The Third Eye: Jay Macpherson's 'The Boatman'
[The Boatman] has made a great difference in the world of Canadian poetry. Let us proceed to explain the greatness of this difference.
First, what one must remark about Miss Macpherson's whale or "Leviathan" is that it is so very skillfully carved, and so are all the other beasts inside it, for her Leviathan turns out to be a Noah's Ark as well. It can also be said that she is the first Canadian poet to carve angels at all well. No one before had ever told Canadian poets that the Angel was or could be a very suitable and good topic for poetry.
Miss Macpherson's angels, of course, have a lot to do with the fact that she does some very natural but very hard things connected with the Bible. The Bible is still a vexatiously ill-known work in Canada…. I mean that it is ill-known as a key to art and as a source for new art. Miss Macpherson knows her Bible, knows that the natural world about us is not natural, knows how her Bible shows you how to deal with this unnaturalness; so nothing seemed more amiable probably than to have lots of angels, for they are the structure of the Bible and they prove to be a subject that immediately creates a tension in which any object or animal or being—Egg, Abominable Snowman and Mary of Egypt—begins to have an outline that glows. In The Boatman there is the "faceless angel" of the Storm, the angel who knows what "sways when Noah nods", the "inward angel"—of a poem called that—who has a "diamond self". There are the angels who look on as Leviathan frolics and there are the seraph forms within the "caverned woman" which are later named "flowers, fountains, milk, blood". In this equation we see that what the poet means by an angel is anything or anybody or any being seen in its Eternal aspect, that is, at its most glorious and most real, its most expanded. Actually, in leafing backwards through The Boatman and tracking down the angels, I've forgotten to mention the very important angel in the last poem:
The world was first a private park
Until the angel, after dark,
Scattered afar to wests and easts
The lovers and the friendly beasts.
This angel represents the giant and supernatural force all Creation lost at the Fall. This force, like a cork in a bottle, stands between us and Paradise in the sense that we must attain to it again before we can return to Paradise. This significant angel and his companions are a great part of the reason why The Boatman is such an exciting book…. To have landed and handled [the concept of the angel] is a real achievement.
Not only is this poet able to arrive at a skill with a very important symbol; she knows also how to deal with a great variety of topics in a carefully modulated variety of ways. The variety of methods or ways or tones is so cleverly arranged that by the time the reader has finished the volume he has boxed the compass of the reality which poetry imitates. This should be an ability an enthusiast for poetry would naturally expect from the author of any volume of lyrics. (pp. 23-5)
One of the proudest conclusions the author of The Boatman might draw about her own volume is that very few of the experiences described are "real" or "natural" experiences. The situations, the beings, the speakers are all gloriously artificial like the themes of Bach, which no "real" bird, no "real" train whistle could imitate or has ever imitated. If the tyranny of the "natural" or unorganised results in the ragbag approach to a volume of lyrics, then the monarchy of the better than "natural", the monarchy of the organised, has resulted in the beautifully articulated structure of this book, and it is a monarchy that shows the way to future ones. (pp. 25-6)
In a poem entitled "The Anagogic Man" we are presented with a figure as interesting as the angel, the figure of a sleeping Noah whose head contains all creation. "Consider that your senses keep / A death far deeper than his sleep"…. [It represents] the slumbering imagination of all life, a slumbering imagination that slowly through art and science rearranges the sun, moon, stars and figures of the gods until they are once more under human control. This Noah is the artist, a man who has brought and still brings all of society safely through the flood and tempest of a fallen world's whirlwind of atoms and death-wishes. But Art must be allowed to decide for itself when the time for universal apocalypse has arrived. If we waken him or it beforehand it is akin to building the Tower of Babel, to attempting a leap into Paradise when we are by no means ready for it. The whole collection of poems requires the reader to transfer himself from the sleep our senses keep to Noah's sleep, and from Noah's sleep eventually to the first morning in Paradise. Miss Macpherson's book is a dream that starts off in the world of the senses and slowly lifts us higher and higher until in the final half dozen pages we are as high as we can be. (p. 26)
One clue to the mystery of Miss Macpherson's hold on one's imagination is the feeling she constantly gives of things inside other things. This idea of things within things can be expanded into the most satisfying explanation of existence I think I know of. We live in a Leviathan which God occasionally plays with and is always attempting to catch. Once we played with it and tried to catch it but it caught us instead. This myth is the essential design of Miss Macpherson's book. (pp. 29-30)
[The] point of the Ark poems is that when Man found himself sinking in the fallen world he had enough sense to build an imitation of that world which met it and himself halfway. One day he'll regain his island or Eden, but a floating island will do for now…. The Ark is a Leviathan within Leviathan and it prophesies to Noah that one day he will swallow his own Ark, that is, make mental and controllable what was physical before and not so easily controlled. (p. 33)
If the reader has really tried to turn himself inside out, that is, discipline and organize his life around a focus of Eternity, then the riddles of the last suite of The Boatman are easy. Each riddle is the top of a spiral staircase leading down through the book. In all the riddles the effect is very much like that of the dancing sequence of those naked ladies on the Acidalian Mount in Spenser's Legend of Courtesy. There is an air of release in Spenser—the Mountain of Contemplation is also at last the mountain of love and joy, nakedness and beauty. So here, after learning how from the other poems in The Boatman, the reader can look at anything in the world and find joy in it, from a lungfish to an abominable Snowman…. The last section in effect says to the reader that Creation, Fall and Redemption are part of a dance whose final figure is the scene in which the Fisherman, in the very last poem, having corrected the Fall is himself corrected for all time. But perhaps in Eternity we would never dream of playing with lungfish and mermaids completely scrubbed of their fallen characteristics, which would be their firm graspable outline. Even when one finally achieves the freedom of being outside one keeps very wisely a delight in the perils of insideness.
Perhaps the best way to conclude what should be said in praise of The Boatman is that it shows you how to get from "here to there". If "here" is this world and "there" the world of Eternity, then this book of poems shows the reader all the necessary steps of the way. These are steps that I am sure an increasingly great number of readers and writers in Canada are going to find very exciting to take. (pp. 33-4)
James Reaney, "The Third Eye: Jay Macpherson's 'The Boatman'," in Canadian Literature, No, 23, Winter, 1960, pp. 23-34.
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