Wilderness Gothic

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Wilderness Gothic

Al Purdy 1968

“Wilderness Gothic” was published in 1968 in a collection called Wild Grape Wine just as Purdy’s career was beginning to take shape. In many ways, the poem reflects on the themes of human aspiration and the possibility of failure, which corresponds with Purdy’s own struggle to succeed in the literary world. At the start of Purdy’s career, he endured criticism of his early works and his lack of formal education, yet he continued to create poetry, a testament to his own commitment to his craft and his unbridled faith in his abilities.

The poem begins in the present time and describes the actions of an ordinary man who is working hard to repair a church spire. The man hangs from a rope and takes a great risk to donate his time and labor to God. The poem then shifts in time and place so as to discuss history. The speaker mentions a Durer landscape, a reference to the artist Albrecht Durer (1471–1528). One of Durer’s woodcuts is called The Fall of Icarus, which reflects some of the themes of “Wilderness Gothic.” According to the myth of Icarus, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, tried to escape imprisonment by flying with wings fashioned of feathers and wax. However, Icarus did not heed his father’s warning about flying too close to the sun. Rather, Icarus was so exhilarated by the act of flying that he flew too high and the sun melted the wax in his wings, and Icarus fell to his death. As a result, Icarus has become a symbol of aspiration, yet he also represents the human capacity for failure.

Just as Icarus fell to his death, “Wilderness Gothic” ends with the line “perhaps he will fall.” This statement implies that while the man working on the church is willing to take a heroic and noble risk, he is not immune to the consequences of that risk. However, the overall message of the work is that the risk is still worth taking.

Author Biography

Alfred Wellington Purdy was born on December 30, 1918, in the small farming town of Wooler, Ontario, Canada. When Purdy was just a toddler, his father died, prompting him and his mother to move to the nearby town of Trenton. There he enrolled in public school and published his first poem, “Spotlight.” Purdy dropped out of school in the ninth grade and never went to college, preferring to ride the rails in and around Vancouver and support himself through several odd jobs. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 and married Eurithe Parkhurst a year later. After World War II, Purdy continued to earn a living with random work, so that he could have the freedom to pursue his poetry. He self-published his first collection, The Enchanted Echo, in 1944; however, it would take more than ten years for Purdy to produce another compilation, The Crafte So Long to Lerne. Since Purdy was a self-taught poet and had not immersed himself in the work of his peers, critics felt Purdy’s early work to be immature and undeveloped. This criticism did not stop Purdy from fully dedicating himself to writing, and he succeeded in creating his own style with his next work Poems for All the Annettes, a volume that finally brought him some critical praise and the title of working-class poet.

During the 1960s, Purdy traveled extensively, spending time in Cuba, Mexico, Europe, Japan, and Africa. In 1965, he published The Cariboo Horses, a breakthrough compilation that confirmed his reputation in the literary world and earned him a Governor General’s Literary Award. At that point, Purdy was able to support himself and his wife with work as a teacher and lecturer at the university level. He also continued his globetrotting and added travel essays to his resume. In 1970, Purdy became a visiting associate professor at the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario, among others.

Purdy continued to produce several volumes of poetry, including The New Romans, Being Alive,

Wild Grape Wine, The Stone Bird, and The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. The last work was dedicated to his wife and earned him another Governor General’s Literary Award in 1986 as well as the status of one of the most significant Canadian poets of the twentieth century. Late in his life, Purdy published several works that focused on his correspondence with fellow poet Charles Bukowski, and he then tackled his first novel, A Splinter in the Heart in 1990. Purdy completed his autobiography Reaching for the Beaufort Sea in 1993. For a man with modest means and little education, Purdy enjoyed great success. However, he told critic Peter O’Brien (in Essays on Canadian Writing) that “it’s an awful cliché to say it, that writing itself is its own reward . . . but it’s true. It has to be.” Purdy died of lung cancer at his winter home on Vancouver Island on April 21, 2000. He was eighty-one years old.

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Poem Summary

Lines 1–7

In the opening stanza, Purdy introduces the narrator who stands on the shore of Roblin Lake, which happens to be near the home of the poet. This implies that Purdy is the one who observes, just two shores away, a crew of workingmen “sheathing the church spire with new metal.” Upon closer inspection, Purdy notices a lone man who “hangs in the sky over there from a piece of rope.” The man is clearly taking a chance with his life to fix the spire because he is “working his way up along the spire until there’s nothing left to nail on.” The spire is also described as “God’s belly-scratcher,” implying that while the man is dedicated to his work, there’s a sense that in the grand scheme of things, the act may just be a minor, inconsequential job.

Lines 8–15

In the following lines, Purdy ponders the workman’s motivation for his work. He hypothesizes that it is the man’s faith that drives him. However, because the work is so dangerous, the man’s faith “reaches beyond: touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob.” The mention of Jacob refers to the Book of Genesis in which Jacob has a vision of a stairway that leads to heaven and later builds a pillar in the place which he believes is the gate to heaven. Jacob’s experience leads him to believe that God manifests himself and his purpose in times of hardship. Thus, Purdy believes that the man working on the church is not only doing God’s work but also thinks his faith in God will protect him from harm. As the man “pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky, [he] contends heroically with difficult problems of gravity, sky navigation and mythopoeia.” This last word, mythopoeia, means creating a myth. This suggests that the man hanging in the sky might see his work in mythic terms and its value in mythic proportions, which could lead to a struggle with maintaining his humility to avoid an act of hubris that is a sin in God’s eyes. If the man hopes to reach heaven’s gate through his acts of good will, he must remember that acts alone do not guarantee entry to heaven. Ultimately, it’s the man’s faith that will redeem him in God’s eyes.

