P. K. Page i s not as well known as a writer of short stories, yet Preview was the balanced or juxtaposed within the subjective frame-work of poem or story. . The thing that I had feared most of a l l had happened at last. .. description much more sympathetically viewed than that in "Summer Resort": And.
Table of contents
- 6. The Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry
- Blackout Poetry
- Blackout Poetry | Scholastic
- Access Check
- Create a List
Return to the page of text and circle only the words you selected for the final poem. Remember to also erase the circles around any words you will not be using. Add an illustration or design to the page of text that connects to your poem. Be very careful not to draw over the circled words you selected for your final poem! Photos courtesy of Stacy Antoville.
As you can see, blackout poetry is a great way to infuse visual art into poetry in order to creatively enhance a poem's meaning. For other inventive ideas on what to do with your too-far-gone-to-be-read material, check out fellow blogger Meghan Everette's " Reusing Books: Endless Purposes for Discards. For another art-paired-with-poetry project, take a look at this Pantoum Parade project printable from Scholastic Printables. For a limited time they are making the printable free for Top Teaching readers so enjoy!
Make diverse books available and visible in your classroom libraries with these book recommendations. Pique your students' interest in the wide world of geography with these ideas to celebrate Geography Awareness Week. Connect your students to the needs of their community with meaningful service learning opportunities. Celebrate National Poetry Month with these resources to help you teach students how to read, write, and share poems. List Name Delete from selected List. Save Create a List. The Teacher Store Cart. Back to the Top Teaching Blog.
Grades 3—5, 6—8, 9— Download the PDF from here.
Share your ideas about this article. John's Most Recent Posts. Use these organizational strategies to help jump start a brand new classroom library. Sharing expressions of gratitude for this season of thanksgiving. The Mexicans, as Lawrence presents them in this tale, illustrate abundantly the resistance of the earthly, fleshy, thing, the "half-created being", against the fuller l i f e that is beyond i t. The Mexicans are "a people incomplete", tortured by the "fathom-less resentment. They are caught in the toils of old lusts and old activities as in the folds of a black serpent".
The imaginative adventure of the tale is the attempt to show how "half-created" men might be helped to awaken the serpent power within themselves, to unite i t with the bird, the eagle-power of the heaven and vision, and thus find true self-hood,9 True self-hood is the desired destination of Page's subjects, but how to 10 escape "the room with, invisible walls"? In "Round Trip" a passenger ". A lifetime lies behind him he has left the tightly frozen rivers of his blood the plateaux of his boredom and the bare buttonholes his pallid eyes had cut.
A faintly overrealistic dream sequence unfolds in the poetic present-ation of the train trip. In such sweet rain his ears and armpits grew flowers and humming birds were part of him— hanging jewels upon lapel and hat. The dream world is more appealing than the parched vision of reality. Too late, the train stops at his Home Town. The deception of a forward drive towards new truth is complete; the traveller's dream betrayed, "Forever, everywhere, for him, the same1.
Like the traveller, "The Permanent Tourists" in another poem by Page are blind to their own realities. They are the I'photograph", devoid of great depths of feeling. The need for a deep drink from the Pirean spring is there, but they are incapable of i t. Yet the poet senses the desire within these people to know and to feel the past. While passive and placid in contrast to the ruined vitality in the ancient columns, these people exhibit a beauty that the poet captures; they are "classic in their anxiety".
Imagery and theme create the tension through the clash of diametrical opposites. Even "The Landlady", a caricature in curiosity, is not entirely unsympathetically presented by Page as a lonely isolated individual with-out a l i f e of her own, living vicariously through the experience of her boarders. She sees a l l and knows a l l , yet can't get outside herself. The craving desire for personal contact is there, but incapacitated. She is another of the "half-created" men of Lawrence's writing, a modific-ation of the dark individuals in Page's poetry and prose, "Snapshot" reveals the empty shell of a person who exists as a "shadow" of her reality - an image of the actual - as Plato described the shadow on the cave wall.
Trapped by a covetous society, the woman is but a token self, existing only in relation to the demands of others, "caught like a bent pin". This selection of poems show Page's perceptive interest in a multitude of types of people. One group of individuals however, to whom she devoted special observation were those girls involved in the same occupation as she herself had once been - the stenographers. Miss Page identified with their plight of isolation.
In "Offices" she writes with the authority of the genuine: Developing in the f i n a l stanza a conceit of g i r l s with birds, P. K, Page emphasizes the harshness of young lives eroded by their uncongenial environment. The following year, , Page published a poem closely related to "Offices", "The Inarticulate", Again, the poet presents her steno-graphers as "misers of words" incapable of communicating their feelings or desires, grown dumb as a result of the restrictive inhibiting nature of their jobs.
This poem vibrates with sound images: People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never shared, no one dared Disturb the sound of silence. The inarticulate office workers are the epitome of self-isolation within a modern social structure. Page shows them as unable to bridge the communication gap between themselves and l i f e around them. Surface calm masks their inner debility for they are lost souls in the lonely crowd.
The culmination of Miss Page's interest in the problems of such a group as these g i r l s can be seen i n her well-known poem "The Steno-graphers" which f i r s t appeared in i n Canadian Forum. This poem contains within i t a l l the divergent aspects of the conflict of opposites involved with the theme of separateness, as well as the basic image patterns that reinforce the opposition, and a more detailed study of this poem w i l l help to reveal these, "The Stenographers" by P. Page is an insightful glimpse of the complete day i n the l i f e of an office typist. The point of view is Page's as sensitive observer.
