The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Blaðsíða 26

24
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1963
limerick in English society but its form
is more flexible and its range is wider.
A wartime example by Stephan G. has
already been quoted. Guttormur gives
us the following jest:
A widower read long in Holy Writ,
Then sent aloft a frantic
prayer-o-gram:
“I’d rather that my wife in hell
should sit
Than warm the bosom of old
Abraham.”
Or the following might be quoted
from “K.N.”:
The Torn Bible
Into the kitchen fire I poke
The Bible for cremation.
“God gives and takes away,” I croak.
But the Devil cries out :“Holy smoke!”
Mute is my meditation.
One of the least original prases of
their output is nature poetry in an
early Romantic tradiion. Morning and
night, spring, summer and autumn,
rose gardens and lilies, even complete
with fairies and sun-goddesses, are all
too common. As with all too many
Anglo-Canadian poets, part of the
trouble doubtless lies in their use of
models from an earlier day, lingering-
over Keats and Tennyson, Poe, Long-
fellow and Bryant, without any aware-
ness of the ferment of current ideas
and artistic experimentation associated
with Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas,
Edwin Muir, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Sand-
burg and MacLeish. If they translate
from German, it is from Heine and
not from Rainer Maria Rilke. In Nor-
wegian, their models seem to end with
Ibsen and Bjornson; in Icelandic,
they are inclined to stop with Thor-
steinn Erlingsson and Hannes Haf-
steinn. The most widely read of the
Canadian group have been Stephan G.
and Guttormur. The range of the
former is documented very fully in the
four volumes of his Bref og RitgerSir
(1938, 1942, 1947, 1948) but while both
men were enabled to live a very full
imaginative life in their reading, it.
was an undisciplined foray, for the
most part through English, German
and Scandinavian literature, with the
Russian novelists (in translation)
thrown in for good measure. None of
the Icelandic Canadian poets seeems to
have been grounded in the Latin,
Greek, French or Italian literatures
that are the majestic background of
most of the great English poets of our
century. On the other hand, several
of them, and especially Stephan G. and
Guttormur, have been deeply and
fundamentally familiar with the sagas
and the Eddie poetry, and from them
gain an extra imaginative dimension.
It is probably their lack of contact with
contemporary thought and form that
makes so much of their nature poetry
seem empty and superficial. They do
not realize, moreover, that a poem like
John Keat’s “To a Nightingale” was
not a facile exercise in sentiment but
the sensuous embodiment of a pro-
found spiritual conflict over the na-
ture of reality; and that to copy the
form without the experience is a
jejune performance.
Nature poetry among the Icelandic
Canadians takes on significance only
when they see their new surroundings
with their own eyes and shape their
portrayal in terms of their own ex-
perience. This is part of the greatness
of Stephan G. in “A ferS og flugi” or
in such an apparently traditional poem
as “Greniskogurinn.” A couple of
stanzas from the latter, written in
strict alliterative measures, show the
spruce forest of the Alberta Rockies
not only portrayed with vivid power