The next lines confirm the man’s commitment, saying that in addition to contending with the above issues (gravity, mythopoeia), he isn’t being paid for his work. Rather, the man is volunteering his time and labor to the church and to God. Purdy refers to the man’s labor as a “non-union job” without tangible benefits such as health insurance. This comment is a testament to the sacrifice one makes to God in doing his work; however, it also implies that the compensation is intangible, and, therefore, it has the potential to be more spiritually rewarding.

Lines 16–20

The second stanza moves away from the lone man working on the church. It abandons the shores of Roblin Lake and expands out into the world. Purdy mentions the fields and the woodlots that line the environment and how “death is yodelling quiet” throughout the land. The mention of death silently hovering around the man alludes to the fact that death is a common occurrence; in fact, it has taken the lives of three young birds that were crushed “in the sub-surface of the new county highway.” These deaths confirm the idea that death is a necessary part of life, even when great risk is not being taken. In addition, the act of progress, shown in the creation of a new highway, can often result in the sacrifice of innocent victims.

Lines 21–24

The beginning of the third stanza makes a transition from the present time to the past. Purdy states that the “picture is incomplete.” He delves into a “Durer landscape,” making a reference to the artist Albrecht Durer, who created religious woodcuts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Durer landscape adds another dimension to the poem, putting it into a context that involves the myth of Icarus. Icarus and his father, Daedalus, tried to climb to great heights using wings made with feathers and wax to gain their freedom. However, Icarus ignored his father’s advice to watch how high he flew. Icarus got too close to the sun, which melted his wings and resulted in his fall and death. Daedalus was devastated as he watched his son’s demise, which is reflected in the line, “gothic ancestors peer from medieval sky, dour faces trapped.” The dour face is that of Daedalus, who must helplessly watch his only son die because of his noble vice.

Lines 25–31

As the fourth stanza continues, Purdy mentions “work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh for what keeps moving and changing and flashing,” and “a two-headed calf born in the barn.” These images have religious overtones and hark back to pioneer times, implying that the history of Purdy’s landscape must be acknowledged to understand the present. The poem seems to say that, despite the agony and pain that accompanies life, it keeps moving in an unforgiving fashion. Purdy questions the reason behind agony, asking if it is a sign of “fire and brimstone?” He then answers his own question by saying that these acts are, instead, just signs of “an age and a faith moving into transition.”

Lines 32–37

The poem comes to a close by returning to the present and engaging the reader in some suspenseful action. Coming back to the man working on the church, Purdy sets up the ending by saying “deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant, double-yolked eggs and the house creaks a little— something is about to happen.” The foreshadowing is clear and alludes to the calm before the storm, as if Purdy is anticipating a tragedy. With the myth of Icarus resonating throughout the poem, Purdy believes that the workingman with the capacity to rise above the earth will eventually return to the earth, just as Icarus did. The final line “perhaps he will fall,” confirms the theory, yet it’s also an affirmation because with death the man’s life and work will not be just a fleeting moment in time, but it will become a part of history and speak to and inspire future generations.

Themes

Religion and Mythology

The themes of religion and mythology are present throughout “Wilderness Gothic.” Most prominent is the image of a workingman at the top a church repairing its spire, which is then coupled with a mention of Jacob from the Book of Genesis. This allusion serves to connect the man with the concept of whether good works and acts of faith ensure a rightful place in heaven. As the workingman hangs in the air against the blue sky, it brings to mind Jacob’s vision of a ladder that leads directly to Heaven. In addition, the Greek myth of Icarus plays a large part in the poem by exploring the idea of human aspiration and the capacity for failure. Purdy’s poem suggests a connection between the workingman’s noble ambition and Icarus’ attempts to fly. However, Icarus died because he had too much ambition, a vice that may also bring the workingman to his demise. Another association that exists involves the idea that Icarus, because of his folly, became an emblem of aspiration, and so the poem offers the same possibility to the workingman—that death may, ironically, bring him immortality.

Work

Purdy introduces the theme of work immediately with the first few lines of the poem. The first thing the narrator observes is a crew repairing a church two shores away. The focus turns on one man, who is hanging by a rope, “working his way up along the spire.” As the poem continues, Purdy announces that the man is doing volunteer work. He will not be paid for his labor nor will he receive the type of benefits that come with other jobs. However, the man is doing God’s work, a notion that has in large part disappeared from modern culture. The admiration for the workingman is evident as Purdy refers to his deeds as heroic. Since Purdy was a working-class poet, he understood the inherent value in doing hard labor. He suggests that there’s something noble in a hard day’s work, a concept that might put Purdy in direct contrast with his intellectual, university-educated peers. By creating a poem that exalts the workingman, Purdy criticizes the values of modern society by comparing

Topics for Further Study

Critics claim that Purdy is a distinctively Canadian poet. What makes his work Canadian? Explore the relationship between American and Canadian politics and how that relationship may affect and influence Purdy’s political poems.
Read about Jacob in the Book of Genesis, and explore how his relationship with God parallels the plight of the man in “Wilderness Gothic.”
Compare and contrast the work ethic of the Victorian pioneers mentioned in “Wilderness Gothic” with that of today’s culture. How do they differ? Why do you think these differences exist?
Have you ever taken a risk and failed? Explain your encounter, your motivations, and what, if anything, you learned from your experiences.

modern people to the people of past centuries, who eagerly sacrificed time and labor for the greater glory of God. The workingman seems to be an exception for his time, having more in common with his medieval counterparts who were not concerned with a wage or whether they had a union job.

