One Man's Access to Prophecy: the Sonnet Series of Frank Oliver Call

by R. Alex Kizuk

In an article recently published in Canadian Literature, Avrum Malus, Diane Allard and Maria Van Sundert have shown how the poetry of Frank Oliver Call (1878-1956) belongs to a strong poetic tradition in the Eastern Townships.¹ This article is one instance of a growing interest in Canadian writing of the early part of the century. The authors have supplied an invaluable supplement to Canadian literary history, which has for too long regarded poets like Call as unacceptable subjects for study and analysis. Yet an old bias persists in this study. Attention has been focused on the modernism and free verse of Call's Acanthus and Wild Grape (1920) at the expense of disregarding his true achievement in Blue Homespun (1925), a book of sonnets and a final statement of Call's poetic views. In this essay I discuss the gradual emergence of a prophetic voice in Acanthus, his earlier verse, and the allegorical sonnet series of Blue Homespun.

Call defended the "vers librists" in his "Foreword" to Acanthus, setting off his "blast", like Arthur Stringer before him in Open Water (1914), with military metaphors. Stringer's view of modernism promised a technical means of expressing strong private emotion within a post­Symbolist context. Call's interest was quite different in that he saw modernism as a way of reconciling feeling and reason, "it seems to me", he writes, "that it matters little in what form a poem is cast so long as the form suits the subject, and does not hinder the freedom of the poet's thought and emotion".² The manifesto puts forward an idea of poetic form as a manifest "union of thought, emotion and beauty". This unity, however, is a reflection of "strength" in poetry, a strength of poetic conception that transcends aesthetic questions because for Call any free expression of mind and heart united will be beautiful. Call is more interested in freedom of expression than in the techniques of free verse, in effect dismissing all questions of conservatism and technical experiment as subordinate to the quest for a strong poetry. This quest determines the structure of Acanthus and Wild Grape, a balanced two-part book of conventional lyrics and poems in free verse.

The purpose of this arrangement was probably not as Munro Beattie has said, to "demonstrate the superiority of free verse."³ Call pursues the same unities of concept and feeling in both parts of the book. A pattern of thematic parallels emerges which apparently demonstrate the notion that poetry's ability to communicate "visions" has little or nothing to do with form and technique. Hence, in the two title poems "Acanthus" and "Wild Grape", content is sublimely unaffected by form.⁴ "Acanthus" is a sonnet calling attention to itself as a sonnet; the other flows in and out of a basic iambic in varying line-lengths. Both announce that beauty is eternal. Like an apple halved, the parallelism throughout the book draws attention to what Call has to say rather than how he says it.

The conventional "Acanthus" section reprints almost half of Call's first book, In a Belgian Garden. It begins with a set of fourteen sonnets. The experimentally informal "Wild Grape" section begins with a set of five poems on subjects such as eternal beauty and divine immanence, then continues with another set of poems on Japanese, Swiss and Venetian scenes. The conventional verse closes with "The Answer", a slight lyric despite its formidable title in which the speaker asks himself why he chooses to listen to the song "Of pine-boughs singing all day long". He is drawn to the "silver sound" of a spring and fantastic images of "Pearl ships upon a sapphire sea" that are forming in cloud-shapes. He then tells us that these figures comprise a language unknown to him. He imagines that "Ten thousand poets", too, have failed to perceive the secrets of this vision. In "Prayer", the closing poem of the "Wild Grape" section, a "wind-bell" sounds in the "gateway of an ancient temple" and a pool reflects sunrise and sunset within the temple grounds. The bell draws "the people" to prayer with "music echoing in their ears", and a vision of the pool remains with them when they leave, "rose and gold and crimson in their eyes". These are people who have never heard the "music of the wind" and who never lift their eyes from "gray dusty streets" to appreciate such colour. Both "The Answer" and "The Prayer" point out that there are truths in open landscapes and closed temple grounds alike which neither poets nor ordinary people have adequately perceived. The book ends with an invocation to the Maker of music and beauty to allow him the privilege of emulating the bell and the pool, that is, to be able to direct his reader toward the thresholds of visionary truth.⁵ The bell or angelus will become a major symbol in Blue Homespun.

The inclusion in Acanthus of earlier poems placed at the beginning and the call for a prophet's vision at the end suggest that the poet is not satisfied with his experiment. The book does, however, progress from apprentice-pieces to maturer verse. "Swiss Sketches", "Visions", "Japanese Prints" and other poems in the back of the book re-envision place and history less rhetorically and more personally than the conventional "To a Modern Poet" and the free verse "The Foundry", earlier in the book. Yet despite this progress, Call is frustrated in his desire to speak freely from a reconciliation of mind and heart. The dialectic that his parallelism implies itself becomes a hindrance to poetic `freedom' and `strength', as though the poems were pointing to one another saying, `That's not exactly what I meant either'. The poems that precede Call's invocation of the prophetic in "The Prayer", moreover, "Cups of Jade" and "The Loon's Cry", plainly and personally expresses the discovery that vision will relegate language and poetry to silence once it has been attained. Thus, a sense of the poet's frustrated search for a language in which to express his vision overrides the neat balancing act in Acanthus.

