[Smith was a Canadian educator, anthologist, award-winning poet, and critic. In the following essay, originally published in Canadian Literature in 1971, he examines the imagery and themes in Page's major collections of poetry.]

Of the Canadian poets who led the second wave of modernism in the forties and fifties, P. K. Page holds a curious and somewhat anomalous position; she had certainly not received the critical attention that the remarkable fusion of psychological insight and poetic imagination which characterizes and individualizes her poems would lead one to expect. Perhaps the effort to discriminate between the subjective and objective elements of her work, or between image and symbol or memory and desire, has been thought by the critics too unprofitable or found too fatiguing. There is no doubt that she is a difficult poet—at least I have found her so—and the difficulty is not intellectual. Her moons are not reason's, so that what the reader who is to get the maximum enjoyment needs—or the critic who is to get the maximum comprehension—is a sensibility and an intuition that have to be nourished and educated by the poems themselves as he reads and re-reads them. Though I feel a certain presumption in approaching this subject, I can say that I have found the experience of trying to come to terms with it an absorbing one. Her gardens may be imaginary, but more than the toads in them are real; and are not her angels also?

Of course the fact that P. K. Page has not received the attention that has been given to some other poets of her generation can be partly accounted for more charitably and more prosaically. Her output has not been large. She published only three volumes of verse at rather long intervals—As Ten, As Twenty (1946), The Metal and the Flower (1954)—which won the Governor-General's Medal—and a retrospective selection, Cry Ararat! (1967), which contained seventeen new poems. For some ten years of the fifties and the early sixties she was out of Canada with her husband, who was in the Canadian diplomatic service in Australia, Brazil, and Mexico, and for much of this time she gave up writing (or publishing) poetry for painting. 'Gave up', of course, is not really true; her painting and her poetry complemented one another; each, I think, made the other better, or made it more deeply what it was, which is much the same thing. And then the immersion in the language, landscape, and mythology of the strange, intense, and perhaps intensely unCanadian places had a stimulating and enriching influence on all her latest poems. One does not have to rely on the evidence of the poems alone to corroborate these remarks—though that would be ample. In the tenth anniversary issue of this journal, she wrote her own account of her experiences during the years of fruitful 'exile', and in an article entitled 'Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman' in Canadian Literature 46, she gave an account of her philosophy of composition and of the part played by memory, dream, sensation, and technique in both her poetry and her painting. These essays and her recent poems will mark, I believe, the beginning of a new, far juster, and far higher estimate of her standing among our poets.

The comparative lack of attention given to P. K. Page's early work, published in the little magazines of the thirties and early forties when she was an active member of the Preview group in Montreal, is due partly no doubt to the fact that they were overshadowed by the flashy political poems of Patrick Anderson and the simpler satirical or amatory verses of Frank Scott. Even when she was most herself she was associated in the mind of a critic as alert as Milton Wilson with Anderson as a writer of 'decadent pastorals …, whose glass-tight but vulnerable aquarium leaves me gasping for air' ["Other Canadians and After," in Masks of Poetry, 1962]. This did not prevent Professor Wilson from giving us some just, discerning, and generous analyses of one or two of the most striking of the early poems.

No critic or literary historian, however, has made any serious attempt to deal at length with Miss Page's poetry or to define, illustrate, and evaluate her psychological symbolism and her strongly personal treatment of the universal themes of isolation and frustration—much less point to their transfiguration in certain epiphanies at the close of some of her remarkable poems. This, for want of a better workman, I shall try to do.

I begin with a few generalizations and then shall turn immediately to a close reading of some of her finest and most characteristic poems. This will perhaps enable us to isolate the special quality of her excellence and help place her in the developing pattern of modern poetry in Canada.

There are certain themes that occur over and over again in her poetry and a number of archetypal images and symbols that stamp their impress on most of the best poems in each of her three books, and in her work as a whole.

Her subjects are:

Childhood, its innocent eye, its clarity of vision, and its imaginative richness of invention, all leading to the discovery of a new and other reality than that of adulthood and reason;

Love, either faithful, happy, and unifying, or faithless, disillusioned, and lonely—the end-point of self-regarding love—that must be mastered by a conscious effort of the will;

and lastly, Dream, where child, poet, artist, and wit live and have their being in what in some poems is a garden of innocence, Eden before the Fall, and in others a briary wilderness or a sinister painted arras.

Her images and symbols are White and Green, images of snow, winter, ice, and glass; or of flowers, gardens, leaves and trees; or else glass again, and salt, the transparent green suffocating crystal sea. Her symbolic world seems mostly mineral or vegetable, but there are symbols also of birds, the swan and the peacock especially, and fish. And there are breathing human creatures also: girls, adolescents, lovers, and some selfish, isolated, lonely men. But what most vividly lives and breathes here is the Eye, the Lung, the Heart, and the feeling and perceiving Mind.

