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The Complete Poems of George Whalley |
eBook Available
The poems of a Canadian modernist best known for his investigations into poetic process.
An eminent Canadian man of letters, scholar, naval officer and secret intelligence agent, CBC scriptwriter, musician, biographer, and translator, George Whalley (1915-1983) was also a gifted poet whose work spans five decades. Along with his major critical work, Poetic Process, and his superb biography, The Legend of John Hornby, Whalley’s poetry is an important contribution to the emergence and development of twentieth-century modernism.
The Complete Poems of George Whalley is the first collection of Whalley’s entire poetic oeuvre. It contains the previously published work from his two books of poetry, Poems 1939-1944 and No Man An Island, as well as pieces that appeared in periodicals and edited collections. It gathers all his unpublished poems found in public archives and his personal papers, letters, and journals. This collection reinforces Whalley’s place as the foremost Canadian poet of the Second World War, during and immediately after which the majority of these works were written. It also emphasizes the humour and playfulness of his early and late poems. Michael DiSanto’s introduction provides an overview of Whalley’s life and career, and examines the relationship between his poetics and criticism by consulting his essays, letters, and unpublished papers.
Restoring Whalley’s poetry and literary contributions to their rightful place in the Canadian canon, this comprehensive collection opens new chapters on mid-twentieth-century modernism and war poetry.
The Complete Poems of George Whalley is the first collection of Whalley’s entire poetic oeuvre. It contains the previously published work from his two books of poetry, Poems 1939-1944 and No Man An Island, as well as pieces that appeared in periodicals and edited collections. It gathers all his unpublished poems found in public archives and his personal papers, letters, and journals. This collection reinforces Whalley’s place as the foremost Canadian poet of the Second World War, during and immediately after which the majority of these works were written. It also emphasizes the humour and playfulness of his early and late poems. Michael DiSanto’s introduction provides an overview of Whalley’s life and career, and examines the relationship between his poetics and criticism by consulting his essays, letters, and unpublished papers.
Restoring Whalley’s poetry and literary contributions to their rightful place in the Canadian canon, this comprehensive collection opens new chapters on mid-twentieth-century modernism and war poetry.
Details
360 Pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 9780773548039
September 2016
Formats: Cloth, eBook
“George Whalley is a figure of substantial importance in the history of Canadian literature and scholarship; his influence and inspiration are acknowledged by prominent contemporary writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Elizabeth Hay. Unprecedented in its detail, this lucid and well-researched account brings Whalley’s work the attention it so richly deserves.” Zailig Pollock, Trent University
“Michael John DiSanto’s The Complete Poems of George Whalley is an outstanding collection that offers readers a wide-ranging and extensively researched perspective on a poet and scholar (and so much more) who deserves renewed attention.” Canadian Literature
“Michael John DiSanto’s The Complete Poems of George Whalley is an outstanding collection that offers readers a wide-ranging and extensively researched perspective on a poet and scholar (and so much more) who deserves renewed attention.” Canadian Literature
Michael John DiSanto is associate professor of English at Algoma University and the author of Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism.