A peculiar virtue of this poem arises from the intimacy with which the poet invites her readers to share improvisational insights and original constructs. She has to discover things and their uniquitous unexpected connections for herself. Only after that can she point them out as she does in "The Stenographers". This is Page's evolving poetic technique - through intuitive understanding of her subjects, she creates a portrayal of a universal modern dilemma, the inability of a person to shape his own sense of identity, to become aware of his potential for living, to 'crack' the frozen environment of his mind and of his mechanical l i f e routine.
The typists in this poem are shown as leading pathetic existences, almost T. Eliot's "lives of quiet desperation". This is the 'actuality' for them, yet Page establishes the dichotomy of the 'possible' of the awareness that could be their's -i f only. Employing techniques which have become ingrown since the Imagist movement in poetry - a reliance on the image not just as sign, but as metaphor and symbol; of interlinking sounds and pauses and junctures to set the pace of the poem and to guide in entering the mental process -the poet in the line, "Their climates are winter and summer", focuses on the relationship between the actual and the possible in the lives of her human subjects.
One can appreciate the metaphor of the winter climate. This is a dominant image in the poem, the season of dormancy, of cold and snow and ice and absence of the l i f e force, a l l these connotations i f "winter" is viewed as a 'sign 1. They are buried, smothered under "the snow storm of paper": In stanza four, the voice of authority, of the boss dictating compells them across this wasteland of snow,.
The feelings of emptiness, of arctic expanse of whitenss, of zero temperature, of want of human l i f e , of the unmarked "nothingness" of a "winter of paper" - a l l are contained in this stanza. This is the expli-cit image that provides a relationship with the metaphor of the winter climate. Page suggests, as well, a more subtle implicit winter image -ice.
Reminiscent of the situation in Gibson's poem "The Ice-Cart", the connotation of 'ice' as the frozen state of activity, an escape from the heat of the active real world, brings fuller meaning to Page's presentation of the 'actuality' of the frozen 'iced' human potential within the office workers. To become self-aware, they, or some external force, must 'crack' the ice. Page does suggest some 'ice-breaking1 possibilities. To further develop thewrelationship of winter and the 'actuality' of the stenographers' lives, the symbol of the sea enters the poem, floating in through assoc-iation with ice in the dreams of childhood.
As MacLeish in Poetry and Experience points out, mere intent will not produce a symbol even when the intent is in the mind of an excellent 13 poet. In much of literary tradition, the sea and the ocean, water, imply a relationship of meaning with the place where l i f e originated, with flowing movement, with power, force, destruction, and with chaos. Yet Page infuses a wider sense of meaning through the introduction of her sea symbol. The sea, like the winter climate, is a state of submerged awareness; of beauty, but also of dormancy, and this 'meaning' reinforces again the trapped lives these girls live.
Even in their nostalgic remembrances they sink back into the essentially unaware, non-creative lulled state of child-hood, of the-'. Miss Page is effective as a poet in this stanza in creating a poetic view of a world of childlike imagination where sea floats appear "like sea marrows" on the vine, or "spools of gray toffee, or wasps' nests on water" - on fi r s t reading, a beautiful scene, but on closer observation a metaphor of rather unlovely images, "gray" toffee, not golden brown, and "wasps'" nests.
Once more Page presents in stanza seven the ocean symbol. Even the choice of 'ocean' and not 'sea' seems suggestive of a more imper-sonal force. The girls' "beds are their oceans". The security,othe protection of the bed, the refuge after the hard office routine, recall the idea of the ocean as the womb of a l l l i f e. To let one's metaphorical imagination roam, the stenographers in the refuge of their ocean beds at night are like undiscovered sea pearls whose f u l l value, or in this case, human potential, can only be seen when they are brought up above the ocean's surface into the light.
A paradox surprises, i t does not move. Yet this line moves. It is the combination of the unexpectedness and the Tightness of the paradox that gives i t vitality. The girls do not wish to act, for to act is to be aware, never to forget, and this is a painful, though exhilarating, task. They are of their own volition, or so Page intimates, drowning into the oblivion of the sea rather than attempting their own rescue from a watery grave. Winter is the 'actuality' of l i f e , summer only the 'possibility'.
The summer is always present, but i t is hidden just as a seed deep in the earth is hidden beneath the frost and snow of winter. The natural forces associated with winter, snow, ice and cold, prohibit germination of the seed's potential vitality. In the opening line of the poem, "After the brief bivouac of Sunday", one sees the fir s t indication of any hope for these prisoners of a mechanistic environment. Did this one respite, this Sunday, provide any impetus for revolt against the regime of the office?
It is not until stanza five that another summer image appears, the wind.
6. The Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry
In much the same vein as Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner", Page in possessing the tendency to find in natural objects an expression of the inner l i f e , feels in wind and in stagnant "terrible calm" sym-bols of the contrasted states of ecstasy and of dull inertia, of aware-ness and unawareness, of possibility and actuality. In the poem there is "no wind for the kites of their hearts", there is no wildly impulsive l i f e force to allow them to soar in child-like flight above their mundane daily existence, "Only a breeze".