What is most strange and most revealing in this world is that the workings of its Mind are almost unconscious, often as in dreams, and that even the wit is controlled from Elsewhere. Hers is in its final effect a poetry of vision, and it demands a quality of sympathy in the reader that its poetic richness helps to create. Indeed, to speak for myself, it casts a spell that has made it possible to value it not as vision only but as revelation.

I would like, then, from the point of view of theme and imagery, to discuss, analyse, or perhaps just talk about some of the poems that have impressed me most deeply. A rough classification might go something like this:

Poems in which images of winter predominate, where White is the colour, and ice, snow, glass, and a breathless cold make the mind and sense tingle—among these are 'Stories of Snow', 'Photos of a Salt Mine', 'The Snowman', 'Now this Cold Man', and many lines or stanzas of other poems, such as the last few disillusioned or awakening lines of 'Images of Angels'.

Poems of flowers and gardens, where vegetable dominates mineral, and Green is the primal symbol; many of these are dream gardens, and there are two opposed or contrasting gardens, gardens of innocence and grace, and gardens of imprisonment or exile, or perhaps they are one garden, before and after the Fall. Until its close 'Images of Angels' is of this group; so in part is 'Stories of Snow'. In this group also are many of the poems that deal with childhood and some of the newer poems such as 'After Rain', 'Giovanni and the Indians', and 'The Apple', which is followed by its sad and desolate retrospective sequel, 'To a Portrait in a Gallery'. The garden songs of innocence give way to songs of experience, and here are the most intense and powerful of all the poems. Close to these in theme is 'The Metal and the Flower', though perhaps the antidote for the poison it contains is found in the much later 'This Frieze of Birds'.

Along with the poems centred around snow and ice, or green gardens of pleasure or terror—not too strong a word for 'Arras' or 'Nightmare'—are those where image and symbol are derived from the sea—the sea of poet and psychologist, where sleep is a drowning and the submarine world is the world of the unconscious. Among the most striking of these are 'Element', 'Portrait of Marina', 'Boy with a Sea Dream', and 'In a Ship Recently Raised from the Sea'.

Other classifications might list poems under such heads as Childhood, Love, Self-love, and Dream; but in all of them the same dichotomy of innocence and experience, happiness and despair, or good and evil could be discovered. Classification carried too far defeats its own end; it is time to come to a close reading of some of the poems I have named.

'Stories of Snow' grows out of memories, reveries, and dreams of childhood—'some never-nether land'—where snow storms are held 'circular, complete' in the crystal globes kept in a high tall teakwood cabinet. Encapsulated here are evocations of innocence and perfection opening 'behind the sprouting eyes' caught in the 'vegetable rain'. The conciseness and allusive richness of the language and imagery of the brief opening stanza set the tone at once and imply as a leading theme the contrast between childhood's innocence (or ignorance?) and the safe and changeless purity of the sterile snowflakes imprisoned or preserved in the small glass globe where the child (or poet) may shake up a storm. The major contrast in the poem, however, is that between the white world of innocence and art and the lush tropical landscape of 'countries where the leaves are large as hands / where flowers protrude their fleshy chins / and call their colours', which stands for the natural world of instinct and appearance, of uncontrollable organic growth, that strangles and betrays but which child and poet, or poet as child, can escape from into what the couplet that ends the poem names 'the area behind the eyes / where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies'. This somewhat esoteric ending is led up to through a series of anecdotal pictures that seem like a multiplication of the famous ice-locked swan of Mallarmé—but with a richness and dramatic variety that needs more room than the sonnet can offer.

The illustrative central part of the poem begins with the lines 'And in the early morning one will waken / to think the glowing linen of his pillow / a northern drift, will find himself mistaken / and lie back weeping'. The dreams of this wakened sleeper in a land of fleshy flowers proliferate out of the opening stanza, become the whole poem, and lead to its climax. In Holland, in winter—we realize now that the 'never-nether land' of the opening was the embryo of a pun—hunters, their breath in plumes, 'part the flakes' and sail in their white winged ice-boats over the frozen lakes to hunt the swan. All the images here are of whiteness and no-colour, of snow-flakes and ice, and we see that the innocent world of the child's glass globe has taken on a new, beautiful but sinister significance.

And of the swan in death these dreamers tell
of its last flight and how it falls, a plummet,
pierced by the freezing bullet
and how three feathers, loosened by the shot,
descend like snow upon it.
While hunters plunge their fingers in its down
deep as a drift, and dive their hands
up to the neck of the wrist
in that warm metamorphosis of snow
as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know
who, lost in the white circle, fall at last
and dream their way to death.

