Poetry and Identity

“Poetry and Identity” is a postscript and updating of “My Storied Childhood.” It is recommended to read all of them in order, starting with the Prelude, and then Part I.

Poetry and Identity

Many, many years ago now, when I was a Grade 11 student at Nepean High School in Ottawa, I recall sitting in an English class in the row next to the window in Room 6, listening to Mr. McCarthy reading, with obvious pleasure, Tennyson’s Ulysses aloud to the class. The poem is in the form of a dramatic monologue, in which the Greek hero Ulysses, King of Ithaca, addresses an audience composed of the trusty mariners and warriors who sailed with him on his epic journey from Ithaca to Asia Minor, on what was to prove to be a successful campaign to besiege and destroy the city of Troy, in present-day Turkey, and restore the captive Queen Helen to her husband, Menelaus. He is delayed on his return by shipwreck, captivity, the wrath of the gods, and by the beguiling of a beautiful woman, among other impediments. Finally back home in Ithaca, enriched by his adventures and re-united with his wife and son after more than twenty years away from home, Ulysses, one might expect, would want to settle down to a well-earned retirement. But the poem reveals that he is now bored stiff with a life of peaceful domesticity. Disillusioned and frustrated, he seeks new lands to explore, new challenges to overcome, new adventures to share with his comrades. He wants to “sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars” until he dies. Mr. McCarthy, who was to become a model for my own English teaching years later, was an eloquent Ulysses, but it was not so much Ulysses’ restlessness that spoke to me that day in class, as a line of his that begins the third stanza: “I am a part of all that I have met.” It was not Ulysses’ life story that was uppermost in my mind at that moment, in that classroom, but my own.

“I am a part of all that I have met.” The line struck me with the force of revealed truth. It was a moment of revelation, of what James Joyce called ‘epiphany,’ illuminating for me in an instant not only my own past, but also resolving neatly for me, at one stroke, the troublesome question of my own identity. Such is the power of poetry.

I had arrived in Canada at the age of thirteen directly from an all-boys’ private preparatory school in Surrey, England. Uniforms, cricket and soccer, and cycling to school for Saturday morning classes were replaced with streetcar rides to school at Oakwood Collegiate in Toronto, where the only uniforms were padded ones worn by helmeted combatants in a gladiatorial sport called ‘football’ and girls were a very real distraction from the important business of learning. One of them, a pretty Italian classmate, had asked me at one such football game if I was now ‘Canadian.’ I had then been in the country three weeks. I mumbled something in reply which seemed to satisfy her, but the idea that one could acquire a new identity so quickly was then, and remains to this day, a concept alien to me, and I suspect, to most newcomers. It’s never that easy.