Struwwelpeter is a classic example of the cautionary tale. It’s a collection of illustrated stories in verse showing misbehaving children and the dreadful consequences they suffer. First published in 1845, its original title was Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3-6 Jahren (Funny Stories and Whimsical Pictures with 15 Beautifully Coloured Panels for Children Aged 3 to 6).

Maybe I was born in the wrong era. Although I find the book amusing now, as a child I found the pictures ghastly, especially the ones accompanying “Daumenlutscher” (Thumb-sucker) and “Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug,” a story of a girl who plays with matches and is burned to death. The final picture in this story shows the girl’s two cats beside her ashes, crying a great pool of tears.

It’s the illustrations that really stay in my mind, probably because I could not read German as a child. But I didn’t have to know German to understand the message of the stories: look what happens to misbehaving children!

I was prompted to read Struwwelpeter again, oddly enough, after reading Martyrs Mirror for the first time.

Martyrs Mirror is one of those books, I suspect, that many people know about but considerably fewer people actually read (so I was mildly surprised to find that the public library’s sole copy was checked out). It is a huge work, over a thousand pages, with 104 illustrations. The full title is The Bloody Theater, or, Martyrs’ Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660. It was compiled by Thieleman J. van Braght, a Dutch Mennonite pastor, in 1660.

The book is a compilation of stories and letters, some brief and some running to several pages. It begins, as the title says, with the earliest Christians and moves chronologically from there, devoting considerable attention to the 16th century.

The etchings, by Dutch artist Jan Luiken, are skilfully done and quite arresting. Some are rather gory— for instance, the illustration of the apostle Bartholomew being skinned alive and beheaded. Others are gruesome more for what they suggest than for what they show. One shows the children of a Maeyken Wens, searching for her tongue screw among her ashes after she was burned to death.

In a way, Martyrs Mirror reverses the message of Struwwelpeter. The children’s book says “be good, or face dire consequences.” The accounts of martyrs say “be good, like these martyrs, and be prepared to face dire consequences as they did.”

That, in a sense, is the point of the book. Martyrs Mirror was written a century after the worst of these persecutions took place. The introduction says that it is meant particularly for believers who had become safe, prosperous, and complacent, so that they will be reminded of the faith of their forebears. Although it’s difficult for us to see it that way today, van Braght meant the book to be an encouragement as well as a warning.

This poetry is from the 19th and early 20th centuries— fairly old in terms of Canadian literature. The poets represented here have largely gone out of fashion, and some, I suspect, have been pretty well forgotten. Canadians who went to school in the 1940s and ’50s, maybe even into the ’70s, will know Bliss Carman, William Henry Drummond, E. Pauline Johnson, and Archibald Lampman, but does anyone study them now? And how many today know the names Ethelwyn Wetherald or John Hunter-Duvar?

Anthologies can be a mixed bag, of course. Not every poem in this book is a gem (there’s an especially forgettable piece on the death of Sir John A. Macdonald). But there are some real treasures here, among them Johnson’s haunting  “The Legend of Qu’Appelle Valley,”  and Lampman’s “Heat” which conveys, with its alliteration and slow-swinging rhythm, the sleepiness of a summer afternoon. Until now I’d read very little of these poets— aside from Johnson’s “The Song my Paddle Sings,” which almost everyone reads— but having found their work here, I want to read more.

Fall is equated, understandably, with old age and fading beauty. It’s linked with decay, death and loss. Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ “Summer and Fall” follows that pattern with lines like these: “Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?” It seems to liken autumn to the loss of childhood, the loss of a former self, as it ends: “It is the blight man was born for,/ It is Margaret you mourn for.” And W.H. Auden has this pair of lines in “Canzone”: “Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will:/ Bald melancholia minces through the world.”

Gloomy stuff. But then there’s this one, from an old children’s anthology:

I like the fall,

The mist and all…

I like the gray

November day,

And bare, dead boughs

That coldly sway

Against my pane.

I like the rain. (“The Mist and All” by Dixie Willson)

Which reminds me of my son a couple of weeks ago when I was complaining about the persistent rain: “What’s wrong with the weather?”