'Stories of Snow' is the outstanding success of P. K. Page's first volume, comparable in magnificence and complexity to 'Images of Angels' in her second. These are perhaps the finest of the many very individual poems that seem to grow like beautiful flowers out of childhood memories, recurring dreams, and a crystal clairvoyance. Innocence and experience, illusion and disillusionment, find expression in an overflowing of powerful emotion, remembered not in tranquillity but with a craftsmanly excitement and an exquisite shiver that sets the rhythmical pattern of all her most moving poems.

'Images of Angels', like 'Stories of Snow', 'Photos of a Salt Mine', and some of the newer poems, 'After Rain', and the finest of all, 'Cry Ararat!', is a kind of sentimental education—sentimental not in any pejorative or ironic Flaubertian sense—that, recognizing worlds without love, seeks to explore ways of transforming them or coming to terms with them. Here images of ice and snow give way at the beginning to the daisy fields of childhood. This is the sharpening contrast to the close of 'The Snowman', the poem immediately preceding 'Images of Angels' in the inclusive volume of 1967. Here are the concluding lines of 'The Snowman':

And as far as I could see the snow was scarred
only with angels' wing marks or the feet of birds
like twigs broken upon the snow or shards

discarded. And I could hear no sound
as far as I could hear except a round
kind of an echo without end

rung like a hoop below them and above
jarring the air they had no need of
in a landscape without love.

And here is the beginning of 'Images of Angels':

Imagine them as they were first conceived:
part musical instrument and part daisy
in a white manshape.
Imagine a crowd on the Elysian grass
playing ring-around-a-rosy,
mute except for their singing,
their gold smiles
gold sickle moons in the white sky of their faces.
Sex, neither male nor female,
name and race, in each case, simply angel.

This gives us the traditional almost Sunday-school picturecard of the Angel, innocent, whimsical, happy, but it is done with the wit and knowledge of the mature and critical grown-up poet. The angels are white, and gold, and holy; but they are to be pitied—they were made (by Whom?) 'never to be loved or petted, never to be friended'. Almost at once a sinister note intrudes. Somehow the angels are realized now to be 'mixed with the father, fearful and fully / … when the vanishing bed / floats in the darkness … '

In the body of the poem we have three witty and dramatic characterizations—representative figures who might be thought of as imagining angels: the 'little notary', the financier or business man, and 'the anthropologist, with his tidy science'.

For each the Angel is a special symbol. For the little notary—the scene is surely Québec—'given one as a pet', it is his private guilt, and might, if discovered, be his private shame, and he keeps it 'behind the lethal lock / used for his legal documents', guiltily shut up. Reading this today one thinks of the legal and political repression of the Duplessis days before the Quiet Revolution, an allusion impossible to have been in the author's mind when the poem was written in the early fifties. This is an illustration, I think, of the growth into an even wider significance that some poems undergo with time.

The eleven-line stanza devoted to the business man is lighter in tone than the rest and more frankly witty. Could this be the reason it has been omitted from the reprinted version? 'Angels are dropping, angels going up.'

What business man would buy as he buys stock
as many as could cluster on a pin?

But the stanza ends by humanizing the business man by filling his heart with uneasiness and shame as he remembers childhood tying a tinsel angel to his children's Christmas tree, and the poem returns for a moment to the world of such innocent poems as 'Christmas Tree—Market Square'.

For the anthropologist, the Angel is the miraculous transcendence and perhaps the condemnation to futility of all his classifiable observations. Where in the writings of philosophers or poets has the triumph of imagination over reason been more brilliantly and wittingly put than here?

The anthropologist with his tidy science
had he stumbled on one unawares,
found as he finds an arrowhead, an angel—
a what-of-a-thing
as primitive as a daisy,
might with his cold eye have assessed it coolly.
But how, despite his detailed observations,
could he face his learned society and explain?
'Gentlemen, it is thought that they are born
with harps and haloes,
as the unicorn with its horn.
Study discloses them white and gold as daisies …

as they were described, indeed, at the beginning of the poem. This is the tone and language of light verse and intellectual prose, but the poetry rises out of the thought as naturally and inevitably as in Marvell. The union of the homely and the profound is so quietly accomplished that hasty readers may never notice it. Somewhat in this vein the poem ventures other perceptions: 'Perhaps only a dog could accept them wholly / be happy to follow at their heels … " and again, 'Or, take the nudes of Lawrence and impose / a-sexuality upon them; those / could meet with ease these gilded albinos.'

The next and penultimate stanza returns to the child's world and the child's faith of the beginning, where the sphere of consciousness and imagination is reduced to something as small and self-contained as the glass globe of 'Stories of Snow'. This prepares us for the close of the poem—unexpected and very strange: the summer imagery of daisies, sun-dazzle, and lamb-white gives way to the white of cold and snow. The child, 'this innocent' (the poet herself), 'with his almost unicorn' (his imaginary angel, the poem up to this point), 'would let it go … '

and feeling implicated in a lie,
his flesh would grow
cold
and snow
would cover the warm and sunny avenue.

