Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉCimpressions are processed mentally: words of emotion and reflection areconspicuously missing from the poem.Still, one does not receive the impression that the persona's experience isdevoid of emotion, but this effect is due entirely to the visual perspectivesinvolved. In each stanza, the angle of vision is different. At first, the personaseems to look straight ahead, into a vista of tree stems which is, however,closed (“the merging/of the tall trunks/in the green distance”). He then looksupwards, and again the scope of his vision is restricted: the trees block his viewof the sky. The persona thus experiences a landscape in which possibilities forprospect are largely absent, and its absence, like an excess of prospect, makesfor an unbalanced and thus potentially uncomfortable landscape experience.Balance is provided, however, in the poem's last stanza, where the perspectivesuddenly widens — even though the lake below the forest is only seen througha foreground of “green.” Without this suggestion of a prospect at the poem'send, the forest experience might be claustrophobic, but in conjunction with thevisual relief that the last stanza provides, the denseness of the wood, too, is anexperience to be appreciated.The external focalization common in narrative literature is rarely achieved inpoetry because it is often impossible to locate the perceiving consciousnessentirely outside the situation depicted in the text. However, the effect of anexternal view can be approximated, and enhanced through visual perspective,as in Knister's “Lake Harvest”:Down on the flat of the lakeOut on the slate and the green,Spotting the border of Erie's sleeping robe of silver-bluechangeable silk,In sight of the shimmer of silver-blue changeable silk,In the sun,The men are sawing the frosted crystal.Patient the horses look on from the sleighs,Patient the trees, down from the bank, darkly ignoring the sun.Each saw swings and whines in a grey-mittened hand,And diamonds and pieces of a hundred rainbows are strownaround.This poem, by another Canadian poet associated with Imagism, also reflects aconcern to present a closely observed scene; the prominent use of the definitearticle contributes to the impression that the persona is describing a specificscene. But in contrast to the Ross poem, the seer (who in this text is identicalwith the poem's speaking voice) does not physically take part in the scene heperceives. Located on its outer fringe, he is capable of perceiving a much largerportion of the landscape than the internal seer in the former poem, and there isno sense here that the seer is surrounded by the land. In fact, at first sight the16