Wilderness Gothic (Criticism)

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• The Bukowski/Purdy Letters, 1964 – 1974: A Decade of Dialogue (1983) is a volume of correspondence between the two poets.
• Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952 – 1983 (1994) is a collection by Milton Acorn, a fellow “working class” Canadian poet who was admired by and often compared to Purdy.
• Poems for All the Annettes (1962) is Al Purdy’s first critically acclaimed collection of poetry.
• Reaching for the Beaufort Sea: An Autobiography (1994) by Al Purdy is a comprehensive look into the poet’s life and work. It is edited by Alex Widen.

the fall of Icarus. Icarus is a mythical Greek figure who died while trying to escape from imprisonment. He had wings attached to his body with wax; however, he flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. Despite Icarus’ mistake, his legend became a symbol for human aspiration. By making a reference to the Durer landscape, Purdy suggests a comparison between the workingman in the poem and the myth of Icarus. At first glance, the workingman’s dedications might seem naive and foolish; however, Purdy seems to be saying that, like Icarus, the workingman should be admired for his ambition, even if it might result in tragedy.

The poem also makes references to Victorian pioneers and medieval ancestors and how they faced great adversity in their times. Hard work was a way of life back then and it was commonplace to dedicate time and energy to God. Similarly, Purdy was a self-educated man who worked hard to support himself, a sacrifice he made for his creative ambition. Perhaps unlike some of his contemporaries who were university educated, Purdy understood the value in a hard day’s work and how it gave him not only the freedom to engage in creative pursuits but a wealth of ideas to use in his poetry. Purdy clearly admires and relates to the workingman in his poem, while also commenting on a society that undervalues the meaning of hard work.

At the end of “Wilderness Gothic,” Purdy makes a statement that hints at his own fear of defeat. There is an anticipation of something tragic in the last few lines. By announcing that “something is about to happen,” Purdy exposes the anxiety that accompanies any risk — that of fear of failure. Purdy understood failure very well. In his early years as a poet, he received negative criticism about his work, causing him to doubt his own abilities. However, Purdy never stopped writing, an ambition that mirrors the man in the poem who will keep climbing his way up the spire until “there’s nothing left to nail on.”

The last line of the poem is perhaps the most shocking and most revealing in the whole piece. It also proves to be a bit of a conundrum. By saying “perhaps he will fall,” it seems that Purdy is almost willing the tragedy to occur. However, it begs the question, why would Purdy wish for the man he admires to meet his demise? One interpretation is that he is envious of the man’s dedication and wishes him to fall and be punished for his naivete. On a second reading, though, the line takes on another meaning. When Purdy says, “perhaps he will fall,” he seems to be acknowledging one of life’s ironies — that to succeed at anything great, one must be prepared to fail. Considering the fate of Icarus, it was his failure that was captured in legend. Certainly, falling or failing is the risk one takes to achieve such grand ambitions; but, for Purdy, that fate is far more noble than never having taken the risk at all. Purdy’s last line then serves to confirm the man’s courage, because if there were no risk, the man would never have the opportunity to be a hero. On another level, Purdy is also serving to confirm his own life’s work as if to say, because he risked so much himself for the sake of his craft, he too has lived a courageous life, and he too may one day become a legend and, more importantly, a part of Canadian literary history.

Source: Michele Drohan, Critical Essay on “Wilderness Gothic,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Alice Van Wart

Van Wart is an editor who has a Ph.D. in Canadian literature. In the following essay, she offers a close reading of the poem to show Purdy’s development of theme and technique.

In the sixties, Canada experienced a cultural renaissance in its poetry, a phenomenon that started in the fifties. One reason for the rising popularity of poetry was coffeehouse poetry readings that made it possible for a poet to become a public figure and persona. Two flamboyant and well-known Canadian “coffeehouse” poets were Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton. A third was Al Purdy. Purdy was one of a number of poets, along with Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and Patrick Lane, whose roots lay in Canada’s working class. These poets turned away from the formal poems favored at the time and wrote an informal poetry based on narrative and anecdote written in a colloquial voice. Their interests were in the rediscovery of their personal history and in bringing to Canadian poetry a sense of its own past.

A prolific poet, who won numerous awards, Purdy began writing poetry in his teens, paying to have his first book published. Though he did not continue his formal education beyond grade ten, Purdy read voraciously and worked diligently at his craft. In his introduction to The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, speaking of Purdy’s long, self-taught apprenticeship, observed that Purdy was one of “the slowest developers in the history of poetry.”