The poet through the coupling of images establishes a metaphorical rela-tionship between the breeze, a weak form of wind, and the boyfriends of the stenographers. Perhaps these "boyfriends of blood" could melt the frozen world and release the human potential of the girls. The blood image, violent and startling in a poem void of strong colour - a poem of ice-white, of sea-green, of gray - suggests a chance, a force of warmth; i f only physical sex, i t is better than no attachment at a l l.
But the total metaphorical image points up the callousness of the 'love1 relationship. The girls are like the "leaves of the country", they are "tumbled" sexually by the physical force of love, only scattered by this breeze and left as "rubbish". The passion is not a natural force of summer that results in regenerative change.
It is lacking true power as i t lacks true emotion. Stanza six may be viewed as a third chance for escape into a 'summertime' world through satisfying relationships with others, with friends through verbal intercourse and dialogue. Sundays, coffee breaks, lunch hours, after work time, are usually felt to be moments of release from either the pressures or the monotony of modern work. Page again employs a paradox to show a seeming contradiction on the part of her subjects. They are incapable of any meaningful communication with others, with any attempt to f i l l the emptiness of their lives.
It is noon hour; they are out for lunch; i t should be a moment for fun and contentment. Yet, "In the inch of the noon as they move they are stag-nant'. This is Page's uncanny way of relating the unrelated; of twisting the expected res-ponse. The girls have such a brief moment to "make hay while the sun shines"! Just an "inch" as the sun moves slowly, and the world is bathed completely in real light and not in illusionary shadow. Yet like the Mariner's "painted ship uipon a painted ocean", they are becalmed. The juxtaposition of "terrible" with "calm" reinforces the inner anguish of these girls.
Leisure time presents a problem to them in how to f i l l i t. The senses of sight, hearing, taste and touch are aroused. The hunger for some communication is compared to brittle icicle-tongues breaking the calm of noon 5 incon-gruous, yet sensuous. Finally a last glimmer of the 'summer of the possible' appears in the quiet of the bedroom, in that moment of semi-awareness between wakefulness and sleep when the individual is alone unto himself. Their salt tears are "the tide before sleep". Here, i f ever, perhaps they might be able to save themselves, to melt their frozen shells. Not counting blessings they assemble sheep in linear columns, possibly reflecting the linear dimensions of their lives, and "watch them leap desks for their fences".
The last breath of summer, the last ray of sunlight is gone in the poem. Page opens and closes her poem focusing on the eyes of the stenographers. These eyes that stare are outward-looking only. They, like the Janus figure of mythology, see but a mirrored reflection of themselves, a shadow on the cave wall that Plato spoke of, a 'carbon copy' of the 'first draft'.
They are not the eyes of a Buddha that seek the inner self. The final metaphorical image of the eye is a most provocative one. In a sense i t is a modern metaphysical image, a twentieth century Donne eye image. The eye, with its connotations of light, knowledge, double vision, reflection of inner awareness, and source of perception, is shown as a reflector of the inner fever of the anguished girls.
The marathon race of the pin men, is analogous to the Oriental image of the serpent chasing his t a i l and to the laboratory white rat on an exercise wheel, an endless futile race to madness: In their eyes I have seen the pin men of madness in the marathon trim race round the track of the stadium pupil. The stenographers are trapped within themselves and within their jobs. The army imagery of the opening stanza reveals that they are prisoners in this office chain gang.
The natural forces of snow, ice, cold - forces beyond man's control - reflect the mechanistic impersonal business world, as in the fourth stanza. The bell and the voice, sym-bols of impersonal authority, impose restrictions on the typists' lives. Even the sheep are in columns. The "keys" when coupled with "vault" and taut net curtains stretched on frames, give added meaning to the idea of the typists as prisoners in a tomb of mechanical work, going mad within and yet pre-senting an illusion of calm normalcy and efficiency.
One question posed implicitly is 'Of whose making is this prison, society's or the stenographers'? Page does not supply an answer. To briefly comment on the prosody of the poem i t is not d i f f i -cult to notice Page's delight in word sounds: To highlight her sensitive free verse, the poet weaves alliteration and assonance into the lines. She introduces texture to the poem through the choice of such words as "toffee", "salt", "felt of the morning", "calico-minded" and "starched". In stanza four a stacatto effect is produced by the rapid-fire success-ion of monosyllabic words emphasizing the brisk, efficient structured business world.
The acuteness of the poem lies in Page's perception 'just beyond the senses', as the emotional portrayal of such lives is not just a glimpse of the tension, but a tragic view of 'frozen' human beings. These trapped individuals are unable to bridge the chasm between solitude and multitude.
In quite a different poem, "Photograph", Miss Page again pre-sents a view of individuals within shells of self, submerged under water and blissfully ignorant of the energy and substance of l i f e above the surface of the sea. Submersion is not death, but "merely a l i t t l e muted". The photograph image emphasizes the contrast between the actuality and its captured flat reproduction; between the positive substance and its negative form.
The two people in the poem are called "lovers", yet they l i e "apart and s t i f f " , their language of love is garbled and distorted by their watery oasis. The idyllic love scene in the picture is described as a "pretense". Contrast is heightened in the last stanza by the lines: While overhead the swimmers level waves shrinking the distance between continents and closer inland from the broken weirs the fishermen are hauling giant nets. Those below are ignorant of the action of those above the surface who are making progress towards greater communication between people.
