by Glen Sorestad
Poets are and have always been concerned about their own country’s history, especially about the specific places where they live or have lived. Our Canadian poetry canon is filled with multitudinous examples, from the very early pre-Confederation poets to our contemporary poets, of poems responding to historical events. The familiar dictum that those who do not understand their history are doomed to repeat it may be one of the reasons; or perhaps the notion that a people who do not know their own history are a spiritually impoverished nation is another. But poets are always curious about the world around them and are naturally drawn to the history that surrounds them and imbues the places they inhabit.
* Students can be encouraged to search for poetry that has been written about events that have occurred in the past in their home areas, or in their province. Much poetry, for example, has been written about Louis Riel and both the Red River Rebellion and the Northwest Rebellion; or about the Expulsion of the Acadians, or the building and completion of the trans-continental railroad.
*Poetry about our history offers an excellent opportunity to focus on the local and the regional, bringing it closer to home for students. It also creates an awareness that what happens and has happened in their part of the country is very much fodder for poets. It also provides an opportunity for encouraging students to write their own poems about events of the past in their home areas.
Canadian poetry is amazingly rich in poems that explore our history and these poems often help us both appreciate the past, the errors and the tragedies, along with the heroism and the hardships. Many of these poems cause us to challenge our current perceptions and to re-think our commonly held historical beliefs and even to question some of the “facts.” Just to cite a couple of examples, Joy Kogawa’s poems and prose about the evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the West Coast to inland detention camps during the Second World War helps us to understand the injustices that led to Canada’s public apology to those people affected. In a similar vein, poems by poets like Louise Halfe that deal with the abuse suffered by First Nations children in many residential schools have helped raise an awareness that led to the federal government’s recent apology in Parliament to those who had been abused.
The many poems that have been written about the public hanging of Louis Riel in 1885 have certainly been instrumental in changing our perceptions about the Metis leader and in questioning the justice of his trial and subsequent execution. In other words, sometimes poets through their poems about historical events can help us see our history in a different light and sometimes to help us discover truths that have lain hidden in the past.
Similarly, poems which portray for us the extreme hardships and the tremendous courage of our early explorers, our first settlers, the waves of immigrants who left their homelands to make a new life in Canada also help us to appreciate our forbears and the sacrifices they made to create the life that most contemporary Canadians are fortunate enough to live.
Interestingly, a Canadian poet serving in the Canadian forces during the First World War during the brutal battle at Ypres penned what has become one of the most famous and most often recited poems about war in the English language. It is Colonel John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”. Unfortunately the author did not live long enough to know that the lines he wrote would have such a profound impact on so many people and, in fact, the poem itself very nearly did not survive the battle either – a story in itself. Most students will have some familiarity with this poem, but few will have much understanding of the circumstances and motivation McCrae had for the writing of this poem – an excellent possibility for students to research what prompted this poem, so that they might better understand its enduring appeal and its place in our literature.
* What better way to observe Remembrance Day than to ensure that students are familiar with John McCrae and his famous poem, as well as the fascinating story behind the poem itself. The poem also provides an opportunity to explore other poems that have come out of the experience of war.
Apart from individual poems written about historic events and sites, there are many books of Canadian poetry that deal with a single event or historical time.
Here are a few examples:
* Any of these poetry volumes may have an appeal or interest, because of its historical subject or time frame for some students, or it may dovetail with what they are or have been studying in their Social Studies or History class.
*spelling variations
The Beothuks were a First Nations people who inhabited Newfoundland at the time of the first European arrivals in North America. They were known for their practice of using red ochre to paint themselves and are the probable origin of the term Red Indian that originated and was used in Europe. Although it is thought the initial encounters between Europeans and Beothuks were peaceful, this appeared to change with increasing contact and developed into open hostility. The newcomers eventually were determined to get rid of the original inhabitants and an unofficial policy of outright cultural genocide was the result.
By 1800 there were only a handful of the Beothuk people left. They had been harried and driven to extinction by the encroachment of a continuous succession of European fishers and settlers. Shanadithit, a young woman, was the last known member of the Beothuk people and she died in St. John’s in 1829.
The extermination of an entire population, a distinct culture, is one of the sorry chapters of our history and at least two poets have tried to capture a sense of this tragedy in separate poems: Al Pittman in his poem “Shanadithit” and Sid Stephen in his poem “She Dies in St. John’s”(from Beothuck Poems). In each instance, the poets imagine this Beothuk figure from more than 200 years before, the very last of her people, and the poems draw us in, closer to history than we can imagine.
Sid Stephen imagines Shanadithit dying in the home of John Cormack in St. John’s, bringing the sad tale of her people to an end.
Her body stiffens
stripped of life
as a tree is stripped by fire,
creating the draught
in which it is consumed
by the very truth
of its burning.
The fog is stained red
as the sun rises through it,
is burned off, disappears
the arc of her people
ends
in a small stone house
above the harbour. * Notice the lovely image of the fog being painted red by the rising sun, an allusion to the red ochre favoured by the Beothuks – as if Nature was in recognition of the significance of Shanadithit’s death. Also, the fine image of an arc to refer to the passing of the last of the Beothuks and the sad irony of her death occurring in “a small stone house/above the harbour”.
Al Pittman’s much longer poem “Shanadithit” is more personal in tone, imagining and conversing with Shanadithit as if she might have been of his own age and time, a part of his immediate past; while at the same time ensuring that we as readers realize that she is history – both the poet’s and our own:
You didn’t know
that you’d end up in my grade seven history book
did you? Pittman’s poem is in one sense an elegy for Shanadithit and in another sense an elegy for her people, for a past that can never be recaptured, for wrongs that can never be redressed. Shanadithit was buried in St. John’s, but her grave was inadvertently lost to later development as the city grew, so that even the grave of the last of the Beothuks disappeared from history, an irony that is not lost on either poet, but especially on Pittman in “Shanadithit”:
The workman who destroyed your grave
to build his portion of road
did not know what he was doing, did
not know that I would have knelt
in awe at that spot loving you
and condemning your death all in one prayer.
He did not know he ruined forever
my one chance to come close to you.
And therefore what is he guilty of
but depriving me of one singular
and pitiful indulgence? One moment
in my history when I could have knelt
over your fleshless remains and said
“Shanadithit, I love you.” What did he
do but save you the agony of one more lie?
Lie easy in your uneasy peace girl
and do not, do not, forgive those
who trespass against you.* Both of these poems should be read in their entirety by students, both orally and silently, so that students can observe how each poem is structured. Teacher and class should engage in active discussion to compare and contrast the way Shanadithit is portrayed by each poet. Is each poem a sympathetic portrayal? How realistic does the portrayal seem? How does each poet seem to feel about Shanadithit, two centuries removed from their subject? How do they feel about the extermination of the Beothuk people? How do we know this? Look for words and expressions that reveal the poet’s feelings towards the subject.
* The teacher and class should engage in some research into the Beothuk people and their disappearance. As a result of this research, the information can be used in encouraging written work.
* Imagine a poem Shandithit might have written when she realized she was the last of her people; or perhaps as she neared her last days and knew that with her death came also the death of a whole culture. Or try to write a poem about Shanadithit from another perspective – from that of John Cormack with whom she lived, or that of one of her relatives who died before her. Or perhaps the construction worker who unknowingly destroyed her grave forever.
* What have these two poets added to our knowledge and understanding of our own history? Do you think they set out to teach us something by choosing an historical subject? Why do you think they wrote these poems?
Glen Sorestad, a League Life member and former high school English teacher, is a much published poet with eighteen books of poetry. He was the first Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan, the first provincially-appointed poet laureate.