[In] Pratt the essential myth is achievement, to moral purpose. (p. 6)

Individual narrative poems treat of parts of the general course of achievement, with its advances and set backs: blocked in [Brébeuf and His Brethren] and The Titantic, moving on in Behind the Log and The Roosevelt and the Antinoe, succeeding in [Towards the Last Spike.] The only real obstacle he records is human, therefore only human resources are needed to overcome the hindrances: creative imagination, effort, courage, and willing submission of individual goals to attain a communal end. In this Pratt expresses the essential myth of Canada at the turn of the century, the achievement for its own sake, with the prime motive exemplified by the axiom that nature abhors a vacuum—the emptiness must be filled, the chaos ordered. (pp. 9-10)

Pratt's symbols for good are warm-blooded reasoning creatures—the dog in "Carlo", the "Apes" in "The Great Feud", and man at the top—which have potential for progress. His symbols for evil are cold-blooded, like the shark, locked in stasis, or like men such as the Nazis whom he depicts as regressing towards it. The moral quality contains the potential for sin, as in Tom in The Witches' Brew, but the main sin is perversion towards the amoral quality of the cold-blooded whose sole achievement is destruction, chaos. As he illustrates in poem after poem, the reasoning ability of man and his crowning achievement of complex communication becomes mechanistic and destructive when it is diverted from creative vision to passion or stasis. The myth rests of course on the assumption that progress, that is, achievement conducive to the advancement of civilization, is a "good". One might add "for its own sake" for despite Pratt's rhetorical insistance on ultimate moral imperative, the successes in his poems are attained without clear and plausible external ethical or religious motive. (p. 10)

Although the achievement myth sounds clearly in the lyrics, it peaks in the long narratives. Poems such as The Titanic and Brébeuf seem the reverse of achievement, but throughout Pratt's poems runs the theme that while individuals, even groups, with their flaws, may deviate from the achievement trajectory, the trajectory is true—the science of probability came into its own in the twentieth century. The Titanic sank but did not destroy the value of Lloyd's insurance system. In any event, the ship represents an immense technological achievement. As the poem shows, man's ingenuity is indeed capable of mastering the environment whereas individual people with their individual flaws may not. (p. 13)

Pratt rounds up most of his thesis of achievement in Towards the Last Spike, where the poles are clearly stated—on the one hand achievement, on the other stasis…. The poem is a paean to achievers…. The poem depicts the achievers as men of vision and faith, with the energy, courage, leadership, and knowledge to transmute dreams into facts…. (p. 15)

Considering Pratt's work as a whole, his tone is democratic and optimistic in that he celebrates those who do what they do with moral freedom, without compulsion other than cheerful compliance with values they respect. (pp. 17-18)

It is worth considering how Pratt's poetic mode suits the essential Prattian myth of achievement. His narratives are poetry of exclusion, and are therefore simple in contrast to poetry of inclusion with its complex problem of attaining unity from a mass of disparates. They are essentially tales of heroic adventure, and … relate mainly to the dynamics of physical force and counterforce. Most have the simple structure of an episodic journey, with the expected narrative arc from setting to conflict, build up of opposing powers, peaking of the action, and resolution—all on the physical plane under a controlling theme. Perhaps the best example is The Titanic in which we see the launching of the great ship and of its iceberg opponent, follow their incremental journey to the collision point, then see the final resolution, which confirms the theme of hubris so powerfully focused throughout the poem.

The narratives sweep unsubtly to their conclusions along courses remarkably alike…. Sub-plots scarcely enter; and where they do, as for example the Joques story in Brébeuf, they function to support closely the main story line. Avoidance of clutter is one of his characteristics. He applies means to end with the concentrated directness of a mediaeval ballad…. (p. 20)

Pratt's characters are elemental, cast from a heroic mould; and like all such heroes fixed and unchanging, so that there is no tragic tension within them. (p. 21)

Pratt seems to have made types of his characters deliberately, for example, Towards the Last Spike eulogizes the Scots by casting some of the protagonists in caricature as Scotsmen. His protagonists, like Tarzan or Superman, always overcome…. Where the outcome seems equivocal, nevertheless the narrative trajectory arcs to triumph. (pp. 21-2)

Pratt rigidly prescribes the consciousness of his characters; they are all male; there is no impingement on them of women or children, or of the softer sentiments. They are motivated by will and knowledge, by courage and tenacity, and by a passion to achieve—each at fever pitch….