Purdy also traveled widely and worked at various casual and manual jobs, often using these experiences for his subject matter. His poetry moved towards an exploration of indigenous myth. He mythologized the landscape of the southeastern end of Lake Ontario, the area where he was born and lived. Human behavior and destiny fascinated Purdy. His unique voice used humor and compassion as it blended the cadences of real speech with elegiac form. Because of his colloquial language, the informality of his tone, and his tendency towards using a long line, Purdy’s poems are immediately accessible though they convey complex ideas that express universal values.

“Wilderness Gothic” is typical of Purdy’s poetry both in subject and technique. Though located in the particular, the poem reflects complex ideas. The human figure in the poem, the workman re-sheathing the church spire, is in the poet’s eyes both literally a tiny dot in the sky and metaphorically a tiny dot at the intersection of historical time. As the poet reflects on what he sees, the changing nature of his perceptions constitutes a complex meditation that moves beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the physical to the metaphysical and encompasses the historical. It expresses the idea of life as a continuing process where each new age brings in new ideas and casts off the old.

The poem works through three stanzas of free verse. Each stanza expresses the poet’s changing

perspective as he watches a workman contending with the physical problems of “replacing [the] rotten timber” of the church’s spire “with pine thews” while being suspended in the sky. In the second stanza, the poet’s perceptions broaden as he sees the workman with the framework of the countryside. In the third stanza, the poet sees the scene as a tableau, equating the scene before his eyes with a painter’s landscape.

The oxymoron in the poem’s title points to poets’ strategy of juxtaposing the abstract and the concrete and the past and the present. The wilderness, a land in the new world, is thought of as uninhabited, uncultivated, and uncivilized. Gothic is a term that describes a style of highly evolved and excessively ornate architecture popular in Western Europe from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Yoking these terms highlights Purdy’s intention of showing the abstract through the concrete, while collapsing the past and the present.

Purdy’s poem begins in the particular locale of Roblin Lake with a casual observation. The poet notices across the lake “two shores away / they are sheathing the church spire / with new metal.” From the distance, it appears to the poet that the person doing the work “hangs in the sky / . . . from a piece of rope.” Both the line’s syntax and the break between lines three and four work to isolate the image of the man hanging in the sky, a startling image to the poet and reader, before the poet realizes the worker is suspended by a rope “hammering and fitting God’s belly-scratcher.” The playful image of the church’s spire as God’s belly-scratcher returns the poet to the workman “working his way up along the spire / until there’s nothing left to nail on.”

As the poet casually observes the image before him, he begins to think about the nature of the person working on the spire. He speculates on what the worker is thinking as he works in “the blue cave of the sky.” The poet wonders if the worker’s religious faith “reaches beyond” the top of the spire, or if he “touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob.” The allusion to Jacob suggests the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32: 24-29), and unites the concrete, temporal, and physical world of “rotten timber” and “pine thews” to the metaphysical world of abstract speculation concerned with the nature of faith. The last five lines of the stanza reinforce the connection between the concrete and the abstract as the worker “pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky,” and contends “heroically with difficult problems of / gravity, sky navigation and mythopoeia.” Mythopoeia in this sense refers to the mythology associated with religious thought. In the last line of the first stanza, however, the poet’s tone shifts away from the seriousness of his reflections to ironic humor. The poet wonders if the worker has volunteered his time and labor, donating it “to God.” In this case, the job is non-union and has no “sick benefits.” Considering the danger of his job, the poet implies he may very well need them.

In the second stanza, the poet sees the scene of the man hanging beside the spire in the distance within the framework of the countryside. The sense of the poet’s presence and his watching eyes fade as the focus in the stanza turns outward to the impersonal natural world where fields “are yellowing into harvest” and “nestling and fingerling are sky and water borne.” The images of the mature birds and fish suggest summer’s end and approaching autumn. The symbolic association of fall with death is explicit in the colorful image of death “yodelling quiet in green woodlots.” In the last two lines of the stanza, death becomes literal when “the bodies of three young birds [that] have disappeared” are found “in the sub-surface of the new county highway.” The death of the birds suggests the inherent dangers in the “new county highway.”