Death

The first image of death in “Wilderness Gothic” is a misdirection of sorts. The third and fourth lines of the poem announce that “someone hangs in the sky / over there from a piece of rope.” This immediately brings to mind someone who has committed suicide by hanging. However, it is quickly realized that the man in question is not dead, rather he is working to repair the spire on a church. It is made clear in the next few lines that the man is putting his life in danger for the sake of God and putting his fate in God’s hands. Since, the man could fall to his death at any time, the narrator believes the man’s faith must reach far and wide. As the poem continues, it describes the death of three young birds who meet their demise because of the construction of a new county highway. Considering that the birds meet their death while the workingman holds his life in the balance, the poem implies that death is present everywhere and can occur randomly and without warning.

The idea of death is continued as the myth of Icarus is mentioned. Icarus met his death while trying to secure his freedom. Consequently, the workingman may lose his own life in the pursuit of a kind of spiritual freedom. Finally, the poem ends with the line, “perhaps he will fall,” which predicts the death of the workingman. And while it is not definite that the man will die while working on the church, the line “something is about to happen” implies that the possibility of death hovers heavily in the air. This further confirms the concept that death can come at any time, and is, in fact, a necessary part of a life and a consequence of a world that inevitably moves and progresses over time.

Style

Non-linear Narrative

When Purdy composed “Wilderness Gothic,” he departed dramatically from his early dependence on romantic models and delved into a more relaxed, nonlinear form of poetry that boasts a colloquial and contemporary style. As he traveled the Canadian countryside with his contemporaries, reading his poetry to audiences, his construction was liberated and became more relaxed and connected to oral syntax and speech patterns. Essentially, his style accommodates the speaking voice, which highlights run-on sentences, fragments, and mixed tenses, as well as variations in tone and diction. It also infuses Purdy’s poetry with a range of emotions, such as humor and anger. In addition, the nonlinear narrative of “Wilderness Gothic” affords Purdy the freedom to express different points of view.

Narrative Lyric

“Wilderness Gothic” can also be considered a narrative lyric, a construction that is characterized by a two-part poem. The first part of the poem is usually some type of anecdote, while the second part offers an investigation and further understanding of that anecdote, then it finishes with a satisfying end. The first part of “Wilderness Gothic” begins with the tale of a workingman repairing a church spire. After the poem introduces this character, it shifts into an investigation of the

Compare & Contrast

1928: Television station WGY, in Schenectady, New York, airs the country’s first regularly scheduled television broadcasts.

1948: One million homes in the United States have televisions, up from five thousand just three years earlier.

1952: Nearly 17 million homes in the United States have television sets.

1962: Ninety-eight percent of the households in the United States have at least one television.

Today: Television screens are seen frequently in public places, including grocery stores, airport terminals, stadiums, and classrooms.
1928: A year after the first commercial talking movie, The Jazz Singer, Disney releases the first cartoon with a voice track. Named Steamboat Willie, the cartoon introduces the popular character Mickey Mouse.

1938: Disney releases the world’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

1961: The Flintstones becomes the first animated television series to be broadcast during the prime-time evening hours.

Today: Computer artists use graphic simulations to design impressive visual effects for movies and television.
1928: Penicillin is first proven to have bacteria-fighting properties. In following years, a number of antibiotics are developed, changing the face of medicine.

Today: Researchers are finding antibiotics to be less successful than they were a generation ago. Because of the extensive use of antibiotics, tougher bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics have evolved.

subject in relation to the past. Once the investigation ends, the poem comes full circle, back to the workingman. The last few lines serve to provide closure.

Historical Context

When Purdy created “Wilderness Gothic,” he was going through a major transformation that reflects the times in which he lived. Purdy had lived through the Depression and World War II, and the style of his early poetry was quite formal, which mirrored the literary and social culture of the 1940s. However, during the 1960s, the United States and Canada were experiencing significant social changes that divided older and younger generations. The younger generations were expelling rigid social constraints and getting involved in a number of political movements, such as the civil rights movement (which fought for equal rights for minority ethnic groups), the antiwar movement (which promoted civil disobedience against the war in Vietnam), the sexual revolution (which encouraged people to express their sexual desires more freely), and the women’s movement (which fought for equal rights for women). In addition, the literary culture was expanding. The Beat poets in America, such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, were changing the literary landscape and redefining and revolutionizing the craft. Since the attitudes in America inevitably permeated its northern neighbor, Canada, these attitudes affected Purdy and his work, as it was at this time that he began to change his old style of writing and expand his horizons.

In addition, during the 1960s, the Canada Council began programs that allowed Purdy to dedicate himself to writing and not to worry about supporting himself with other work. This gave him the freedom to stop doing the menial work that he’d done since he left school as a teenager and to travel extensively during this time, wandering the Canadian countryside with his fellow poets and taking his poetry directly to the people. By reading his work to large audiences and interacting with his peers, Purdy was able to modify his rigid style of poetry in favor of a freer verse. He also began traveling to different countries, such as Cuba, Mexico, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, which exposed Purdy to different people and cultures. During this time, he familiarized himself with the poets Pablo Neruda, Charles Bukowski, and Cesar Vallejo. While he recognized these poets as influences, he explained in For Openers: Conversations with Twenty-four Canadian Writers, “I believe that when a poet fixes on one style or method he severely limits his present and future development.” This statement serves to prove that Purdy finally set aside his previous inclination of mimicking other poets to the point that his influences were no longer apparent in his work.