The evocativally physical settings, cast like the heroes from moulds of heroic size, serve to keep the heroic scale of the characters in focus. Pratt uses gigantean settings; they are absolute in his fictional world in that he rigidly excludes extraneous features of landscape, seascape, or any human consciousness of them. The setting creates absolute moral order, devoid of metaphysical authority, consisting of and governed by the human codes fronting a mechanical universe. Time enters as a metaphor, of appropriate heroic scale and power. It functions as evolutionary force, on man and nature generally, and as tension…. (p. 22)

Pratt's essential myth is not tragedy but the achievements made possible by indomitable heroism. He sings an epic of achievement commensurate with the essential myth of Canadian Literature—that of dynamic prowess conquering a tremendous sweep of space and time from Atlantic to Arctic and Pacific…. [In his myth], man has the potential to triumph over time, over the human world, over the natural world, and over chance, with some suggestion that there may be an ambiguous God somewhere in the schema. Man has the potential, but Pratt also shows that he carries inhim traits from his ancestral background that constantly threaten to drag him back down the slopes of time. (p. 23)

Pratt's silences are highly indicative. The absence from his fictional world of human love, of existent evil (Satan) or good (God), of the anti-hero … helps define his fictional world as one in which God is progress … and evil is retrogression down the evolutionary scale…. (pp. 23-4)

The tone of voice reveals a zest for the wonder of things as they are, particularly if those things can be conceived of in heroic terms, and together with the compelling imagery creates an image of absolute knowledge, which is in keeping with the controlling myth of human capability to reach any goal its vision can articulate. Pratt closely controls the narrative voice, allowing it only a laconic factual rhetoric…. (pp. 24-5)

In his narrative stance he takes sides with his protagonists against his antagonists; and by a whole battery of narrative devices—from letters in Brébeuf, overheard speech in Behind the Log, Van Horne's dreams in Towards the Last Spike, to telegrams and poker games in The Titanic—insists that the reader's commitment prarallel his own.

He also marshals a powerful array of prosodic devices to help snare the reader. (p. 26)

The imagery focuses on primitive nature, on evolutionary time, and on power and its multi-faceted manifestations, studded with meticulously researched factual accuracy. Pratt orchestrates his instruments to his essential theme of achievement with remarkable economy and precision, and with a dynamic narrative surge that rarely falters. He makes epics without the usual pantheon of deities, using instead a supranatural scale—of characters, setting, and action—a device he uses to facilitate control…. (p. 28)

Pratt seems to predicate in these narratives by subject matter and mode that certainly man lives in a world of pressures and problems, enormous and complicated, including such obdurate inertial geological forces as the Laurentians and the Rockies, and such dynamic thrusting ones as weather, time and living enemies. But he also seems to predicate that men can overcome and that overcoming—achievement—is the dominant imperative of living things, and that even when he seems to fail the eventual result will be a triumph correlative to the effort needed to meet the challenge….

For whom did Pratt write his narratives? For what audience? They already need annotation for comprehension by younger readers…. [Their] fading topicality, coupled with the waning, as the twentieth century moves on, of society's acceptance of Pratt's essential myth of achievement will likely relegate him to the bench of the minor poets. But for the reader who takes the trouble to master Pratt's references, the reader who accepts the mythology of Pratt's fictional world, the powerful engines of Pratt's poetry will long throb in memory. (p. 29)

Pratt, in epic scope and dynamic concentration on the achievement theme, breaks new ground. He is the first and only Canadian creative writer to express truly the spirit that forged the nation. (p. 30)

[In Pratt's poems that] deal with war he often takes sides, so that they are in effect propaganda pieces rather than objectively about the "moral problem of war". He frequently loads the scale of his war poems so that they lack aesthetic balance. (p. 46)

One of Pratt's more remarkable war poems, "Cycles", calls for a Lord of Love and Life to resuscitate both sides…. Pratt here takes sides against the compounded destructiveness of impersonal scientific warfare, but closes with the ambiguity that then "The Lord of Love and Life may come …" [italics mine].