By the end of the second stanza, the poet has painted with words a picture of a church in a country landscape where a man is repairing a church spire. In the third stanza, the poet compares the picture in front of him to a Durer landscape. Yet, he is aware that the picture in front of him “is incomplete” and understands that the “part left out / . . . might alter the whole Durer landscape.” The allusion to this particular painter is central to the meaning of “Wilderness Gothic.” Albrecht Durer, considered the greatest artist of the northern Renascence, brought the development of Gothic art in northern Europe to its pinnacle. At the same time, he radically altered the Gothic style of earlier German art by bringing to it the new styles of the Italian Renaissance. Durer’s art represents a period of intense change when new learning and beliefs and new styles of art were changing the world from medieval to modern.

Behind Durer’s new style, however, exist the unseen eyes of his “gothic ancestors” who “peer from medieval sky.” The gothic ancestors not only represent the traditions that came before but also the lives of the people. In the same way, the poet sees beyond the “dour faces trapped in photograph albums.” Like the gothic ancestors, the poet sees peering from behind Durer’s paintings, he sees the dour faces in the photographs “escaping / to clop down iron roads with matched greys: / work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh.” The enjambment of lines twenty four and twenty five places the emphasis on the word “escaping,” and brings back to the trapped faces a sense of their lives. The photographs could be those of his own Victorian ancestors. Whoever they are, the poet sees what the still images cannot show: “what keeps moving and changing and flashing / beyond and past the long frozen Victorian day.” The progressive verbs suggest the nature of life in all its flux and change and work in direct contrast to the words “trapped” and “frozen.” What paintings and photographs cannot capture is life with its constant flux and change. The next two lines shift to a series of rhetorical questions that evoke through the poet’s use of image something of “the long frozen Victorian day.”

The Victorian era, defined by repressive attitudes about sex and matters of the body taught by a grim Presbyterianism, believed in “fire and brimstone” as the consequence of sin. Natural aberrations like the birth of a “two headed cow” or “a sharp female agony” (a miscarriage or natural abortion) would have been seen as signs of sin in an age going wrong. The images evoke an ominous sense of impending disaster often associated with events in a transitional age. The poet clarifies the association of the images with a transitional time when he calls it “an age and a faith moving into transition.” The following lines list a series of minor domestic occurrences. Dinner is cold and the “new-baked bread a failure.” Outside the “deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant” while the eggs are “double yolked and the house creaks a little.” He concludes with the apocalyptic suggestion that “Something is about to happen.”

The shift to the present tense in line thirty one, however, indicates a return to the present time of 1968 when the poem was written. The age and faith that moves into transition refers not only to the transition of the previous time but also to the sixties, a time of radical ideals and changing values. There is a corresponding shift in tone in these lines as the poet’s thoughts turn back to the present, to the double yoked egg he has just cracked and the creaking of the house, and to the ominous sense of something about to happen. The shift in tone accompanies the change in the choice of images. A doubled yoked egg is less ominous than a two headed calf, and the failure of baked bread and a cold dinner could not seriously be seen as signs of troubled times. The serious nature of the poet’s reflections has turned into playful self-mockery. His seemingly ominous prediction that “something is about to happen” is followed by the ironically portentousness of the “leaves are still.” The image deflates the poet’s high seriousness as he returns to “a man hammering in the sky” two shores away. The poem turns back to the beginning and the specific moment where “something is about to happen.” The wry humor that ended the first stanza concludes the poem with the poet’s short and cryptic conclusion that “perhaps he will fall.” The line is intentionally bathetic as apocalyptic imaginings are brought back to the moment and the physical reality of the danger of the man’s work.

In “Wilderness Gothic,” Al Purdy creates seamless shifts in perspectives and voice to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, to collapse past and present, and to bring together the near and the far, the here. The poem expresses a process that shows the universal in the concrete particulars of place and event.

Source: Alice Van Wart, Critical Essay on “Wilderness Gothic,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

S. K. Robisch

Robisch teaches ecological and American literature at Purdue University. In the following essay, he considers Al Purdy’s poem as not only a regional and Canadian poem but as a North American poem.

Al Purdy spent several years and five books of poetry on finding his subject matter, and when he found it, he achieved great success. “Wilderness Gothic” may be the poem that best demonstrates the subject matter he found. His early work followed strict formal conventions; much of it was derivative and unoriginal, but it gave him an education in poetry.

