Craig Space: Poetry: E. J. Pratt, "The Shark"

The Shark

By E. J. Pratt

E.J. Pratt was a well-known and still celebrated Canadian poet. Some of his work was really good, and some of it was passable, but a few pieces really stick out in my mind. I've listed them. He was half from the modern school, and half from the 19th-century tradition of controlled metre.

"Fred Cogswell has called Pratt "the last-born literary child of frontier (north) America", and there is a good deal of truth in that jocular observation.

In the still primitive conditions of the Far West and the Canadian eastern seaboard, the wilderness of plain, desert, sea, and rock gave a meaningful setting to the clash of forces taking place within society too. Pratt's work is filled with images of primitive nature and evolutionary history."

About E. J. Pratt

He seemed to know the harbour,
So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved
With its base-line on the water.

His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue,
And as he passed the wharf
He turned,
And snapped at a flat-fish
That was dead and floating.
And I saw the flash of a white throat,
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit.

Then out of the harbour,
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water
Lithely,
Leisurely,
He swam--
That strange fish,
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,
Part vulture, part wolf,
Part neither-- for his blood was cold.

Source for text and information: "Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt", edited w/introduction by Peter Buitenhuis. Toronto: The Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1968.

About E. J. Pratt

Poetry

Craig Space