Craig Space: Poetry: E. J. Pratt, "The Prize Cat"

The Prize Cat

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

Pure blood domestic, guaranteed,
Soft-mannered, musical in purr,
The ribbon had declared the breed,
Gentility was in the fur

Such feline culture in the gads
No anger ever arched her back--
What distance since those velvet pads
Departed from the leopard's track!

And when I mused how Time had thinned
The jungle strains within the cells,
How human hands had disciplined
Thoes prowling optic parallels;

I saw the generations pass
Along the reflex of a spring,
A bird had rustled in the grass,
The tab had caught it on the wing:

Behind the leap so furtive-wild
Was such ignition in the gleam,
I thought an Abyssinian child
Had cried out in the whitethroat's scream.

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