The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.1988, Síða 15

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
13
Too filled with morning joy for death to
capture?13
A real poet is here at work. This brief
poem wakes up the imagination. It ponders
over the ultimate meaning of the universe.
Though he has read deeply in two lan-
guages, Paul has not taken his ideas about
life from literature. As a poet he draws his
materials from the well of experience. He
never bars the gate to any theme. To suggest
his range, here are some of his titles:
“Motherland,” a tribute to Iceland; “Out-
casts,” about a fair woman and a dark
man; “The Cycle,” echoes “Sandy Bar.”
(In his recent book, Seven Books Between
Two Covers, Gus Sigurdson has a reference
to this poem: “ ‘The Cycle,’ a poem we
praise, is precious to all of our race.”);
“Weeds,” the bane of farmers everywhere;
“Man and the Rototiller,”14 the machine
age, gain or loss?; “The Game,” spectator
sports.
When Pistol was expressing woolly
thoughts in woolly words, Falstaff said to
him: say what you have to say like a man of
the world. Paul Sigurdson always speaks
like a man of the world. He believes in
simple, direct statement and he wants to be
understood, not by furred and gowned aca-
demics, nor by a circle of long-haired
esthetes, but by everyday people in the
everyday world. His poems never set meta-
physical puzzles or present intellectual
conundrums. He does not have to supply a
crib for anything he ever wrote.
Some suggestion of his poetic faith is
offered by these words from the preface to
his poem “The Shot of Angus Stone:”
“You have none of the modern poetic char-
acteristics. You are, alas, comprehensible
— and that’s a fault. You lack meaningful
words — most of yours are understand-
able. Your hero is not a homosexual, a
fink, a lunatic, a pimp, a gigolo, a junkie,
an emasculated rounder, an alcoholic, nor
an adulterer. He is almost a normal man
who has missed the extremities of life.”15
As a maker of plays, Paul Sigurdson’s
masters have been Euripides and Ibsen,
not Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward.
To say the same thing in other words: his
aim has been to produce a nourishing main
course dish, not a frothy tea-time confec-
tion. To illustrate, I refer to his three act
play The Icelander. The central theme of
this play is as old as the hills of Iceland. It is
this: as material standards of living, stimu-
lated by technological progress, improve
the quality of life qua life is impoverished.
Magnus Thorsteinson, the Icelander,
was a man permanently stuck in yesterday.
The old ways were his ways. He resented
change as an evil thing. During the last
war, when the Americans established an
airport at Keflavik, a great deal of Amer-
ican money poured into Iceland, and, as a
consequence, the standard of living of the
average Icelander was raised considerably.
Iceland was the Holy Land of the Ice-
lander’s soul. He resented the Americans.
He hated the new spirit which they had
brought into his country — a spirit exem-
plified by boys of fifteen leaving school to
learn how to drive cars and trucks so that
they could work for the Yankee dollar. As
Magnus said to the elder of his two daugh-
ters, who had given her heart to an Ameri-
can officer: “Yes, they are turning us into a
nation of softies. We are forsaking our
manhood. For centuries we suffered, we
starved, we wore our fingers down, but we
endured. Nature culled us and the strong
survived. The strong and the worthy sur-
vived.”
Perhaps, the seeds of his ultimate defeat
are contained in the thought that the strong
can be equated with the worthy. To the
American officer, who is a splendid repre-
sentative of his race, cultured and interested
in things of the mind and the spirit, a man
whom Magnus, under different circum-
stances, could have taken to his heart,
Magnus said: “Do you think we are a
people who take bread before liberty? We