In the closing poems, Call successfully purges his language of the aesthete cliches in which most of the book is cast because he chooses to direct his attention to the landscapes and idiom of his own locality. Necessary for a plainer language, this move also helps to clarify the logical impasse into which the book has led him. Call recognizes that vision must be a third term arising from his either/or dialectic between convention and experiment. This discovery existentially complicates the lovers' predica­ment in "Cups of Jade,"

Since Call finds a way out of this predicament in his next book, Blue Homespun, Acanthus may be seen to represent only the mid-point of his quest.

In a Belgian Garden, published in London in 1917, is the starting­point of Call's quest for a poetic medium through which to perceive reality as a prophet who speaks a truth unfettered by language. This is very much a war-book at times echoing the manner of John McCrae, and the first Canadian item to be included in the English "Little Books of Georgian Verse" series. The London publishers hoped to sell Belgian Garden by stressing Call's love for the "motherland" and introducing him as a "disciple of the cult of the open road . . . camping and canoeing". In one of the landscape poems, "The Chambly Rapids", Call speaks of white-water canoeing in the Eastern Townships as an experience of demonic, "hell-born light", a "fitful fire, pale and blue/ That burned my spirit through". The trite rhymes and shop-worn imagery of the poem, however, overwhelm this sense of an underlying horror. The book is weakest in its uncritical adoption of aesthete stereotypes. "The Vision", however, contrasts this precious imagery with a plain declaration of love that makes the jewelled vision dim in comparison.⁷

The most arresting poems record Call's personal response to the destruction wreaked on Europe's cities by the First World War. In two of these, "The Madonna" and "The Lace-Maker of Bruges", Call communi­cates his sympathy for the suffering he sees through the eyes of an old woman cast adrift in "the midst of the surging crowd", defeated by modernity and war. These empathic verses contrast with others such as "An Idol in a Shop Window", which focuses on the detachment of a Buddha who, with "eyes half closed in a mystic's dream/ Of his poppy-land of long ago", remembers "the kneeling throng he used to know" and watches the crowds passing in the street only to wrap himself once more "in his mystic shroud."⁸  

The aloneness of "Cups of Jade" perhaps has its inception in this conflict between compassion and detachment. Call empathizes with the pain of Europe in 1917, but he is also filled with a visiting Canadian's sense of separateness as well as the remembrance of walking tours on the continent as a student at Marburg and Paris a few years before war broke out.⁹ This experience of mingled pain and pleasure leads to a paradox in the Belgian Garden verses, which are as internally divided as Acanthus is outwardly. In "The Mystic", for instance, his beatific subject perceives life as a "dim, weird pageant passing by". The speaker points out that "the pageant is real, himself the dream", yet the mystic is undecided whether the reality he perceives is a dream, or the dream reality.¹⁰ This preoccupation with the nature of subjective perception appears again in "The Indifferent Ones", "The Obelisk" and "The Golden Bowl". In short, Call's experience of shattered Europe struck a divisive cord, which In a Belgian Garden attempts to heal. His final and most coherent attempt to reconcile mind and heart is Blue Homespun.  

"Cups of Jade" records Call's confrontation with the silence of an inexpressible vision. In the context of his oeuvre, the poem records Call's decision to speak out plainly as "the voice of his people" and thereby abandon earlier notions of the poet as an artificer of delicate beauty. Moreover, the poem occupies a point in his quest at which Call discovered that divination and soothsaying can be mutually exclusive modes of visionary poetry. The Romantic connection between poetry and divination is perhaps Coleridge's "armed vision" in which the `I Am' is perception's guide. But for Call poetry became a matter of "telling it like it is", a struggle to tell the truth about oneself and one's place. This struggle begins in early poems like "The Chambly Rapids", where the speaker is stung by terror when he beholds the white water. The whole of Belgian Garden attempts to reconcile conflicting emotions brought on by a divided perception of war's horrors, but the verses are conceived essentially as objects of beauty in which a beatific vision has revealed an archetypal pattern that is detached from reality. As such, the book records visionary experience and privileges artifice. Acanthus demonstrates a will to perceive another reality beyond the contraries and dilemmas that confront a modern poet. Call hoped to actualize his vision by bracketing it between two contrasting types of poetic language, but this led to an intellectual cul-de-sac. In Blue Homespun, Call chooses to write a poetry that will no longer merely record his divinations, but will communicate his vision and that vision's application to present reality. Consequently, he retains the plain language and local setting of the poems in the close of Acanthus. The later poems are now clearly prophetic utterances that direct present pain toward the bliss of an imminent renewal. There is always an unstated "Hear ye" appended to the address.  

