The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Page 27

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
25
but used to embody his very personal
revolt against the injustice of an ac-
quisitive society:
... Is thy view not vast and dire,
void of joy?—beneath the hill
gapes a maw of fetid mire,
muck-devouring, hungry still;
while a jaundiced jaw of stone
juts above thee, gaunt and still . . .
Many a man in kindred fashion,
moved on by the winter’s blast,
looks on livid bogs of passion
lying rotten, black and vast;
sees the yellow rock-jaw yonder
Yawning from the face of Caste . . .
Or Guttormur Guttormsson, in des-
cribing his springtime tribulations in
bringing up from the cellar the angry
bees who have wintered there, com-
pares them with tragic reality to the
poetic ideals that a life of toil and
hardship has frustrated in his own
experience:
Honey-bees of my high ideals
Have I imprisoned in this my winter,
Night and day in the chilling darkness
Down in the cellar beneath my spirit . .
Time went by, and I raised the
trap-door,
Took to the ladder and sought
the cellar.
Stygian voices I heard distinctly
Stir in the subterranean darkness
Savage hungry and sullen rancour
Sang in the clouds of that dim inferno:
Borne from the depths like a blast
of sulphur.
Buzz’d the rage of their venomous
cursing ....
There is still another way of analyz-
ing the strength and weakness of Ice-
landic Canadian poetry. Most of the
great poets of the world have vindicat-
ed their greatness by producing works
of considerable length, des oevures a
longue haleine, whether narrative,
dramatic or philosophical. The Aeneid,
the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury
Tales, Pan Tadeusz, La Legende des
Siecles, Eugene Onegin, Paradise Lost
and John Brown’sBody are all exam-
ples of the first type; Edipus Rex, Ag-
amemnon, Hamlet, Le Cid (Corneille),
Phedre, Faust, Peer Gynt, and Murder
in the Cathedral are examples of the
second; while the third category may
be represented by De Rerum Natura,
The Testament of Beauty, The Faery
Oueene, Four Quartets, An Essay on
Criticism and The Ring and the Book.
When John Keats sought to prove to
himself his title to a place in English
poetry, he set himself, in Endymion,
the task of writing a poem at least
4,000 lines in length. And what do we
find among our Canadian Icelandic
poets? Only two of them survived the
test of length—Stephan G. Stephansson
in A FerS og Flugi and Guttormur
Guttormsson in Jon Austfirffingur,
works of roughly 1,050 and 1,175 lines
respectively, the former a series of
eighteen vivid descriptive sketches in
a uniform metre and the latter a
sequence of eleven poems in various
metres, all set in the pioneer commun-
ity in Manitoba where he was born.
Neither of these works is an organic
unity in the structural sense although
each hangs together by its homogene-
ity of atmosphere and theme. In any
absolute sense, neither is very long
or very great.
The significance of this may be
broadened if we go on to affirm that
long poems are just as mysteriously
lacking in the literature of their na-
tive Iceland. Eysteinn Asgrimsson’s
Lilja consists of only one hundred brief