Contents
xv Acknowledgments
xix Abbreviations
xxi Introduction
li Editorial Procedures
The Complete Poems of George Whalley
3 Ode to a College Sausage
4 Homer at Dawn
5 Louisburg
5 The Chase
6 Derelict
7 Dog Watch
8 Fragment
8 Transcendence
9 Hymn to the Moon
11 20th Century
12 Dedication
13 Testament of Youth (A Sonnet)
13 Vision
15 Desertion
16 Desire
16 In Examination
17 And so it will go on till time is dead
19 Darkness - and the wild, maniac rush
19 Of the hilly road’s adventurous bend
20 The Limitations of Academic Philosophy
21 Modelled upon a German Prayer
22 To Canada
23 A Smile and a Nod
23 Dove Cottage Unvisited
26 Battle Pattern
36 Behind the Victory
37 Domestic Manifesto
39 Wheat
40 By the River
41 Commandos Embarking
42 Initial Assault - Sicily
43 Aftermath, July 1943
44 Pilgrim Heart, Turn Homeward
45 The Sound of Bare Feet
46 One night in the darkness
47 Homecoming
48 London after Leave
49 Sitting the Night Out
50 The Messenger
53 The Moon
54 The Devils’ Day Out
55 English Winter
56 W.K.E.
56 Beech Wood
57 Minster Lovell
58 There was no way of telling
59 Portrait
59 You must have found within yourself
60 Das Lebewohl, die Abwesenheit, das Wiedersehen
62 For Elizabeth
62 Now we are both alone and isolate
63 Renunciation
63 Sleep
64 Christmas Eve
64 Winter North Atlantic
65 If Winter Comes
66 This Is Your Music
67 Returning to Sea
67 London, 1944
68 Q.A.M.
69 It was to be expected he would be young
69 World’s End
73 Metamorphosis
73 The Way Back
74 Storm
75 Seeing Ducks Asleep
75 On Rejoining an Old Ship
76 Strength and peace have come
77 After Santayana
77 Normandy Landing
81 St. James’s Park
82 Normandy 1944
83 Apple Orchard, Normandy 1944
83 Epithalamion
84 How the Time Passes
85 Prothalamion
85 The serene ring of the horizon
85 His love did not strike and blind me
85 When this southbound ship comes in
86 The great ship, reeling and rearing
87 With a Sapphire Ring
88 A Girl in Love
88 Peter
89 Emergency Operation
90 Fragment
90 Proud wings from a snow-swept pine forest
91 Canadian Spring
93 We Who Are Left
94 End of Foreign Service Leave
95 Victory in Europe
96 Ships’ sirens cry with ragged melancholy
97 All these I give you, the gentle cunning
97 For the Sweeties
98 April Shower
98 Poetics
99 Punctually to obey, unquestioning
100 Variation upon a Seventeenth Century Theme
101 Counterpoint
102 Pray Silence
103 This is how it was the first time
103 Gunboat Sortie
105 Candlelight works such a miracle
105 Alan Gateling
106 Dad
107 Covenant with Death
107 Five Years
109 Landscape with Rain: Schwarzwald
110 Music has two lives
110 Music goes out at the fingers
110 Four Freedoms
111 Dunster
112 Cabot Strait
113 It never seems to be summer in a ship
114 Pick-up
114 Morning Watch
115 Thalamion
116 Toro
118 J.W.
118 Anniversary
119 Rotterdam
119 Action Stations
120 Prayer for the Living
121 Sicilian Vignette
121 Take out of my heart
122 Discharged: Services No Longer Required
123 Rondo
124 Exegi Monumentum
124 One of your letters held the germ of a poem
124 Seascape
128 Letter from Lagos
131 Dieppe
133 Meditation on Tower Hill
134 To R.G.
135 Walker
135 After it’s all over, whatever the crisis
136 Adam
136 Lyric
136 In black, with a white
137 Chief
137 Undertow
140 Death by Drowning
141 Clerk in Underground
142 The Silver Cord
143 Priest among the Dandelions
144 Anima Poetae (after Coleridge)
144 Annapolis Nightfall
145 I wonder what it’s like
145 Night brings back the ships
145 Today, he thought, the office won’t be fun
146 Wedlock Is So Esy and So Clene
146 Beaky, aetat 77
147 Hooded Eagle
148 Those who have no love of life die
148 After Giordano Bruno
150 National Anathema
150 Alchemical Retort: Recipe for a National Flag
151 Ubi Thesaurus Ibi Cor
153 Her cheeks were plump and rosy
154 What was not said and never can now be said
154 Go littel boke, go littel my tragedy
155 Three Years After
155 There are other centres than cities and governments
156 Barrenness comes on my pen
156 The sea may pick my bones
156 Grim and sulky beauty
157 When what you wanted has not been had
157 Poem
158 Death of a Bird
159 The stark clarity of starlight
159 This is the self-created tragedy of the world
161 Christmas Eve
162 Hatasis
163 Super Flumina
165 Hodie tibi, cras mihi
165 The spear and thrust of bud and blossom
166 Biology Exhibitions
167 Utopia 1948
168 The high whirr of and wings and shadow
168 When the books are balanced
169 Penelope of the white hands and the bright eyes
169 How shall I break this chaotic shell of silence
170 Suddenly the veil of self-pity lifted and I felt
170 How pitifully transitory, small, imperfect seems