While “Wilderness Gothic” is not necessarily set in the 1960s—in fact, it does not have a definite time frame—the subject matter resembles a shift in generational values. Purdy’s poem compares and contrasts religious faith and work between the Victorian pioneers and that of more modern people. This idea has its roots in the generational struggles that occurred during the 1960s. Young people were at odds with their parents and the conservative political system over their views about gender, ethnic, and international relations. The 1960s, in some respects, represented a change in the cultural climate toward greater freedom. In this poem, it is Purdy’s style and construction that serve to capture the spirit of the freedom of the 1960s.

Critical Overview

When “Wilderness Gothic” was published in the volume Wild Grape Wine, Purdy achieved a breakthrough in the literary world. Critics regarded his previous work as generally inferior and immature in comparison to the work of his peers. However, with the collection that included “Wilderness Gothic,” Purdy reinvented himself, and the critics noticed that he had finally developed his own unique style. Critic George Woodcock calls it one of “his most completely successful poems,” saying “it is one of the poems in which Purdy deftly juxtaposes the different elements of his world.” As a result of this work and others he published at the time, Purdy received the Governor General’s Literary Award, which significantly advanced his reputation as a poet. At that point in his life, Purdy was able to support himself financially with his writing and began to lecture at prestigious Canadian universities.

Purdy sustained a successful career until his death. While some critics note that his works has a rough, unfinished quality, other critics praise Purdy for continuing to create poems with expanding insight at a late stage in his life. When his Collected Poems of Al Purdy was published, critics called it an exceptional accomplishment. Purdy’s prolific career is summed up by critic John Bemrose, who says, “a hundred years from now, one of the few Canadian poets whose work will still be read is Al Purdy. . . . A handful of his best poems . . . already have the feel of classics; they are uncannily powerful meditations on fate, landscape, and history.”

Criticism

Michele Drohan

Drohan is a professional editor and writer who specializes in classic and contemporary literature. In the following essay, she explores Purdy’s working-class background and the idea that his personal beliefs about life and his experiences in the working world find their way into his poems, particularly the ideas that are expressed in his poem.

Purdy’s ancestors were Canadian Loyalists who settled in Upper Canada in the 1780s after the Revolutionary War. This family history influenced Purdy’s early writing, and he exalted his ancestors’ tenacity and courage in his writing. After Purdy’s father (a farmer) died, young Purdy moved with his mother to a house that was more than one hundred years old. Purdy described the house in his poem “Morning and It’s Summer,” saying: “The floors were sagging upstairs and down, as if the house was tired from all these years and couldn’t stand properly upright any longer.” While Purdy attended public school for a while, he eventually dropped out and spent his teenage years working through the Great Depression. After Purdy joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, he married and moved to Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he built his own house and continued working in places such as a mattress factory. During all these years, Purdy kept writing poetry. By Purdy’s own admission, the poems he writes represent himself. He tells critic Peter O’Brien that he doesn’t understand how “anybody could not say that about their poems.” Purdy continues, “I’m not saying that everything I write is God’s truth or anybody’s truth, but it is my kind of truth. It’s the truth of the moment.” In fact, one of his poems “Piling Blood,” discussed his work at a factory where he stacked piles of blood from animal slaughters. Because he does not dissociate himself from his work, Purdy’s life inevitably influences his poems. With “Wilderness Gothic,” Purdy is making a fierce statement about sacrifice, ambition, aspiration, and faith, while also reflecting on his own strength of character. While Purdy always considered poetry his true calling, the work he did to support himself made him a working-class poet, one who did not receive any formal training and who looked to Canada’s history for inspiration. Critic George Woodcock said “Canada—and Loyalist Ontario in particular—is indeed the heart of [Purdy’s] world.” These factors combined to earn him the title of poet of the people.

Much of Purdy’s work is grounded in the Canadian land. Critic George Woodcock believes that Purdy has “an awareness of the brilliant surface of the earth as clear as that of an imagist, and yet at the same time a sense of depths and heights, of super real dimensions, so that common things can suddenly become irradiated and the world swing into ecstasy.” This idea is represented fully in “Wilderness Gothic,” as Purdy takes a common moment of a man working to fix a church spire and turns it into something greater, a testament to his dedication to God, his heroic work ethic, and his connection to history.

The setting of Purdy’s poems are often recognizable as his homeland. His house in Ameliasburgh was close to Roblin Lake, which is the first image presented in “Wilderness Gothic.” This implies that the narrator in the poem is Purdy, who stands watching “across Roblin Lake, two shores away.” By inserting himself into the poem, Purdy shows that the ideas expressed in the work reflect his own feelings about life. He is writing about the world in which he lives, that of the common man. As “Wilderness Gothic” progresses, Purdy is surprised to see a man hanging in the sky by a rope “working his way up along the spire until there’s nothing left to nail on.” Purdy’s first reaction is that of wonder, and he ponders the man’s motivation for working at such a dangerous task. The idea of faith is introduced, as Purdy believes it must be the man’s intense faith in God that gives him the strength and desire to risk his own life.

Purdy’s curiosity turns to admiration as he describes the man’s efforts as brave, pointing out that

“As ‘Wilderness Gothic’ progresses, Purdy is surprised to see a man hanging in the sky by a rope ‘working his way up along the spire until there’s nothing left to nail on.’ Purdy’s first reaction is that of wonder, and he ponders the man’s motivation for working at such a dangerous task. The idea of faith is introduced….”

the man “contends heroically with difficult problems of gravity, sky navigation and mythopoeia.” The next few lines make a strong statement about the times in which Purdy lived: “his volunteer time and labour donated to God, minus sick benefits of course on a non-union job.” Upon closer look, this epiphany becomes a declaration about the work ethics of the man in relation to society at large. Purdy lives in a modern time, where most people are concerned with their daily wage and what kind of benefits they are receiving when they do a job. Instead of doing work for the sake of the work, the focus of any job for most people is on tangible compensation. The workingman in the poem stands out as a rare example of doing work for God, a kind of work that is primarily volunteer in nature. The rewards are therefore intangible. The man working on the church reaches noble heights, as he labors for his faith. While his rewards will inevitably be more spiritual, there is no guarantee, in the end, that his good works will ensure his place in heaven. This lack of guarantee makes the work that much more courageous and admirable in Purdy’s eyes.