He did not attend a university, and so he learned poetry by reading, by examining, by meeting other poets, and, finally, by moving to a place that inspired a great change in his language. He is a poet of the school of hard knocks. It is important to know this when reading “Wilderness Gothic,” because his strength as a writer and the fame he gained have often been attributed to his strong ties to his region and his nation. One important trait of this particular poem, however, is that it also demonstrates Purdy’s sense of history and scope. In an Al Purdy poem, a small place usually points the reader to a much larger and older one.

The poem begins with a reference to Roblin Lake, which is located in Ontario, Canada, where Purdy and his wife bought a house in the mid-1960s. At the lake, Purdy produced a new, more vibrant poetry that looked closely at his surroundings in a rough-hewn voice, a voice like the land around him. The lines in “Wilderness Gothic” are long. The poem is a narrative, full of the life not only of the lake but also of religion and doubt and mythology. The narrator is an observer, as Purdy must have often been, a thinker capable of taking the long view of his subject. This viewpoint is vital to understanding Purdy’s work; the change in his poetry from formalist verse to strong observational free verse changed his very heritage as a poet. “Wilderness Gothic” and other poems from books such as The Cariboo Horses and North of Summer make him a descendant of the poets of place, those who know that who one is is very often shaped by where and when one is living.

When the reader arrives at the lake, he or she sees the church spire standing against the sky “two shores away.” The first stanza of the poem shows a lake and sky, simple in place, epic in scale. The workman on the church steeple is given a religious persona as well — Jacob of the Old Testament, who had a dream about a ladder reaching heaven and who wrestled with an angel. Laced throughout this stanza is Purdy’s characteristic roughness, a mild vulgarity, in the way he calls the spire “God’s belly scratcher”; in his wry reference to there finally being “nothing left to nail on” (that the spire does not, in fact, reach heaven, and if it does, that there’s nothing left there); and in the final line in reference to blue-collar labor with God as the boss. The word mythopeia is included as a problem with which the laborer must contend, along with gravity (which becomes important in the final line), and “sky navigation.” Mythopeia, or mythmaking, is equated with knowing the stars and with the scientific fact of gravity, so that this church at Roblin Lake points the reader to things of great magnitude, things that the narrator considers without too much faith or too much hope. He focuses instead on the worker, which is another common trait of Al Purdy’s poetry.

In the second stanza of the poem, the reader sees a kind of pivot into the voice of the third stanza. The narrator is a skeptic; his view of this job of reaching God is, in some ways, similar to God’s own view of the tower of Babel. In the fields around this church, “death is yodelling,” and “gothic ancestors peer from a medieval sky.” The stanza ends with an odd, augural image of the county highway as a place of disappearance. The accomplishment of human labor, it seems, only provides the reader with another means by which the ancient truths come back again and again. People still have old faiths and repair the church steeple. Where once the wilderness frightened Europeans who came to North America, it has become rural and, in some ways, tamed, but Purdy does not let it remain so. The births and deaths of the natural world go on, but “that picture is incomplete.” It requires a closer look at how natural time and human time, when combined, produce a sometimes dark and difficult history.

The connotations of gothic literature surface in those moments of labor throughout “Wilderness Gothic”; hard work is dangerous work and has associated with it something of the sublime and grotesque. The labor of child birth, for example, appears in the middle of the third stanza in connection to all of the elements of the poem: the mythmaking of fire and brimstone, the hard fact of a mutated calf, the juxtaposition of that unfortunate birth with the “sharp female agony,” implied to be the agony of the “work-sodden wives,” who are dehumanized in the stanza. There are omens in this stanza, indications of something pagan and primordial in the land around Roblin Lake as the laboring man works on the church, and the laboring woman works against a suffering associated with “an age and a faith moving into transition.” The medieval reference gives the reader a sense of many centuries of people working on churches, building towns in the wilderness, and trusting the creaks of their houses, divination, and the legacy of the generations who worked before them. In “Wilderness Gothic,” Purdy tells the reader through his narrative voice that those mythic invocations have not changed, partly because the land is older than humans, and the fields around Roblin Lake, while cultivated, are the place where young birds still disappear, only now, they disappear into highways.