The Iron Door (An Ode) (1927) partially resolves the ambiguity. It only hints at the ultimate moral order—The Lord of Love and Life—but does contain its own order, that inherent in the poem, in the assumption of its speaker that there ought to be a suprahuman order to match the order displayed by the individuals who ask their questions of the door. Pratt does not depict an anti-order character in this poem—all his seven searchers seriously question the enigma of existence and their seriousness imposes its own order in which facetiousness would be out of place. The very seriousness of the single questioner in "The Truant" (1943) likewise serves to create in that poem its own moral order. While scarcely "war" poems, The Iron Door and "The Truant" do show Pratt's insistence that life has moral order.

"The Radio in the Ivory Tower" (1943) focuses specifically on the Second World War—September, 1939…. It attacks the militarism of the era of the First World War … and it condemns the events of late 1939…. It thus seems to be a piece of didacticism, a direct anti-war poem. Yet it sets a moral justification for the epics of war that come later, the justification of order as good, chaos as evil. It asks why the power of the Western world fell before Hitlerian rhetoric…. (pp. 49-50)

"Come Away, Death" (1943), an earlier statement of "Cycles", regrets time's traumatic effect on the nature of Death, from dignity in the past to indignity in the present, as seen particularly in modern war…. But Pratt here sets up a universal moral order based on the myth of progress—that the predator in the Second World War, likened by imagery to Death itself and "his traction tread" …, constitutes an evolutionary reversion; and as long as we believe in the myth of progress this moral order will have validity. (p. 51)

Both The Witches Brew (1925) and "The Great Feud" (1926) surge with lust of battle, and with wide-spread conflict. Each has a volcanic setting, with the suggestion of possible catastrophic intervention cyclopean in nature. Each unleashes a warrior of heroic scale. And each concerns itself with the genocidic effect of warfare unconstrained by either the referee Lord of Hosts or the therapeutic Lord of Love of "Cycles", with one life form turning on its kindred in blind fury, as man had done in 1914. Both seem to be war poems. However, any relevance The Witches Brew might have to war, any reading that would link the genocidal Tom to place or time, must take cognizance of the tonal gusto that celebrates his predatory prowess and achievement, as well as the absence of a moral order based on myth, in the poem. As a war poem it is ambiguous. (pp. 51-2)

"The Great Feud" can … be read as an allegory of man and his various potentials: calibrated killing for a cause, and blind purposeless slaughter—both shown as chaotic or negative; and the imposition of will on emotion to achieve order—shown as positive. The prime powers in its fictional world are Nature—depicted as chance; and human-like will—seen as good, as long as it is morally oriented, i.e., leads towards order and away from chaos. (p. 53)

With Dunkirk (1941) we have, at last, a direct war poem. Its action is motivated by the myth of political freedom, "Freedom to them was like the diver's lust for air" … and, as in "Cycles" and "Come Away, Death", by the myth of devolution…. The freedom myth would anchor the poem in a more credible moral absolute, but Pratt in this poem takes sides…. The Germans are tersely caricatured as mechanical creatures "set to a pattern of chaos" …, the British portrayed at great length as full of humour and the common touch and by analogy "the liberal imbecilities" … and the motivation is halfhearted…. Pratt extolls Caractacus and Boadicea for waging defensive war aginst the Romans … and, more significantly, omits to give the parallel of the Germanic peoples in Roman times who were more successful than the British in fighting off the Romans in order to preserve their freedom. What Pratt says about his two combatants might be true, or be made to seem true, but the fictional world of the narrative is too sketchily shown to prove it, too much like a cartoon to seem to be true. The complexities he deals with would require a scale more like Tolstoy's War and Peace to come truly into proportion. As a result the poem is verse propaganda. (pp. 56-7)