Purdy then shifts in time and introduces what he calls a Durer landscape. Albrecht Durer was an artist in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who made religious woodcuts. One of his woodcuts details

What Do I Read Next?

The Bukowski/Purdy Letters, 1964–1974: A Decade of Dialogue (1983) is a volume of correspondence between the two poets.
Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952–1983 (1994) is a collection by Milton Acorn, a fellow “working class” Canadian poet who was admired by and often compared to Purdy.
Poems for All the Annettes (1962) is Al Purdy’s first critically acclaimed collection of poetry.
Reaching for the Beaufort Sea: An Autobiography (1994) by Al Purdy is a comprehensive look into the poet’s life and work. It is edited by Alex Widen.

the fall of Icarus. Icarus is a mythical Greek figure who died while trying to escape from imprisonment. He had wings attached to his body with wax; however, he flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. Despite Icarus’ mistake, his legend became a symbol for human aspiration. By making a reference to the Durer landscape, Purdy suggests a comparison between the workingman in the poem and the myth of Icarus. At first glance, the workingman’s dedications might seem naive and foolish; however, Purdy seems to be saying that, like Icarus, the workingman should be admired for his ambition, even if it might result in tragedy.

The poem also makes references to Victorian pioneers and medieval ancestors and how they faced great adversity in their times. Hard work was a way of life back then and it was commonplace to dedicate time and energy to God. Similarly, Purdy was a self-educated man who worked hard to support himself, a sacrifice he made for his creative ambition. Perhaps unlike some of his contemporaries who were university educated, Purdy understood the value in a hard day’s work and how it gave him not only the freedom to engage in creative pursuits but a wealth of ideas to use in his poetry. Purdy clearly admires and relates to the workingman in his poem, while also commenting on a society that undervalues the meaning of hard work.

At the end of “Wilderness Gothic,” Purdy makes a statement that hints at his own fear of defeat. There is an anticipation of something tragic in the last few lines. By announcing that “something is about to happen,” Purdy exposes the anxiety that accompanies any risk—that of fear of failure. Purdy understood failure very well. In his early years as a poet, he received negative criticism about his work, causing him to doubt his own abilities. However, Purdy never stopped writing, an ambition that mirrors the man in the poem who will keep climbing his way up the spire until “there’s nothing left to nail on.”

The last line of the poem is perhaps the most shocking and most revealing in the whole piece. It also proves to be a bit of a conundrum. By saying “perhaps he will fall,” it seems that Purdy is almost willing the tragedy to occur. However, it begs the question, why would Purdy wish for the man he admires to meet his demise? One interpretation is that he is envious of the man’s dedication and wishes him to fall and be punished for his naivete. On a second reading, though, the line takes on another meaning. When Purdy says, “perhaps he will fall,” he seems to be acknowledging one of life’s ironies—that to succeed at anything great, one must be prepared to fail. Considering the fate of Icarus, it was his failure that was captured in legend. Certainly, falling or failing is the risk one takes to achieve such grand ambitions; but, for Purdy, that fate is far more noble than never having taken the risk at all. Purdy’s last line then serves to confirm the man’s courage, because if there were no risk, the man would never have the opportunity to be a hero. On another level, Purdy is also serving to confirm his own life’s work as if to say, because he risked so much himself for the sake of his craft, he too has lived a courageous life, and he too may one day become a legend and, more importantly, a part of Canadian literary history.

Source: Michele Drohan, Critical Essay on “Wilderness Gothic,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Alice Van Wart

Van Wart is an editor who has a Ph.D. in Canadian literature. In the following essay, she offers a close reading of the poem to show Purdy’s development of theme and technique.

In the sixties, Canada experienced a cultural renaissance in its poetry, a phenomenon that started in the fifties. One reason for the rising popularity of poetry was coffeehouse poetry readings that made it possible for a poet to become a public figure and persona. Two flamboyant and well-known Canadian “coffeehouse” poets were Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton. A third was Al Purdy. Purdy was one of a number of poets, along with Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, and Patrick Lane, whose roots lay in Canada’s working class. These poets turned away from the formal poems favored at the time and wrote an informal poetry based on narrative and anecdote written in a colloquial voice. Their interests were in the rediscovery of their personal history and in bringing to Canadian poetry a sense of its own past.

A prolific poet, who won numerous awards, Purdy began writing poetry in his teens, paying to have his first book published. Though he did not continue his formal education beyond grade ten, Purdy read voraciously and worked diligently at his craft. In his introduction to The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, Dennis Lee, speaking of Purdy’s long, self-taught apprenticeship, observed that Purdy was one of “the slowest developers in the history of poetry.”

Purdy also traveled widely and worked at various casual and manual jobs, often using these experiences for his subject matter. His poetry moved towards an exploration of indigenous myth. He mythologized the landscape of the southeastern end of Lake Ontario, the area where he was born and lived. Human behavior and destiny fascinated Purdy. His unique voice used humor and compassion as it blended the cadences of real speech with elegiac form. Because of his colloquial language, the informality of his tone, and his tendency towards using a long line, Purdy’s poems are immediately accessible though they convey complex ideas that express universal values.

