioneer settlement and his father’s
early death restricted his education to
a very little more than Stephansson
had received. He faced the world as a
penniless orphan at the age of sixteen
and was then tossed from heavy job to
heavy job through sixteen years of
promiscuous and uncertain employ-
ment. The past fifty-three years he has
spent in grinding poverty on a bush-
land farm. And yet he has read un-
remittingly, in Icelandic literature, in
English literature, and in world liter-
ature in English translation. He, too,
has worked far into the night and his
poetic output is second in volume and
importance only to that of Stephans-
son himself.
Some poets, not necessarily the great-
est, impress me with the intricacy of
their prosodic patterns. A good ex-
ample is Nikulaas Ottenson who, in
his rfmur on the captains of the Ice-
landic fishing fleet in Manitoba, is
not content to use simple ballad
measure but employs 104 stanzas in
“hagkveSlingahattur” and over 200
stanzas in “hringhendur” — the former
a quatrain in which the second stressed
syllables of the four lines rhyme AAAA
and the final stressed syllables rhyme
BBBB and each couplet is bound to-
gether by strict alliteration, while the
second stanza-form is identical except
for final rhymes running BCBC. The
only way in which he can fill out his
tiny frames of reference is by coining
his own “kennings”, several pages of
which are appended to his volume for
the enlightenment of baffled readers.
In these lists he has, inter alia, some 50
cumbersome synonyms for “sea”, 63 for
“ship” and 64 for “man.” Another type
of ingenuity is found in Pall S. Pals-
son, whose “Haust” begins as a series
of Sapphic quantitative stanzas; to this
the rhyming of Italian poetry is added;
and a final rivetting together of each
couplet with alliteration completes
the design. Imposing prosody also
characterizes Sveinn Bjornsson, Einar
Pall Jonsson and Thorsteinn Th. Thor-
steinsson.
In another group of poets the chief
emphasis is one of social indignation
over the injustices and evils of our cen-
tury. This had been one of many
strands in the work of Stephan G. and
Guttormur, but it is the dominant
theme in Jonas Stefansson fra Kald-
bak and SigurSur Julius Johannesson.
Both have a penetrating eye for rotten
spots in our economic and social
system, but “J. S.” has a far sharper