What I was really after, though, was a poem for clear blue-and-gold days when it’s a pleasure to scuffle through the dry leaves. It’s a bit more difficult to find a poem like that, though, especially one that isn’t too sappy. So far the only one I’ve found that comes close is Bliss Carman’s “A Vagabond Song,” especially the middle stanza: “The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry/ Of bugles going by./ And my lonely spirit thrills/ To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.”

I’ll keep looking.

I often find, with favorite books, that I notice different things each time I read them. What struck me this time around was how much careful observation there is in Durrell’s stories. Here is someone who was insatiably curious about the world around him, and was willing to spend a great deal of time just looking at things— geckos on his bedroom ceiling, trapdoor spiders, or scorpions in the garden wall. 

His curiosity was rewarded with some fascinating sights. There was the epic battle in his bedroom between a small gecko and a large praying mantis, the slow-motion mating rituals of turtles, and the sight of a giant toad stuffing an earthworm in its mouth.

I’ve had experiences like that, too, but not nearly as many as the young Durrell. The thing is, you have to get outside— that’s the easy part— and then you have to sit still.

Fafard’s animals are characters, that’s what they are. Whether they are smaller or larger than life-size, flattened cutouts or three-dimensional, they are not generic; they are definite characters.

The same is true of his ceramic figures of people. They are much smaller than most of his animal sculptures and, except for oversized hands, quite lifelike. My husband looked at a figure called “King,” of a man in a baseball cap and work boots lounging in a chair, and said, “That one must have been a real character.” 

Here is a video of Fafard talking about this exhibit (which was at the McMichael Gallery last summer) and about his work in general. And here is a link to his web site, with loads of pictures.

In the same vein, I also recommend Saskatchewan Birds by Alan Smith. I discovered this beautifully illustrated book, and many of the birds described in it, while attending the Sage Hill Writing Experience last May. As a city-dweller, I tended to notice the obvious birds— sparrows, robins, the ubiquitous Canada geese— while remaining oblivious to the thrushes, warblers and nuthatches. This book showed me that

1. Sparrows are more varied— and unexpectedly beautiful— than I realized 
2. In movies, the cry of a red-tailed hawk is often paired with the image of an eagle, because eagles do not have impressive voices
3. There really is such a thing as a coot

This reminded me of the words of David Milne, the Canadian painter who lived from 1882 to 1953. An exhibit of his work at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992 had quotations from his letters and other writings on the wall next to the paintings. “Art is love,” he said. Not love of anything or anyone in particular; “[i]t is just love, love without an object, a spilling of the oil of love.” He also said: “The thing is that while I write or paint with one hand I have to have someone— nature mostly— hold the other.”

I think this is some of what Domanski is getting at in reference to poetry, although he used the words “compassion” and “mindfulness.” But for both Milne and Domanski the point is that art-making has to involve a movement outward from oneself. Self-absorption is deadly; artists ultimately have to get outside their own heads if they’re going to have anything interesting to say. Strong feelings in themselves don’t make for good art.

The assumption implicit here is that poetry, and art in general, is about something other than itself. That’s certainly my own approach to poetry, but there are movements in poetry that treat language in abstract ways. Yet I think that even this kind of poetry requires getting outside one’s own head. The poet has to begin with a love for language and a willingness to listen. 

You can read a poem by Don Domanski here, and a CBC Radio interview here.

See some of David Milne’s work here.

e.e. cummings was very good at exuberance, and wrote several spring poems. A bookstore in my neighborhood had one posted in the window: “in Just-/ spring     when the world is mud-/ luscious the little/ lame balloonman// whistles     far     and wee…” The line near the middle, “when the world is puddle-wonderful,” reminds me of my son, who views puddles (as I did, at his age) as things to be enjoyed, not avoided. (Full text of the poem here.)

In “Québec May” by Earle Birney you can sense both the energy of growing things and people’s revived spirits: “Now the snow is vanished clean/ Bo’jour, Pierre, ça va?/ skyward point the cedar billows/ birches pinken    poplars green/ magenta runs the sumach tine/ pouring down the hills like wine/ Yellow catkins on the willows/ yellow calico on line/ ‘Allo, Marie, ça va? ”

Of course, people have been writing poems about spring for centuries. One of the few bits of poetry I remember from a class in Middle English literature is the opening of this lyric: “Lenten is come with love to toune,/ With blosmen and with briddes roune,/ That all this blisse bringeth.” Unfortunately, all this bliss contrasts with the speaker’s unhappy love life, but there’s still a lot about the beauty of birds and flowers here.