“Wilderness Gothic” is typical of Purdy’s poetry both in subject and technique. Though located in the particular, the poem reflects complex ideas. The human figure in the poem, the workman re-sheathing the church spire, is in the poet’s eyes both literally a tiny dot in the sky and metaphorically a tiny dot at the intersection of historical time. As the poet reflects on what he sees, the changing nature of his perceptions constitutes a complex meditation that moves beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the physical to the metaphysical and encompasses the historical. It expresses the idea of life as a continuing process where each new age brings in new ideas and casts off the old.

The poem works through three stanzas of free verse. Each stanza expresses the poet’s changing

“Because of his colloquial language, the informality of his tone, and his tendency towards using a long line, Purdy’s poems are immediately accessible though they convey complex ideas that express universal values.”

perspective as he watches a workman contending with the physical problems of “replacing [the] rotten timber” of the church’s spire “with pine thews” while being suspended in the sky. In the second stanza, the poet’s perceptions broaden as he sees the workman with the framework of the countryside. In the third stanza, the poet sees the scene as a tableau, equating the scene before his eyes with a painter’s landscape.

The oxymoron in the poem’s title points to poets’ strategy of juxtaposing the abstract and the concrete and the past and the present. The wilderness, a land in the new world, is thought of as uninhabited, uncultivated, and uncivilized. Gothic is a term that describes a style of highly evolved and excessively ornate architecture popular in Western Europe from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Yoking these terms highlights Purdy’s intention of showing the abstract through the concrete, while collapsing the past and the present.

Purdy’s poem begins in the particular locale of Roblin Lake with a casual observation. The poet notices across the lake “two shores away / they are sheathing the church spire / with new metal.” From the distance, it appears to the poet that the person doing the work “hangs in the sky / . . . from a piece of rope.” Both the line’s syntax and the break between lines three and four work to isolate the image of the man hanging in the sky, a startling image to the poet and reader, before the poet realizes the worker is suspended by a rope “hammering and fitting God’s belly-scratcher.” The playful image of the church’s spire as God’s belly-scratcher returns the poet to the workman “working his way up along the spire / until there’s nothing left to nail on.”

As the poet casually observes the image before him, he begins to think about the nature of the person working on the spire. He speculates on what the worker is thinking as he works in “the blue cave of the sky.” The poet wonders if the worker’s religious faith “reaches beyond” the top of the spire, or if he “touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob.” The allusion to Jacob suggests the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32: 24-29), and unites the concrete, temporal, and physical world of “rotten timber” and “pine thews” to the metaphysical world of abstract speculation concerned with the nature of faith. The last five lines of the stanza reinforce the connection between the concrete and the abstract as the worker “pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky,” and contends “heroically with difficult problems of / gravity, sky navigation and mythopoeia.” Mythopoeia in this sense refers to the mythology associated with religious thought. In the last line of the first stanza, however, the poet’s tone shifts away from the seriousness of his reflections to ironic humor. The poet wonders if the worker has volunteered his time and labor, donating it “to God.” In this case, the job is non-union and has no “sick benefits.” Considering the danger of his job, the poet implies he may very well need them.

In the second stanza, the poet sees the scene of the man hanging beside the spire in the distance within the framework of the countryside. The sense of the poet’s presence and his watching eyes fade as the focus in the stanza turns outward to the impersonal natural world where fields “are yellowing into harvest” and “nestling and fingerling are sky and water borne.” The images of the mature birds and fish suggest summer’s end and approaching autumn. The symbolic association of fall with death is explicit in the colorful image of death “yodelling quiet in green woodlots.” In the last two lines of the stanza, death becomes literal when “the bodies of three young birds [that] have disappeared” are found “in the sub-surface of the new county highway.” The death of the birds suggests the inherent dangers in the “new county highway.”

By the end of the second stanza, the poet has painted with words a picture of a church in a country landscape where a man is repairing a church spire. In the third stanza, the poet compares the picture in front of him to a Durer landscape. Yet, he is aware that the picture in front of him “is incomplete” and understands that the “part left out / . . . might alter the whole Durer landscape.” The allusion to this particular painter is central to the meaning of “Wilderness Gothic.” Albrecht Durer, considered the greatest artist of the northern Renascence, brought the development of Gothic art in northern Europe to its pinnacle. At the same time, he radically altered the Gothic style of earlier German art by bringing to it the new styles of the Italian Renaissance. Durer’s art represents a period of intense change when new learning and beliefs and new styles of art were changing the world from medieval to modern.

Behind Durer’s new style, however, exist the unseen eyes of his “gothic ancestors” who “peer from medieval sky.” The gothic ancestors not only represent the traditions that came before but also the lives of the people. In the same way, the poet sees beyond the “dour faces trapped in photograph albums.” Like the gothic ancestors, the poet sees peering from behind Durer’s paintings, he sees the dour faces in the photographs “escaping / to clop down iron roads with matched greys: / work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh.” The enjambment of lines twenty four and twenty five places the emphasis on the word “escaping,” and brings back to the trapped faces a sense of their lives. The photographs could be those of his own Victorian ancestors. Whoever they are, the poet sees what the still images cannot show: “what keeps moving and changing and flashing / beyond and past the long frozen Victorian day.” The progressive verbs suggest the nature of life in all its flux and change and work in direct contrast to the words “trapped” and “frozen.” What paintings and photographs cannot capture is life with its constant flux and change. The next two lines shift to a series of rhetorical questions that evoke through the poet’s use of image something of “the long frozen Victorian day.”