170 We must go
171 Dawn comes in inexorable beauty
171 The flower unfolds
172 Night Flight
173 Runaway
174 Me, driven through minefields, with a quartering
174 Elegy
178 If it must be an affair of drowning, let it be
178 This death was cruel certainly
180 Gyro
180 How shall I say, having come this far
180 Lazarus
182 Ploughed and harrowed with cries of drowning
183 Raising a hand to my forehead
183 Spindrift of spindle-shank children
184 Though inland, though far
184 The rest may rest as best they lost
184 Wheel dove, wheel eagle, gyre skylark
184 When we were younger and loving
185 I do not know these men
185 I would come to a point in timelessness
185 Myth, that ganglion of symbols
186 Veronica
186 There’s nothing for it but drop an anchor there
188 When we set out, there was little gear to muster
190 And this befell and that happened
190 You are here, auburn-headed and slender
191 Admonishment
192 Dionysiac
193 How very odd to miss the bus
195 Not at bidding nor commanding
195 O World, O Word
196 But where in all this world is Eden? Where is any garden?
196 Affair of Honour
198 Memorial
199 A Minor Poet Is Visited by the Muse
200 Calligrapher
203 Twenty years ago - on the bridge
203 The Sage
204 A House Divided
204 After a certain age all of us, good and bad, are grief-stricken
205 How shall I say I love thee
205 Pig
207 Saint Francis’ cloak praises
207 Flowering of an Ancient Reticence
208 I came into life and now am leaving it
209 Autumn Was Never So Late
211 I washed my hair
212 As a smiling 50-year old
213 Absence
213 Turn the key on this room
215 Cosmogony
215 Like an abandoned railway station when
216 A seagull in a lilac tree
216 Song
217 My heart is not here in the pages
219 O
220 All Shall Be Well
220 In winter sunlight on the open street
221 To Mr W.H. All Happiness
222 Woburn Square
223 Southampton Row
223 The full moon lost behind cloud
224 This silver turned yellow
225 The voice of the wind making snow
226 Thaw-water and thaw-wind
226 I wore a khaki shirt and red tie
227 There’s a wise woman who knows
229 Textual Notes
262 Explanatory Notes
287 Appendix 1: Contents of Poems 1939-1944
288 Appendix 2: Contents of No Man an Island
290 Appendix 3: Pages That End with the Last Line of a Stanza
292 Index of Titles and First Lines
xv Acknowledgments
xix Abbreviations
xxi Introduction
li Editorial Procedures
The Complete Poems of George Whalley
3 Ode to a College Sausage
4 Homer at Dawn
5 Louisburg
5 The Chase
6 Derelict
7 Dog Watch
8 Fragment
8 Transcendence
9 Hymn to the Moon
11 20th Century
12 Dedication
13 Testament of Youth (A Sonnet)
13 Vision
15 Desertion
16 Desire
16 In Examination
17 And so it will go on till time is dead
19 Darkness - and the wild, maniac rush
19 Of the hilly road’s adventurous bend
20 The Limitations of Academic Philosophy
21 Modelled upon a German Prayer
22 To Canada
23 A Smile and a Nod
23 Dove Cottage Unvisited
26 Battle Pattern
36 Behind the Victory
37 Domestic Manifesto
39 Wheat
40 By the River
41 Commandos Embarking
42 Initial Assault - Sicily
43 Aftermath, July 1943
44 Pilgrim Heart, Turn Homeward
45 The Sound of Bare Feet
46 One night in the darkness
47 Homecoming
48 London after Leave
49 Sitting the Night Out
50 The Messenger
53 The Moon
54 The Devils’ Day Out
55 English Winter
56 W.K.E.
56 Beech Wood
57 Minster Lovell
58 There was no way of telling
59 Portrait
59 You must have found within yourself
60 Das Lebewohl, die Abwesenheit, das Wiedersehen
62 For Elizabeth
62 Now we are both alone and isolate
63 Renunciation
63 Sleep
64 Christmas Eve
64 Winter North Atlantic
65 If Winter Comes
66 This Is Your Music
67 Returning to Sea
67 London, 1944
68 Q.A.M.
69 It was to be expected he would be young
69 World’s End
73 Metamorphosis
73 The Way Back
74 Storm
75 Seeing Ducks Asleep
75 On Rejoining an Old Ship
76 Strength and peace have come
77 After Santayana
77 Normandy Landing
81 St. James’s Park
82 Normandy 1944
83 Apple Orchard, Normandy 1944
83 Epithalamion
84 How the Time Passes
85 Prothalamion
85 The serene ring of the horizon
85 His love did not strike and blind me
85 When this southbound ship comes in
86 The great ship, reeling and rearing
87 With a Sapphire Ring
88 A Girl in Love
88 Peter
89 Emergency Operation
90 Fragment
90 Proud wings from a snow-swept pine forest
91 Canadian Spring
93 We Who Are Left
94 End of Foreign Service Leave
95 Victory in Europe
96 Ships’ sirens cry with ragged melancholy
97 All these I give you, the gentle cunning
97 For the Sweeties
98 April Shower
98 Poetics
99 Punctually to obey, unquestioning