Some are 'surfacing' to self-awareness, A community of feeling is being formed. Water-land imagery accentuates this portrayal of the conflict of solitude and multitude and a new note of hope is sounded i f only for select individuals. These are a new breed capable of adapting from an aquatic, or solitary form, to a terrestrial, or communal, existence, P.
Page has touched on this human search for truth and beauty and self-fulfillment in much of her work. The approach to the theme varies as does the supporting imagery. In a l l the writing a basic con-f l i c t of opposites is to be found. Generally this opposition involves the antipodal conditions of solitude and multitude.
Blackout Poetry
There i s one poem that goes beyond the basic dichotomy discussed here to show the confron-tation of an individual bent on finding truth, with a hypocritical society that crushes his quest and causes him to retreat again into a shell of his former self. It has been described by Miss Page's c r i t i c s as a "novelette"; by John Sutherland as ". Sutherland goes on to write that, The same sensibility which conceived the heroine of Sun and Moon i s s t i l l at work in these new poems, where in 'welters of narcissus', the body i s always confused with inanimate existence and the one i s serving as the mirror of the other.
The sensibility s t i l l depends on the struggle of the self for power over i t s surroundings, leading to alternate victories and defeats and never reaching a f i n a l conclusion. But now the meaningless struggle with nature, described in Sun and Moon, i s grasped as the real opposition of the self to society and as the fear of the self which produces i t. A central male figure i n a l l three works journeys into the world in search of truth, peace, beauty and self-hood, only to be continually confronted with the harshness of r e a l i t y and the hypocrisy of men.
The communal l i f e loses i t s appealing facade and is exposed as sordid and hollow in comparison with the security and peace of the "personal shade".
Blackout Poetry | Scholastic
Heller's Yossarin stumbles through the murk of wartime Italy. Page's Cullen encounters similar experiences. This image of an area of beauty and truth "behind the eye" is unique to Page and she elaborates on i t in many poems to suggest the aspect of solitude in the conflict with the forces of worldly experience.
Momentarily Cullen appears to have found his 'heaven' after a journey from the 'hell-city': Decided that country people were big and free; found himself lodgings with fishermen on a c l i f f , slung his hammock from these beliefs and slept. Morning caught at his throat when he saw the men return at dawn like silver armored Vikings; the women were malleable as rising bread— in fact the environment was to his liking.
Access Check
Sea was his mirror and he saw himself twisted as rope and fretted with the ripples— concluded quietness would comb him out; for once, the future managed to be simple. He floated a day in stillness, felt the grass grow in his arable body, felt the gulls trace the tributaries of his heart and pass over his river beds from feet to skull. He settled with evening like a softening land, withdrew his chair from the sun the o i l lamp made, content to rest within his personal shade.
His serenity is short-lived; the very nature of avaricious men destroys the idyllic peace and disrupts Cullen's assimilation with nature. The women, gathering, tatted with their tongues, shrouds for their absent neighbors and the men fired with lemon extract and bootlegged rum grew suddenly immense. No room could hold them—he was overrun, trampled by giants, his grass was beaten down. Having exhausted a l l possibilities for a l i f e of peace on earth he goes to war, disillusioned, confused, uncommitted to the fight, a shadow of Sisyphus condemned to eternal frustration, a victim of the conflict between the impersonal forces of a malicious society.
A more intensive study of Freud's influence of Page's work will be appropriate with respect to later selections, but in connection with the conflict of the self with society, Page in "Cullen" does seem to adhere to Freud's thesis that society is controlled by anxieties, real or imaginary, designed to repress or sublimate any human impulses towards greater freedom. Page broadens her presentation of conflict of opposites in poems and short stories that contrast surface appearances and human facades with the reality of the depths of feeling people experience.
Smith in Canadian Forum writes of Page that, "In the inner l i f e of reverie, of self-analysis, and of dreams she finds a mirror-like stage for the re-enactment of the hesitations and struggles of the outer 16 world of objective experience".
- Georgias English Rose.
- Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step 2010.
- Feedback on Open Collections Website?
- God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God!
- Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT.
- 6. The Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry;
Exterior calm masks a desperate inner madness; beauty is only an outward covering for a hidden terror or horror. Surrealism, the French inspired movement in literature and art, was influenced by Freudian thought. The artist attempts to convey the mind's subconscious activity by presenting images out of order or sequence as in a dream. Page modified this experimentation to express "the strangeness and terror that grow naturally out of the familiar as they 17 do in dreams".
The poet's preoccupation is with penetrating the world of action and appearances and plummeting the depths of sea, of cave, of mine, of ice, to go beneath the surface. Concrete accurate images of illness, contagion, loss of memory support the conflict of opposites, contrasting with more abstract impressions of dream and waking states.
It i s Smith who notes the " f l u i d i t y " and "impermanence" created from the poet's alternations between surface and depth when he comments that, Metamorphoses occur here, and strange alternations of being and non-being. Yet the images in which a l l of this i s presented are hard and clear. The writing i s precise and exact. These are 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'.