The Victorian era, defined by repressive attitudes about sex and matters of the body taught by a grim Presbyterianism, believed in “fire and brimstone” as the consequence of sin. Natural aberrations like the birth of a “two headed cow” or “a sharp female agony” (a miscarriage or natural abortion) would have been seen as signs of sin in an age going wrong. The images evoke an ominous sense of impending disaster often associated with events in a transitional age. The poet clarifies the association of the images with a transitional time when he calls it “an age and a faith moving into transition.” The following lines list a series of minor domestic occurrences. Dinner is cold and the “new-baked bread a failure.” Outside the “deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant” while the eggs are “double yolked and the house creaks a little.” He concludes with the apocalyptic suggestion that “Something is about to happen.”

The shift to the present tense in line thirty one, however, indicates a return to the present time of 1968 when the poem was written. The age and faith that moves into transition refers not only to the transition of the previous time but also to the sixties, a time of radical ideals and changing values. There is a corresponding shift in tone in these lines as the poet’s thoughts turn back to the present, to the double yoked egg he has just cracked and the creaking of the house, and to the ominous sense of something about to happen. The shift in tone accompanies the change in the choice of images. A doubled yoked egg is less ominous than a two headed calf, and the failure of baked bread and a cold dinner could not seriously be seen as signs of troubled times. The serious nature of the poet’s reflections has turned into playful self-mockery. His seemingly ominous prediction that “something is about to happen” is followed by the ironically portentousness of the “leaves are still.” The image deflates the poet’s high seriousness as he returns to “a man hammering in the sky” two shores away. The poem turns back to the beginning and the specific moment where “something is about to happen.” The wry humor that ended the first stanza concludes the poem with the poet’s short and cryptic conclusion that “perhaps he will fall.” The line is intentionally bathetic as apocalyptic imaginings are brought back to the moment and the physical reality of the danger of the man’s work.

In “Wilderness Gothic,” Al Purdy creates seamless shifts in perspectives and voice to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, to collapse past and present, and to bring together the near and the far, the here. The poem expresses a process that shows the universal in the concrete particulars of place and event.

Source: Alice Van Wart, Critical Essay on “Wilderness Gothic,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

S. K. Robisch

Robisch teaches ecological and American literature at Purdue University. In the following essay, he considers Al Purdy’s poem as not only a regional and Canadian poem but as a North American poem.

Al Purdy spent several years and five books of poetry on finding his subject matter, and when he found it, he achieved great success. “Wilderness Gothic” may be the poem that best demonstrates the subject matter he found. His early work followed strict formal conventions; much of it was derivative and unoriginal, but it gave him an education in poetry.

“. . . Purdy captured in his work a Canadian sense of vastness, of the land as a presence that prompts Canadians to think in terms of great scale, ancient time, and their position in that place . . . . the Canadian sense exhibited in much contemporary writing is different than the United States’ sense of promised land, nature as gift, and revolutionary conquest.”

He did not attend a university, and so he learned poetry by reading, by examining, by meeting other poets, and, finally, by moving to a place that inspired a great change in his language. He is a poet of the school of hard knocks. It is important to know this when reading “Wilderness Gothic,” because his strength as a writer and the fame he gained have often been attributed to his strong ties to his region and his nation. One important trait of this particular poem, however, is that it also demonstrates Purdy’s sense of history and scope. In an Al Purdy poem, a small place usually points the reader to a much larger and older one.

The poem begins with a reference to Roblin Lake, which is located in Ontario, Canada, where Purdy and his wife bought a house in the mid-1960s. At the lake, Purdy produced a new, more vibrant poetry that looked closely at his surroundings in a rough-hewn voice, a voice like the land around him. The lines in “Wilderness Gothic” are long. The poem is a narrative, full of the life not only of the lake but also of religion and doubt and mythology. The narrator is an observer, as Purdy must have often been, a thinker capable of taking the long view of his subject. This viewpoint is vital to understanding Purdy’s work; the change in his poetry from formalist verse to strong observational free verse changed his very heritage as a poet. “Wilderness Gothic” and other poems from books such as The Cariboo Horses and North of Summer make him a descendant of the poets of place, those who know that who one is is very often shaped by where and when one is living.

When the reader arrives at the lake, he or she sees the church spire standing against the sky “two shores away.” The first stanza of the poem shows a lake and sky, simple in place, epic in scale. The workman on the church steeple is given a religious persona as well—Jacob of the Old Testament, who had a dream about a ladder reaching heaven and who wrestled with an angel. Laced throughout this stanza is Purdy’s characteristic roughness, a mild vulgarity, in the way he calls the spire “God’s belly scratcher”; in his wry reference to there finally being “nothing left to nail on” (that the spire does not, in fact, reach heaven, and if it does, that there’s nothing left there); and in the final line in reference to blue-collar labor with God as the boss. The word mythopeia is included as a problem with which the laborer must contend, along with gravity (which becomes important in the final line), and “sky navigation.” Mythopeia, or mythmaking, is equated with knowing the stars and with the scientific fact of gravity, so that this church at Roblin Lake points the reader to things of great magnitude, things that the narrator considers without too much faith or too much hope. He focuses instead on the worker, which is another common trait of Al Purdy’s poetry.

In the second stanza of the poem, the reader sees a kind of pivot into the voice of the third stanza. The narrator is a skeptic; his view of this job of reaching God is, in some ways, similar to God’s own view of the tower of Babel. In the fields around this church, “death is yodelling,” and “gothic ancestors peer from a medieval sky.” The stanza ends with an odd, augural image of the county highway as a place of disappearance. The accomplishment of human labor, it seems, only provides the reader with another means by which the ancient truths come back again and again. People still have old faiths and repair the church steeple. Where once the wilderness frightened Europeans who came to North America, it has become rural and, in some ways, tamed, but Purdy does not let it remain so. The births and deaths of the natural world go on, but “that picture is incomplete.” It requires a closer look at how natural time and human time, when combined, produce a sometimes dark and difficult history.