[Although] Pratt insists, in poems such as The Iron Door and "The Truant", that life has moral significance, this moral order applies ambiguously in his poems about conflict. In some he evidently celebrates or condemns conflict, didacticism gets in the way. Instead of experiencing at first hand the dramatic conflicts through ironical, auditory, tactile images of environment and action, the reader is often told what reaction he is supposed to have. In other poems Pratt creates credible fictional worlds centered on human strife. The difference lies mainly in the myths involved. When the moral order rests on decaying myth, or a myth inadequately sustained by the details of the poem, he is less successful. Where it rests on living myth, or where his narrative propriety is such that the detail informs the myth, he comes into his own. But in general he does not create poems that seriously concern the morality of war because he does not have a consistent moral attitude towards it. (p. 61)

What [The Iron Door] says is plain enough but how it says it invests it with a veil that renders it not plain at all but elusive, uncertain, sombre, even menacing.

The twenty-one sections which make up the poem vary in length from three lines to twenty-four; each has one to two sentences and focuses on one feature of the dream. The verses all run on to an end-of-line stop, with variations of verse length substituting for pauses within the line. The spondee and trochee metrical variations act dramatically against the basic iambic rhythm to drive home the sense of unease…. The loose verse form seems used not because it is the "in thing", nor because Pratt wants to avoid regularized poetic form; but … because this verse cadence best fuses the other components of the poem, so that the tension between order and disorder induces a cumulative effect of uncertainty, of ambiguity, of flux without discernable authority. (p. 63)

There is a tension also in the language, between on the one hand such mind-wandering words as "credulities", "emptiness", or "questionings", and on the other such precisely used words as "cruciform", "lintell", "architrave", "sextant", or "davits", which authenticate and focus attention on scene and action…. At the same time, the syntax of long compound sentences provides an undertow rhythm consonant with the recurrent references to the sea and tidal movement.

In its figurative language, this is a highly visual poem. (pp. 63-4)

Rhyme is irregular but its sound patterns, weaving back and forth, give an echoing coherence within the sections…. [Rhyme] functions in Pratt's poem. (p. 64)

Sound imagery echoes fitfully … but as the poem mounts towards climax and the great door opens, full and continuous sound rolls in….

Most components of the poem contribute towards the pervading sense of enigma, of doubt, of skepticism, if not pessimism, about cosmic nature—but not all…. (p. 65)

[In] summing up the forces that may have caused the door to open, the dreamer cites only the five speakers who had shown at least some belief, and omits the two most skeptical ones, i.e., the philosopher and the artist, leaving the impression that perhaps faith had been the prime mover.

The choice of the dreamer as the point of view from which we are to apprehend the poem is most apt; for he discloses only the half-facts, half-suppositions of dream, without the need for Pratt to introduce other narrative devices in order to convey the sense of doubt and ambiguity. This feeling is efficiently inherent in the speaker….

In my appreciation its components coalesce into a lyrical lament for lost friends and a song of hope that they have all met a just and spiritual reward; but to me it also conveys a sense of refusal to credit that the evidence before man can support this view, and that the human situation should be otherwise, that sacrifice, courage, duty, achievement for the public good—all the virtues of the nineteenth-century Victorian ethic so succinctly summed up in the questions posed by the seven speakers—should be rewarded in kind….

Form and meaning fuse in The Iron Door. The form as well as the meaning exists in the language of the poem, in which the grief and hope and uncertainty, and the sense of desolation present in the uncertainty, are memorable because the words make sad and sombre music. (p. 66)

Glenn Clever, On E J Pratt (copyright © Glenn Clever, 1977, Borealis Press, 1977, 67 p.