The surface of this poem has a child-like innocence to i t. The whiteness of the salt mine suggests to the poet the play of children in snow and the pleasure of lovers in bed. Miners climb "Miniature matterhorns. The surface is the photograph,. But the discordant note of theme enters in the last photographic shot taken at "an acute high angle". The beauty of the mine and miners i s now distorted, Like Dante's vision of the nether h e l l men struggle with the bright cold f i r e s of salt locked in the black inferno of the rock: The opposition of innocence with guilt occurs through the juxtaposition of images of blackness and f i r e , salt with snow, rock with the struggle of the miners and ugliness with surface brilliance and beauty.
In s t i l l another poem "Schizophrenic", Miss Page contraposes an innocent surface appearance xd. The f i n a l stanza of the poem with i t s sharp images reveals the triumph of the horrifying portion of a self over the innocence nature of the individual. Opposition i s the essence of the poem's creative tension. A l l i s often not what i t appears to be in P. The individual in "opportunist" appears aflame with drive and purpose: Almost a f i r e himself on his flaming reel he tunnelled the night and ate the sparks at a gulp; arriving he entered the very heart of the blaze. But he had never intended to put i t out: The dream i s the active existence, r e a l i t y the passive, and individuals l i k e this opportunist are torn between the relative security of self-isolation and the v i t a l i t y , but insecurity, of self-awareness.
Page's basic presentation of conflict of solitude with multitude i s seen again. Is this image real or a dream; the picture of a "painted land" or the "deep grass of the island"? Page deliberately confuses the reader to emphasize the terror and horror of the final view of the only child who caught the birds,.
Then through the bald, unfeathered air and coldly, as a man would walk against a metal backdrop, he bore down on her and placed them in her wide maternal lap and accurately said their names aloud: The "Only Child" conveys an intensity through inner conflict of a similar magnitude to that of E. A, Robinson's "Richard Cory". Both figures are like icebergs, only one-tenth of the reality of the self is publicly! A further parallel of this presentation of the latent terror of a pent-up nature lying under the surface can be seen in E, J.
The poet writes that, I saw the generations pass Along the reflex of a spring, A bird had rustled in the grass, The tab had caught i t on the wing: Pratt developed this theme and imagery in his work in much the same way as Page presented her conflict of opposites. Such poems as "BrebeufT,and His Brethren", "From Stone to Steel" and "The Titanic" depict the thin tightrope that spans the gap between the cave and the city, between the jungle nature of man and the power of understanding and love, and Page's "Only Child" shows the i l l effectscof an individual who is restrained and kept from walking the tightrope and reaching the humanizing side.
The conflict of solitude with multitude takes on a varied form in "Puppets" and The Green Bird , when laughter masks hidden tears. The clown nature of the caricatured puppets is magnified to create comedy, yet the audience is watching but an inverted mirror image of themselves. In The Green Bird, P. Page as spectator, stands at a distance from her pathetic subjects Mrs. Rowan, Miss Price and Ernest, She acknowledges her complicity in being 'led' into the surrealistic world of these impaled, shuttered xromen.
At the same time, the author is a subject in the story.
Create a List
Yet i t is as i f she has no control over nor desire to escape from such a situation. Rowan today and I hope you will come', I said, TYes'. The desire to be trapped by old Mrs, Rowan was stronger than any other feeling," At times i t is as i f Page were outside her physical self, looking back over her shoulder and being astonished at her own sentences and behavior. She plays Miss Price's game and she is like Mrs.
Rowan while trapped in the tomb of the solid dark house. The story's conversation creates a surface impression, disjointed and detached, but definitely a cover to the horror and mystery lying behind this world: Ernest was carefully balancing his saucer on his knee, sitting very straight. There was no sound in the entire house, "I hope you are feeling better, Miss Price," Ernest said, I saw the immense silent body heave again, this time with sobs.
And then i t spoke for the fir s t time. I'm nothing but a stump". And the sobbing grew deeper, longer, I looked at Ernest. I heard my own voice saying, "Such a lovely place to live, this—so central. You can see every-thing from this room. It looks right out on the street. You can see everything. Looking-Glass, is both surrealistic and psychedelic. John Sutherland in first noting a similarity between the work of Carroll and Page remarked that both worlds, which juxtapose the comic with the terrifying, fasci-nate by their apparent calm in the midst of upheaval and the unexpected.
A vibration is felt in writing such as this when the outcome of events and images is uncertain. Page's story emerges like a 'theater of the absurd1 play in its portrayal of a lack of cummunication and a shattering of images. Individuals thrust at one another with fragmented and absurd 'comments' in a frustrating manic attempt to be understood - the final impression is disjointed and deliberately incoherent - each figure is a miniature solitude, too brittle to break and be melted into a common form with other individuals.
Following a year's visit to the west coast of Canada, Miss Page published another short story, Weekend—West Coast that also illustrates this clashing of fragmented ideas. In the story, conflict of opposites is represented by the archetypal conflict of Paradise with Hades. The short story is a portrait in detail of a decayed way of exis-tence on Vancouver Island. The people are atrophied remnants of British immigrants who have remained insulated from the mainstream of Canada, Images of contagion are rife: But then, I am hysterical about contagion".
Reality and illusion clash constantly in Miss Page's perception of the place and the people. Transported by a sparkling clean white ferry and its dazzling crew to an idyllic island setting "dry land among the dark mountains, the green sweet-smelling pastures and the large, heavily leafed trees", the poet's anticipation of good things to come from her visit is heightened. Then she is hit by the dichotomy of what l i f e is really like on this Paradise.