Wherever an identifiable human voice exists in poetry there is at least the image of a real person behind that voice. In Blue Homespun the image is that of a prophet, but not a Victorian or Edwardian poet-prophet —rather a modern version of the Old Testament type. The Hebrew word for "prophet," ndbd, means "to bubble forth" or "to utter". In the time of Samuel other words, ro'eh and hozeh, came into use in the sense of a "seer". The "prophet" proclaims the word of God; the "seer" beholds it in silence. The ndbi predicts, warns, conveys religious instruction, interprets current events, promotes enterprises beneficial to the people, blesses and reveals hidden truths such as the imminence of judgement and the evil of the days. Like the pronouncements of an Old Testament ndbi, Call's Blue Homespun presupposes an attitude toward the status quo in which it is assumed that "the people" have wandered from the correct path, and that their perception of reality is impaired.

"A Sonnet Series of French Canada", the first of the three sustained sonnet series in Blue Homespun, impressed Lorne Pierce with the simplicity and sincerity of Call's portrayal of "habitant life". Lionel Stevenson commented favourably on the simplicity of these word-pictures, "reminiscent of Millet's paintings". The Canadian Literature article points out that Call was "not a full-fledged modernist" and suggests that he is "at his best, writing sonnets."¹¹ These remarks require some further elaboration regarding Call's representation of life as it is lived in a particular locality, Millet, and the sonnet as his preferred form.

In the close of Acanthus Call discovered a plainer, more personal use of language, and many of his poems are meditations on specific places. His third book combines these elements in a verse that seems to speak personally of communion and community despite the sonnet's formality. Stevenson's perceptive remark suggests that this sincerely local voice might also be construed as a "voice of the people". Call's figures of simple people in rural landscapes do recall Millet's paintings of winnowers, sowers, harvesters, potato planters and so forth. One could say that Call's romanticism borders on socialism, as does Millet's. In Millet the everyday lives of simple people are what makes a landscape sublime. Similarly, Call's word-pictures are concerned with a reconciliation of vision and locality, which bubbles forth in companionable praise for its "true-to-life" inhabitants. Finally, Call is not "at his best writing sonnets" but rather in what he attempted with the sonnet series. In terms of his poetic, one form is as good as another, but the sonnet's formal yolking of observation and commentary suited his conception of poetic unity as heart and mind united. More importantly, the sonnet series as a group of interlinked but discontinuous moments of grace and freedom was particularly useful to him in its capacity for a wholeness greater than its parts. Blue Homespun is in fact a series of three sonnet series, which presents his reader with a truth founded upon the plain piety and way of life of the francophone farming communities around Lennoxville, Quebec. Call looks for and finds a timeless wisdom enduring in this locality despite the incoherence of rapidly changing times. For Call this homespun vision transcends questions of literary taste, whether that be Romantic, Symbolist, aesthete, or modernist, and the form that he believes least impedes its free and prophetic communication is the allegorical and discontinuous sonnet series.  

In the book's first section, a sonnet series of French Canada, Call begins by unearthing truths he believes modern man can live by, and from which man has strayed. In "The Oven" the mother of a family is presented from two points of view, one mundane and the other archetypal,  

This is a woman at peace with herself and the place to which she belongs (barefoot in the kitchen, alas). At the same time, however, she is "the priestess of an ancient shrine,/ Keeping alight the sacrificial spark/ That made old altars through the ages shine". The poem superimposes her "dull contentment" upon a "sacred oil" that "burns and glows through storm and sun and dark". It is this `layering' of vision and perception with which Call is primarily concerned. The sonnet makes no claims beyond the simple allegory that it frames and highlights. Out of context it is a small thing, recording a small moment. As part of a series, however, the poem directs the reader's attention and focuses it upon another level of meaning flowing beneath the surface. The sonnets are not static objects or `captured' moments of observation but a series of wells sunk in the flow of time and on-going life.  

"Chansons" and "The Raconteur" point out that any art that excerpts itself from daily life will be limited in its capacity to speak the truth. When the habitants sing or tell stories, they enjoy it fully, then go to bed in silence. Narrative and song are pleasant but no more lasting than a good meal. In the Belgian Garden verses, Call had seen an image of unnamable horror in the Chambly rapids. Here, in "Chambly", the rapids are a monotone "dull rune/ Of ancient days" — "in tune/ With beating steel-blue wings of dragon-flies" and the old lullabies of the region. This image encapsulates Call's conception of an art that reverberates point for point with its audience and the environment in which communication takes place. Now, the rapids, the mother's oven, and art's tinkling cymbals are all harmonic tones in the "mystery" of a community at one with itself and its environment.¹³  

The people of this locality are privy to an enduring knowledge, and Call has learned from their example not to try to nail it down. He allows the locality to speak for him and through him. Vision is a hidden treasure that the people and their poet share, and silence is the cost of knowing such secrets. Hence it is not language but the landscape and the customs of the people that have meaningful speech, as we see in "An Old Habitant":