And there’s the most famous of Middle English lyrics: “Sumer is icumen in,/ Lhude sing, cuccu!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, cuccu!” The rhythm skips merrily along, like the lambs and calves in the second stanza. (Hear a music video of this here.)

And finally, there is A.E. Housman’s “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now…”, in which the speaker thinks about how many years he may have left to live, and concludes: “And since to look at things in bloom/ Fifty springs are little room,/ About the woodlands I will go/ To see the cherry hung with snow.” 

Spring has sprung. Carpe diem.

Then again, some art is simply irritating. Well, to be more accurate, what’s irritating are the descriptions attached to works of art in gallery exhibits. It makes sense to have some commentary on an exhibit, since a lot of contemporary art is baffling to a lot of people, and it’s useful to get a hint of what to look for in a work. At the same time, I often find that it’s more helpful to view a work without reading the accompanying commentary. If, for instance, I’m looking at an object that appears to be a blotchy mirror and then read that I am supposed to glean some elaborate sociological meaning from it, it’s more than likely that I’ll stare at the object for a minute or two and then say, “Nope. I don’t see it.”

Dan Siedell, in an interview with Image magazine, says that looking at art “is not about receiving a meaning that the artist intended. The artist isn’t intent on ‘communicating’ with me some idea that he or she is wrapping up in paint that I then need to unwrap.” A work of art, he says, is not so much an essay as a poem. I find this a helpful way of thinking about art. And maybe what I’m really irritated with is the sense that at times I’m being told what I ought to see — that some artists or gallery curators do see art as an essay.

But that’s still not quite it. Sometimes art-as-essay does work. For instance, last year the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina showed works by Kent Monkman, including a silent film that uses role reversal to question the idea of history, and whose history is authoritative. It works because it addresses a fairly straightforward question, and while not subtle, it is clever satire executed with skill and flair.

On the other hand, there’s that blotchy mirror. This is an extreme example from an exhibit called Let Me Be Your Mirror, also shown at the MacKenzie Gallery last year. According to the description, in this exhibit “the viewer’s position before mirrors, both real and represented, is placed in question as part of a larger inquiry into social structures that govern desire and its production.” Looking at the works in this exhibit may well raise questions about images, how we see ourselves and what is real, you would not get to the level of interpretation in the description without reading the piece, and furthermore, knowing something of the theory behind it. On the whole, the exhibit did not seem able to bear the weight of the complex meanings attributed to it.

I had to laugh when I heard this song, because it reminded me of the Christmas songs we used to sing at family gatherings years ago. Some of them are truly lovely; others can be either lovely or drippily sentimental, depending on the day; still others are just not very good (sorry, Mom). Bells are mentioned frequently, as in “Süsser die Glocken nie klingen” (“Sweeter the bells never ring”), “Hört Ihr nicht die Weihnachtsglocken” (“Don’t you hear the Christmas bells”), or “Kling, Glöckchen, kling” (“Ring, little bells, ring”). Christmas trees come up fairly often, too, as in one of my favorites, “Welchen Jubel, welche Freude” (“What rejoicing, what delight”). I sang all these, and loved them, long before I understood the words.

But for a certain subset of Russian Mennonites from the prairies (my extended family included), the crown jewel of Christmas music was “Der Friedensfürst” (“The Prince of Peace”). It’s different from the others: not a hymn or carol, but a choral piece probably written around the turn of the 20th century. It’s composed of several short sections, with each pair of lines in the text having a different musical setting. It sounds like it was written in the popular-song style of the day. Once, at a carol-singing evening at the church we attended in Toronto, someone brought out copies of Der Friedensfürst” and we sang it. Those of us who knew the piece were thrilled; those who were new to it didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

To this day I am not sure if it’s a good piece of music, objectively speaking. But that’s not the point. The point is that we used to sing it every Christmas, and now we don’t. And if, at some Christmas gathering, someone were to pull out a copy of the music, and if there were at least two other people in the room who knew it, I’d sing it. With feeling.