The houses are "tottering under rusty corrugated iron-roofs", "the children talk as i f they are grown ups, the grown ups as i f they are mentally deficient". Sweet Alan, the local builder spends his time making brown sugar whisky in pumpkins buried deep in manure; the Chinese cook crawls over the food in an effort to reach his room behind and through the refrigerator! As observer, the author sees beyond the apparent. She notices "The girls who run the hotel , ,.
Already you can see the shape they will become. There's a kind of soggy look about them". Tragedy dissolves into comedy over the failure of the "sexometer"; tranquility in the hotel room vanishes with the thud of the colonel's shoe heaved at the wall. Ghostly tales of horror about Mr. Does i t much matter i f such stories prove true or not?
A l l the observer wants is to escape by bus and ferry from "The dark souls about on this island. The conflict is resolved by her exodus.
- Profit from Property: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Successful Real Estate Development.
- .
- Who We Are:.
- Rapunzel (Modern Wicked Fairy Tales Book 2);
- Rumis Daughter.
Page's recurring image patterns continue the conflict of opposites, of solitude and multitude. The principal ones she employs are associated with water, with snow and ice, with caves, mines and vaults, with eyes or with the juxtaposition of black on white. The image of a water self is central in much of Miss Page's work.
- Poetry and prose of P. K. Page : A study in conflict of opposites - UBC Library Open Collections?
- The Amazing Advertures of Fizzlegrits (Fizzlegrits at the Opera Book 1).
- UBC Theses and Dissertations.
Many of her subjects exist in a state of submerged ignorance or innocence below the surface of the sea. To stay submerged may be a most pleasant and soothing situation, but i t is an ignorant one for the individual, one in which the senses are stimulated but the mind is in a limbo state. In inno cence and youth, the "porpoise-like" "Young Girls" deep in their daze, dawdle and r o l l ; "as i f in the sea. However, the terre-stial environment proves to be most appropriate and "earth becomes home— their natural element". In a discussion of the relationship between poetry and dream, Maud Bodkin points to a characteristic of much dream imagery, a quality that distinguishes Page's imagery.
In dreams, the dreamer experiences a feeling of going deep into water until i t becomes warmer and more relaxing and expression that can be interpreted to indicate the desire of the indi-vidual to return to the 'maternal depths' - to the womb, to a warm shel-ter protected from turmoil above in outer experience. Bodkin notes that in much poetry "the image of the sea seems to be fused with that of 19 the mother". One poem, "No Flowers" with overtones of the dichotomy between social classes, presents a vision of the underwater world as the 'Great Leveller' of a l l social inequality.
No hand made shoes can reincarnate Peter and Elizabeth Arden cannot withstand salt water. A l l the trappings of class distinction and wealth according to the poet can be washed away when the ship sinks. Water i s the cleansing power that wipes away a r t i f i c i a l distinctions between individuals in this gentle and fanciful diatribe directed at the bored leisure class who "have always cruised on the luxury liner".
Page's philosophy of social equality could become entwined with her capricious elaboration of imagery and the water symbolism in the poem is drawn to an extravagant conceit in the last stanza where, Octopus arms w i l l hold you and sea snails w i l l stud the carefully massaged lobes of your ears; the wide blade of the water w i l l pare the hips down to a size sixteen—the coveted size; and starfish, swept by the wakes of other ships, w i l l cast their angular shapes across your eyes. The image of the sea i s of a constructive social force in this poem.
Pbrtrait of Marina", Page emphasized the more destructive nature of water. To the constrained heroine spinster, the ocean of her childhood was not a thing of beauty, but,. Father's Fearful Sea harsh with sea serpents winds and drowning men. For her i t 1 held no spiral of a shell for her descent to dreams, i t held no bells. And where i t moved in shallows i t was more imminently a danger, more alive than where i t lay off shore f u l l fathom fi v e. Marina, as much a victim of her parental upbringing as the "Only Child", is in a sense 'retarded' and ignorant.
The isolation of her l i f e brought on by the fear of authority exerted by her father isrreflected in the sea imagery. But where the wave breaks, where i t rises green turns into gelatine, becomes a glass simply for seeing stones through, runs across the coloured shells and pebbles of the shore and mades an aspic of them then sucks back in foam and undertow— this aspect of the sea Marina never knew. The contrast and conflict of father and child, of authority and submission, of suppression and freedom within an individual, are revealed through the two images of the ocean.
The beauty of the sea is unknown to the "half-created" Marina, another individual unable to traverse the path from soli-tude to multitude. If water imagery is perhaps most prevalent in P. Page's writ-ing, visions of winter and dreams of snow and ice are only slightly less common. Canada, 'Our Lady of the Snows', has inspired its writers to draw on snow for much of their creative imagery. Lake Achigan", Anne Hebert with "Neige", Purdy's "Scarci-ties", the l i s t is endless - a l l focus on white snow imagery for dramatic and symbolic meaning.
Miss Page is part of this tradition. In one of her most beauti-ful poems, "Stories of Snow", she creates a vision of whiteness, a Cana-dian winter legend that presents the snowy scene as symbolic of a static and deliberate state of innocence only found in the imagination. There is a softness and roundness to the poem, as i f one were walking on eider-down. And there the story shifts from head to head, of how, in Holland, from their feather beds hunters arise and part the flakes and go forth to the frozen lakes in search of swans— the snow light falling white along their guns their breath in plumes.