Does this ending repudiate imagination, faith, and the fairytale world of childhood so convincingly recreated not only in this poem but in many others such as the beautiful 'Christmas Eve—Market Square' and the pieces gathered in the last book under the title of one of them, 'The Bands and the Beautiful Children'? I do not think so. These closing lines are an affirmation of sincerity and of an integrity that is moral as well as aesthetic—a look at the worst as the images in so many poems of flowers and sun and summer are an attempt to find the best.

Before attempting an analysis of 'Arras', which I think is the finest, if among the most difficult of the poems, let me jot down a few notes on some in which imagery and symbol are drawn from the sea and from salt or metal. In some the sea is clearly, like sleep, a symbol of the unconscious and, indeed, for the sensitive and perhaps easily hurt spirit of the poet a dark place of refuge. This is the theme of one of the shortest but most explicit, the beautiful and touching 'Element': 'caught and swung on a line under the sun / I am frightened held in the light that people make / and sink in darkness freed and whole again / as fish returned by dream into the stream.' Although the key statement is the line 'I am not wishful in this dream of immersion', the poem ends with the agonizing image of 'gull on fire or fish / silently hurt—its mouth alive with metal'.

Much more objective and therefore free to be more witty, but inevitably less intense, is 'Boy with a Sea Dream'. Here are images of masts of ships, ancient hulls, and keels rusting in the iodine air—a dream of immersion again 'where like a sleep / strange men drown drowsily / spiralling down the sea's steep underlip … ' Once again the sea is a symbol of dream as the cinema of the unconscious, but without any of the jargon of the clinical psychologist. For the critic, who like the poet ought to have a poetry-crammed head, the associations are with the music and imagery of 'Lycidas', 'Full Fathom Five', and the 'Voyages' of Hart Crane.

The end is strange and subtle, a sort of inside-outside reversal, recalling—distantly, of course—some passages in Jay Macpherson and Robert Graves.

… like the perfect schooner which is pushed
through the slim neck to fill a bottle's shape
his dream has filled the cavern of his head
and he, a brimful seascape,
a blue brine,
with undertows and sudden swells
which toll his bells
and watery laws to be obeyed
and strange salt death to die

Images of sterile salt and metallic cold are found in a number of poems that analyse self-love with what can only be described as a kind of cold fury. Among these are 'Isolationist', 'Only Child', 'Foreigner', 'Man with One Small Hand', 'Mineral', and 'This Cold Man'. The last three are particularly impressive for the concentrated angry wit that turns experience into a new universal and instant myth.

A striking quality of many of these poems is the sudden immediacy of perception and emotion.

Look, look, he took me straight
to the snake's eye …

begins 'The Apple'—a magnificent opening, equalled only perhaps by Anne Hébert's awakening in 'La Chambre fermée'—

Qui donc m'a conduite ici?
Il y a certainement quelqu'un
Qui a soufflé sur mes pas …

It is these quick exclamations of bewilderment, horror, or agony that give so much of its intensity to the haunted dream garden of 'Arras'. Here the perfection and purity of the classical Eden have been violated by a strange and somehow sinister intruder:

… a peacock rattling its rattan tail and screaming
has found a point of entry. Through whose eye
did it insinuate in furled disguise …?

The agonizing questions come thick and fast: 'Who am I / or who am I become that walking here /1 am observer, other …?' 'What did they deal me in this pack?' Alice's looking-glass garden has grown menacing and lonely. 'I want a hand to clutch, a heart to crack … the stillness is / infinite. If I should make a break … ' Then the truly terrifying line:

The stillness points a bone at me.

And now the prisoned dreamer breaks under the reiteration of the self-imposed questioning:

This fearful magnificence gives way to a simple homely cry, which in its context has a grandeur beyond the reach of rhetoric—'Does no one care?'

This poem alone would be sufficient to place P. K. Page among the fine poets of this century, and it is good to know that, while it is perhaps the high point of her achievement, it is also the high point of a school of symbolist Canadian poets among whom I would name Anne Wilkinson, Anne Hébert, Jay Macpherson, Daryl Hine, and Gwen MacEwen.

These are the poets in Canada who write not for the immediate moment alone. They are the poets who will live when the urbanized hitch-hiking social realists or the lungborn egoists of instant experience have been long forgotten.

Postscript

That great man, Frank Underhill, once sent me a collection of his political essays, not ironically but too modestly inscribed, as to a poet, 'these prosaic offerings'. When I read the poems of P. K. Page and her equally profound notes on poetry, painting, and magic I am conscious of how prosaic this offering is. My hope, however, is that it may lead other critics to write of her work with their own perceptions.