Purdy gained considerable fame in Canada for bringing its poetry a strong voice — not only for writing strong poems but for writing strong loyalist poems. The voice of Roblin Lake is also, in the canon of poetry, the voice of loyalist Ontario and of Canada, which gave Purdy two Governor General’s awards, the highest Canadian literary honor. One of the reasons for this particular acclaim, according to several writers and critics, is that Purdy captured in his work a Canadian sense of vastness, of the land as a presence that prompts Canadians to think in terms of great scale, ancient time, and their position in that place. From British Columbia to Newfoundland, the Canadian sense exhibited in much contemporary writing is different than the United States’ sense of promised land, nature as gift, and revolutionary conquest. In poem after poem of Purdy’s work, this sense is acute, but in “Wilderness Gothic” something even bigger is happening. This poem reaches even beyond the national impulse and invokes a kind of North American consciousness. Margaret Atwood said of Purdy that his voice “wasn’t just focused on personal event. It had a geographic, geological, archaeological scope to it, and it was the way he would connect time and space with the moment.”

Two other art works might give the reader some idea of how Purdy’s poem achieves a North American scope, Marianne Moore’s poem “The Steeple Jack” and Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic.” Moore’s poem depicts the same scene as Purdy’s but in a supposedly quintessential United States venue. Just as Purdy writes in the third stanza of “Wilderness Gothic,” “That picture is incomplete, part left out / that might alter the whole Durer landscape.” Moore writes, “Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.” Albrecht Durer was famous for his detail, for being meticulous at rendering, and so it is with the efficiency of workmanship, such as the repair of the church steeple. The middle of Moore’s poem seems to celebrate the wildness of life around the steeple; she lists flowers and describes the flights of birds. Purdy’s second stanza does a little of the same. He turns to the fields, to the way nature follows it seasonal course and builds its own mythology, but his is a darker mythology.

While in “The Steeple Jack” the reader sees a sense of celebration and hope, “Wilderness Gothic” forcefully shifts its view to the possibility of danger. “It could not be dangerous to be living,” writes Moore in her poem, “in a town like this, of simple people, / who have a steeple-jack placing danger-signs by the church / while he is gilding the solid-pointed star, which on a steeple / stands for hope.” For Purdy, this is not the case. His worker, as seen in the last line, “could fall,” and the long third stanza leading to it prepares the reader for that possibility, a possibility that pervades the industrious efforts of European North Americans, whether in Canada or in the United States.

But even though Moore and Purdy have different approaches to the subject, the material is the same in many ways. Even Moore acknowledges the risk of approaching God when she calls “the pitch of the church / not true,” and says that her steeple jack has a sign on the sidewalk below that reads, “Danger.” Moore was a prominent poet, “The Steeple Jack” one of her best-known poems; and Purdy was an ardent reader, so he may have been under some influence. It is almost certain, however, that he knew of “American Gothic.” The painter Grant Wood was influenced by German and Flemish painting styles but interpreted those styles into his own vision, a rural American one. His painting gets its title partly from the gothic window of the house behind the two famous figures in the foreground. Wood, who knew Iowa, used his sister and his dentist as models for the work. He brought to his painting a subtle irony, a combination of celebrating the American farmer and looking hard at the dourness of the work. This is precisely Purdy’s sense as well.

None of this is said in an attempt to deny the national and regional significance of “Wilderness Gothic.” On the contrary, the reader should see the poem as being so precise, so strongly written, that while it focuses acutely on a small place, it invokes a whole continent as well as the history of its working class, those who are often at physical and, in “Wilderness Gothic,” spiritual risk when doing their jobs.

The sounds of the lines, the choice of words such as “dour,” “clop,” “iron,” “frozen,” and “brim-stone” — all in the space of a few lines — casts a long shadow. The wilderness around the steeple is the living indicator that the reader should not be too confident in his or her assumptions about God. When danger is at hand, “woods shiver and water drops hang pendant.” When the worker might fall, “leaves are still.” Purdy puts no good and evil in the poem. Wilderness is not evil, it is not against people; it is simply what existed before towns and churches and a sense of region and nation. This is another reason that “Wilderness Gothic” has such a wide lens. In the quest for true religion, for the promised land of the New World, the narrator declares that there is failure and potential failure as well as the potential for a fall, and those who build European churches in the North American wilderness ought to take that seriously.

Source: S. K. Robisch, Critical Essay on “Wilderness Gothic,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

“As ‘Wilderness Gothic’ progresses, Purdy is surprised to see a man hanging in the sky by a rope ‘working his way up along the spire until there’s nothing left to nail on.’ Purdy’s first reaction is that of wonder, and he ponders the man’s motivation for working at such a dangerous task. The idea of faith is introduced.”