And of the swan in death these dreamers t e l l of its last flight and how i t falls, a plummet, pierced by the freezing bullet and how three feathers, loosened by the shot, descend like snow upon i t. 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, f a l l at last and dream their way to death.
The 'filter of innocence', the whiteness of the snow, blots out a l l colour from the poem which then becomes a study of white images on white. The play by Ibsen and the poem by Page, both native in setting to snow countries, reveal a quest for self-hood, through imagery of snow as a 'filter of innocence' obliterating the darkness of personal guilt. Page's "Snowman" is also a representation of innocence, "white double 0, white nothing, nothing.
Innocence is the sub-stance of a hollow man, a mute figure, devoid of love and strong emotions, an'isolated self "in a landscape without love". Black on white, or white on black - the colour dichotomy estab-lished so early in Page's writing - is part of the poet's snow images.
Miss Page, at one time a script writer for the National Film Board of Canada, predates a recent Film Board surrealistic production that closely parallels her snow dreams. The dream sequence of a snow romp by a butterfly-girl, a boy and a dog, is haunted by the whispered refrain "I can't stay, I can't stay", for the message is that shared love is but a fleeting experience.
The atmosphere created in the film Angel, with its deliberate distortion of focus and its frag-mented sequence of frames, is strongly reminiscent of Page's poetic dreams of winter. Closely allied with the frozen xrorld as a retreat or refuge from awareness are the recurring images of caves, mines or vaults. The arche-typal conflict of Heaven and Hell, of Paradise and Hades is seen through the imagery of surface gardens and cavernous "nether Hells" in Page's work.
Even the sunless sea can be viewed as a form of darkness beneath the images of nature's beauty above. Self-isolation and solitude are readily identified by the obscure "caverns of the mind" with "intricate 21 and winding chambers" that "thought can with d i f i c u l t y v i s i t ". Page's individuals conform, in part, to the dictum 'If rejected, retreat' - into ice, under water, into caves.
There one must only see the reflection of reality, the photographic negative, Plato's shadow. The woman in the "Bed-Sitting Room" i s l i k e an impaled moth "pinned to a board in the floor". Her "leaning tower of self" i s a four-walled 'cave world' with a faceless window. The strikers in "Bank Strike: Quebec—" come from the "cellar of certainty" to defeat, in their clash with the outer mainstream of entrenched urban society.
In "Remember the Wood" the reader i s caut-ioned to retreat into a natural "vault" deep in the forest i f uncongenial r e a l i t y presses. And in the short story, The Green Bird, Page enters a veritable tomb when she cannot "resist the desire to be led through shutters and impaled on strange l i v i n g room chairs'. She imagines dis-ease as "white and dim. Solitude is thus associated with confinement of some form and multitude with the converse, freedom in the open. As Page observes her earliest subjects, she presents them mostly as victims of self-isolation, unable to bridge the gap of separateness with the rest of humanity.
Her "Young Girls" are left on dry land after their metamorphosis from a semi-amphibious stage. They dance best who dance with desire Who lifting feet of fire from fire Weave before they l i e down A red carpet for the sun. Page fervently writes, like Layton, of those, While dreaming wishful dreams that will be real, some there are fearless, touching a distant thing— the ferreting sun, the enveloping shade, the attainable spring and the wonderful soil nameless, beneath their feet. In her attempt at solution to social problems the poet develops natural images of sun, soil, season, shade as symbolic of man's goals in l i f e.
The passage from solitude to multitude is from darkness into light and from winter into spring and from submersion to emersion, Layton's fire-dancers are activists involved with l i f e and living, and Page's fearless individuals are similar in that they share a common bond with a l l humanity in'their pursuit of l i f e. For example, By the sun, by the sudden flurry of birds in a flock, Oh, by love's ghost and the imagined guest— a l l these shattering, shaking the g i r l in her maidenhood, she knows him and his green song smooth as a stone and the word quick with the sap and the bud and the moving bird.
Like Leda of the myth, Page's "Virgin" is shaken into a moment of this awareness through sexual experience and thus she loses her restrictive innocence along with her ignorance of love. She becomes one of Page's few successful individuals to break the bonds of solitude. A further example of the presentation of the communal state in the conflict of opposites may be seen in the t i t l e poem of P. For we can live now, love: As ten, as twenty, now, we break from single thought and rid of being two, receive them and walk out.
Here the poet spins an involved metaphysical conceit of the multipli-cation factor of l i f e through the power of shared love, not isolated self-pity. One unites with one, and then two divide, and the ramifi-cations are a l l of humanity. This poem is Page's embodiment of the value of the communal aspect of l i f e. To communi-cate commands to the beast, a rather nervous animal, the man fir s t tries force, then cajoling.
Forced to accompany one another along a country lane at night, the man and the cow assume roles of strolling companions. The man formally introduces himself, pays the 'lady' compliments and at the moment of crisis, the appearance of a fast moving car, reacts with the gallantry of a lover and pushes the cow to safety in a ditch, unfor-tunately on top of himself.