The connotations of gothic literature surface in those moments of labor throughout “Wilderness Gothic”; hard work is dangerous work and has associated with it something of the sublime and grotesque. The labor of child birth, for example, appears in the middle of the third stanza in connection to all of the elements of the poem: the mythmaking of fire and brimstone, the hard fact of a mutated calf, the juxtaposition of that unfortunate birth with the “sharp female agony,” implied to be the agony of the “work-sodden wives,” who are dehumanized in the stanza. There are omens in this stanza, indications of something pagan and primordial in the land around Roblin Lake as the laboring man works on the church, and the laboring woman works against a suffering associated with “an age and a faith moving into transition.” The medieval reference gives the reader a sense of many centuries of people working on churches, building towns in the wilderness, and trusting the creaks of their houses, divination, and the legacy of the generations who worked before them. In “Wilderness Gothic,” Purdy tells the reader through his narrative voice that those mythic invocations have not changed, partly because the land is older than humans, and the fields around Roblin Lake, while cultivated, are the place where young birds still disappear, only now, they disappear into highways.

Purdy gained considerable fame in Canada for bringing its poetry a strong voice—not only for writing strong poems but for writing strong loyalist poems. The voice of Roblin Lake is also, in the canon of poetry, the voice of loyalist Ontario and of Canada, which gave Purdy two Governor General’s awards, the highest Canadian literary honor. One of the reasons for this particular acclaim, according to several writers and critics, is that Purdy captured in his work a Canadian sense of vastness, of the land as a presence that prompts Canadians to think in terms of great scale, ancient time, and their position in that place. From British Columbia to Newfoundland, the Canadian sense exhibited in much contemporary writing is different than the United States’ sense of promised land, nature as gift, and revolutionary conquest. In poem after poem of Purdy’s work, this sense is acute, but in “Wilderness Gothic” something even bigger is happening. This poem reaches even beyond the national impulse and invokes a kind of North American consciousness. Margaret Atwood said of Purdy that his voice “wasn’t just focused on personal event. It had a geographic, geological, archaeological scope to it, and it was the way he would connect time and space with the moment.”

Two other art works might give the reader some idea of how Purdy’s poem achieves a North American scope, Marianne Moore’s poem “The Steeple Jack” and Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic.” Moore’s poem depicts the same scene as Purdy’s but in a supposedly quintessential United States venue. Just as Purdy writes in the third stanza of “Wilderness Gothic,” “That picture is incomplete, part left out / that might alter the whole Durer landscape.” Moore writes, “Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.” Albrecht Durer was famous for his detail, for being meticulous at rendering, and so it is with the efficiency of workmanship, such as the repair of the church steeple. The middle of Moore’s poem seems to celebrate the wildness of life around the steeple; she lists flowers and describes the flights of birds. Purdy’s second stanza does a little of the same. He turns to the fields, to the way nature follows it seasonal course and builds its own mythology, but his is a darker mythology.

While in “The Steeple Jack” the reader sees a sense of celebration and hope, “Wilderness Gothic” forcefully shifts its view to the possibility of danger. “It could not be dangerous to be living,” writes Moore in her poem, “in a town like this, of simple people, / who have a steeple-jack placing danger-signs by the church / while he is gilding the solid-pointed star, which on a steeple / stands for hope.” For Purdy, this is not the case. His worker, as seen in the last line, “could fall,” and the long third stanza leading to it prepares the reader for that possibility, a possibility that pervades the industrious efforts of European North Americans, whether in Canada or in the United States.

But even though Moore and Purdy have different approaches to the subject, the material is the same in many ways. Even Moore acknowledges the risk of approaching God when she calls “the pitch of the church / not true,” and says that her steeple jack has a sign on the sidewalk below that reads, “Danger.” Moore was a prominent poet, “The Steeple Jack” one of her best-known poems; and Purdy was an ardent reader, so he may have been under some influence. It is almost certain, however, that he knew of “American Gothic.” The painter Grant Wood was influenced by German and Flemish painting styles but interpreted those styles into his own vision, a rural American one. His painting gets its title partly from the gothic window of the house behind the two famous figures in the foreground. Wood, who knew Iowa, used his sister and his dentist as models for the work. He brought to his painting a subtle irony, a combination of celebrating the American farmer and looking hard at the dourness of the work. This is precisely Purdy’s sense as well.

None of this is said in an attempt to deny the national and regional significance of “Wilderness Gothic.” On the contrary, the reader should see the poem as being so precise, so strongly written, that while it focuses acutely on a small place, it invokes a whole continent as well as the history of its working class, those who are often at physical and, in “Wilderness Gothic,” spiritual risk when doing their jobs.

The sounds of the lines, the choice of words such as “dour,” “clop,” “iron,” “frozen,” and “brim-stone”—all in the space of a few lines—casts a long shadow. The wilderness around the steeple is the living indicator that the reader should not be too confident in his or her assumptions about God. When danger is at hand, “woods shiver and water drops hang pendant.” When the worker might fall, “leaves are still.” Purdy puts no good and evil in the poem. Wilderness is not evil, it is not against people; it is simply what existed before towns and churches and a sense of region and nation. This is another reason that “Wilderness Gothic” has such a wide lens. In the quest for true religion, for the promised land of the New World, the narrator declares that there is failure and potential failure as well as the potential for a fall, and those who build European churches in the North American wilderness ought to take that seriously.

Source: S. K. Robisch, Critical Essay on “Wilderness Gothic,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.