100 Variation upon a Seventeenth Century Theme
101 Counterpoint
102 Pray Silence
103 This is how it was the first time
103 Gunboat Sortie
105 Candlelight works such a miracle
105 Alan Gateling
106 Dad
107 Covenant with Death
107 Five Years
109 Landscape with Rain: Schwarzwald
110 Music has two lives
110 Music goes out at the fingers
110 Four Freedoms
111 Dunster
112 Cabot Strait
113 It never seems to be summer in a ship
114 Pick-up
114 Morning Watch
115 Thalamion
116 Toro
118 J.W.
118 Anniversary
119 Rotterdam
119 Action Stations
120 Prayer for the Living
121 Sicilian Vignette
121 Take out of my heart
122 Discharged: Services No Longer Required
123 Rondo
124 Exegi Monumentum
124 One of your letters held the germ of a poem
124 Seascape
128 Letter from Lagos
131 Dieppe
133 Meditation on Tower Hill
134 To R.G.
135 Walker
135 After it’s all over, whatever the crisis
136 Adam
136 Lyric
136 In black, with a white
137 Chief
137 Undertow
140 Death by Drowning
141 Clerk in Underground
142 The Silver Cord
143 Priest among the Dandelions
144 Anima Poetae (after Coleridge)
144 Annapolis Nightfall
145 I wonder what it’s like
145 Night brings back the ships
145 Today, he thought, the office won’t be fun
146 Wedlock Is So Esy and So Clene
146 Beaky, aetat 77
147 Hooded Eagle
148 Those who have no love of life die
148 After Giordano Bruno
150 National Anathema
150 Alchemical Retort: Recipe for a National Flag
151 Ubi Thesaurus Ibi Cor
153 Her cheeks were plump and rosy
154 What was not said and never can now be said
154 Go littel boke, go littel my tragedy
155 Three Years After
155 There are other centres than cities and governments
156 Barrenness comes on my pen
156 The sea may pick my bones
156 Grim and sulky beauty
157 When what you wanted has not been had
157 Poem
158 Death of a Bird
159 The stark clarity of starlight
159 This is the self-created tragedy of the world
161 Christmas Eve
162 Hatasis
163 Super Flumina
165 Hodie tibi, cras mihi
165 The spear and thrust of bud and blossom
166 Biology Exhibitions
167 Utopia 1948
168 The high whirr of and wings and shadow
168 When the books are balanced
169 Penelope of the white hands and the bright eyes
169 How shall I break this chaotic shell of silence
170 Suddenly the veil of self-pity lifted and I felt
170 How pitifully transitory, small, imperfect seems
170 We must go
171 Dawn comes in inexorable beauty
171 The flower unfolds
172 Night Flight
173 Runaway
174 Me, driven through minefields, with a quartering
174 Elegy
178 If it must be an affair of drowning, let it be
178 This death was cruel certainly
180 Gyro
180 How shall I say, having come this far
180 Lazarus
182 Ploughed and harrowed with cries of drowning
183 Raising a hand to my forehead
183 Spindrift of spindle-shank children
184 Though inland, though far
184 The rest may rest as best they lost
184 Wheel dove, wheel eagle, gyre skylark
184 When we were younger and loving
185 I do not know these men
185 I would come to a point in timelessness
185 Myth, that ganglion of symbols
186 Veronica
186 There’s nothing for it but drop an anchor there
188 When we set out, there was little gear to muster
190 And this befell and that happened
190 You are here, auburn-headed and slender
191 Admonishment
192 Dionysiac
193 How very odd to miss the bus
195 Not at bidding nor commanding
195 O World, O Word
196 But where in all this world is Eden? Where is any garden?
196 Affair of Honour
198 Memorial
199 A Minor Poet Is Visited by the Muse
200 Calligrapher
203 Twenty years ago - on the bridge
203 The Sage
204 A House Divided
204 After a certain age all of us, good and bad, are grief-stricken
205 How shall I say I love thee
205 Pig
207 Saint Francis’ cloak praises
207 Flowering of an Ancient Reticence
208 I came into life and now am leaving it
209 Autumn Was Never So Late
211 I washed my hair
212 As a smiling 50-year old
213 Absence
213 Turn the key on this room
215 Cosmogony
215 Like an abandoned railway station when
216 A seagull in a lilac tree
216 Song
217 My heart is not here in the pages
219 O
220 All Shall Be Well
220 In winter sunlight on the open street
221 To Mr W.H. All Happiness
222 Woburn Square
223 Southampton Row
223 The full moon lost behind cloud
224 This silver turned yellow
225 The voice of the wind making snow
226 Thaw-water and thaw-wind
226 I wore a khaki shirt and red tie
227 There’s a wise woman who knows
229 Textual Notes
262 Explanatory Notes
287 Appendix 1: Contents of Poems 1939-1944
288 Appendix 2: Contents of No Man an Island
290 Appendix 3: Pages That End with the Last Line of a Stanza
292 Index of Titles and First Lines