After a brief moment of rest, the cow struggles to her feet, but the man knocked dizzy reacts in anger at the cow and again kicks her. The thin thread of understanding is lost: He did achieve some form of shared feeling i f only momentary! This bond of communication takes a different form in The Woman. A traveller injured in a war ventures into a strange village in the country in search of a moment of peace away from the turmoil of war and urban l i f e and is taken in by a very withdrawn woman. An overly sensi-tive observer, he is obsessed with trying to know a l l he can about people, why they are as they are.
Through alternating moments of dream and waking, he passes a f i t f u l night reliving his past in the country room of his childhood. Suddenly in his dreams, panic grips him as he sees both his self and its inverted reflection and in terror he screams: And then, very wonderfully, came an answering scream: As i f he had called to a mate and she had replied with immediate urgency. The sound reached him and fulf i l l e d him and he f e l l asleep then as easily and completely as i f he had had a woman. The barrier of solitude built up by the two individuals is broken here by the screams, variations on the theme of empathy used earlier by Page in The Sun and The Moon.
If one can realize the existence of another's soli-tary existence and in doing so, establish a link of communication of any form between himself and the other person, then a community of experience and feeling is formed which strengthens a l l involved and enables them to see and understand themselves more clearly and to sense their own unique-ness and worth.
One other example of Individuals who span the conflict of oppo-sites can be seen in The Rat Hunt. In this short story the isolation of the apartment dwellers dissolves with their realization of the common human bonds they a l l share. It is ironic that the rat hunt itself pro-vides the immediate focus for the individuals: An enormous silence lapped, almost as i f i t were the hot air, on the watchers in the windows. They were now no longer isolated people but partisans, inactive only i f necessary. Silence covered them a l l and held them.
Nothing but the sound of the stick hitting the wood and the high terrible squeaking of the trapped rat broke on empty ear drums. Yet, i t is not of such importance what draws these people in to a circle of shared feelings, so much as, once drawn, they shed their insular fears. Incidental comments give them the opportunity to reveal personality -they dislike rats; like cleanliness and believe i t is "next to Godli-ness" ; are Russian and Hungarian and Scottish - yet they find they are only people with similar ideas. Page employs a form of pathetic fallacy to describe the growing bond of understanding among the four characters in her story.
These four grew expansive with the falling night—grouped and close". As long as '-the magic ring is not broken, loneliness and isolation will be banished. Now let Fall make the horizon narrow reduce the earth's circumference to an accepted thing— easy chairs drawn close and set within a ring where the thin pointed flame shoots like an upward arrow. This group of individuals in- a ring form a vital human chain of defence, a community of souls banded together through shared experiences to ward off the attack of encroaching dark solitude.
The basic conflict of self-isolation and with involvement with others takes many forms in P. Page's writing, but some aspect of the opposition is always to be found either in her image patterns, thematic-strains, or personal perception of indi-vidual subjects. The negative and positive positions of both conflicting states are set forth - early poems emphasizing the strength of the pull towards confinement within the self.
The resulting tension of this con-f l i c t of opposites is evident in the manner in which Page perceived her subjects and her society, and occasionally in some works the more con-structive communal position emerges as dominant and the poet reveals glimpses of f u l l and active individuals freed from solitude, engrossed: The free man is contrasted with the restrained individual and the conflict of solitude and multitude becomes the opposition of restraint with freedom.
Klinck Toronto, , p. Rashley, Poetry in Canada, Toronto, , p. Underlining is my own. Shelley in Bodkin, op. Page expands her primary conflict of opposites, the dich-otomy between the isolation of the self and the desire for a communal sharing of emotions, in much the same way as a baroque vista unfolds. From the kernel focal point of solitude at issue with multitude, the poet enlarges her perspective to include a view of the conflict of the external forces of restraint on an individual with the inner desire of that individual for personal freedom and self-fulfillment.
Isolation of self and vulnerability of innocence are linked in that both are states of unawareness. The search for self-knowledge, beauty and love, is part of the drive towards greater personal freedom and away from coercive forces. Miss Page shows a particular interest in children and childhood and this conflict of restraint with freedom is much in evidence when she contrasts the force of parental authority with the assailable childhood state of innocence and malleability.
The beauty and freedom of the child clash with the horror of overly protective parents or the blind desire for suzerainty exacted by the adult on the child. In her latest book of published poetry, Cry Ararat! Individuals and classes are victimized by indifferent authority, by social barriers, or by war.
The muted conflict of bourgeoise with proletariat elite is felt in certain poems. Page juxtaposes the state of isolation of mind and lack of world concern for others that existed prior to the world wars with a new growth towards a global community of interest that sprang up as war forced people to learn more directly of the problems and nature of foreign nations. A form of contrast even exists in Page's work brought about by a confrontation of the influence of Marx and of Freud 6n;. The Marxian idea of love of humanity dissolves into a Freudian interpretation of communal existence as an escape from the fears of solitude.
Page's critics such as Wynne Francis have held a f i l t e r of Marx's thought over her art: He was then to caution in a letter published the same year in Canadian Forum that one "cannot discuss P. Page with respect to social ideas alone, but one can't ignore these ideas entirely without basic f a l s i -fication". Rashley, in Poetry in Canada, is perhaps the most per-ceptive when he observes in Page's prose and poetry that the poetic tension originates not purely from the poet's ideas of politics or econ-omic progress.