Trower jarring the ballad.

Wells, Zachariah

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Peter Trower's "Industrial Poem" is an anachronism: a ballad, first published in 1978. Originating in medieval traditions of oral folk song, the first printed ballads date back to the early 16th Century and the form was often adopted by poets well into the 19th Century. In the 20th Century, however, the ballad, rooted in straightforward narrative, singsong rhythms and regular rimes, fell into disrepute as a vessel for serious poetry, and was relegated to the ghetto of popular doggerel. Not one to kowtow to authority, Trower wields the ballad stanza like a fine old rust-flecked sword. Often used to convey outrage against social and economic injustice, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, the ballad is a fitting structure for the content of this poem.

But Trower is no rustic naif, and "Industrial Poem" no old-fashioned exercise in metrical finger-stretching or unsophisticated protest. In some respects, this poem does adhere to the prescriptions of balladry (it tells an action-focused story, briskly and plainly, employing simple stanzaic and syntactic structures), but close reading shows that Trower has also heeded Pound's edict to "make it new." The metre Trower employs consists basically of the three and four-beat iambic lines typical of balladry, but he diverges from it so often and so far afield that the traditional metre and rime-scheme is like a frame showing through free verse cladding (recalling Eliot's admonition that "the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras of even the 'freest' verse"). These deviations might seem like evidence of a bad or ill-trained ear, but besides the fact that irregularity of metre is a hallmark of Victorian balladry, I woud argure that Trower, steeped in the more traditional ballads of Service, Kipling and Robert Swanson, jars their rhythms strategically. The five beats of line 8 for instance--four of them awkwardly clumped in the spondees "life raft" and "death's sake"--mime the injured man's deathbed struggles, like the irregular blips of a heart monitor, as he "[clings] to his ruin." The rhythmically and syntactically clumsy phrase in line 10, "incapable of help," is a perfect reflection of the workers' "shockdrunk" state, just as the six beats of line 15, three of them in the terminal trochaic phrase "never even flinched," limn the workers' brimming hatred for the cold-blooded foreman, whose gallingly prosaic speech in line 13 serves to underline his crassness.

With all of these subtle touches, Trower updates and personalises the ballad for his purposes. The speaker's position in relation to the subject is the other major departure of this poem from ballad conventions. Normally, a ballad, often composed by an anonymous author-or authors--is narrated either in the third person by a party not directly involved in the action, or indirectly through dialogue. In this poem, however, the speaker, as we realize in line 10, is very much implicated in the scene he describes, and therefore incapable of retelling it in a cool, smooth, metrical fashion.

Thus, Trower no more loosens the ballad stanza for the mere sake of appearing modern than he chooses the structure in order to be traditional. Rather, he crafts his lines in response to the particular formal demands of the subject matter he has tackled. The result, all questions of prosody aside, is a chilling indictment of industry's capacity for dehumanization and an affirmation of art's capacity for redress. One can readily imagine a draught of this poem penned on a red-flecked sheet from that very mill.

This essay first appeared in the How Poems Work webzine on arcpoetry.ca in January 2004.

COMMENTARY

Reactions to Peter Trower's 'Industrial Poem'

Disturbing, but with a strong sense of story. It made me wonder about the time and place, and to want to know more. I was also curious as to the conditions that could lead a man to such numbness and apparent callousness as the foreman expressed.

--Mary Mackenzie

Having recently visited a mill, this poem transported me back to the sounds, sights and smells of the wood in the yard and floor of the mill. It left me with a very sensory experience of a dark and dreary work environment. I thought of the fragility of human life and how the work of the mill or any industrial site does go on even after what appears to be another accident. What value does a human life have in the industrial landscape? I particularly like, in the second last line, "he's smelled our hate." Why did Peter Trower choose that sense? He left me with the vision of the "hamburger for lunch, or the red-flecked sheets" which are indeed very graphic. I could feel the pain, see it and smell it. I live in the Ottawa Valley, which was developed because of the lumber industry. Lumber barons like O'Brien and Booth became wealthy because of the lumber industry. Many people still work as "jobbers," mill workers, truck drivers etc., and do so for a variety of reasons. For example, they may do this work because of lack of other employment opportunities, lack of education or because they come from a family which has always worked in the lumber business. Every year, we have serious accidents and deaths, just like the one described in "Industrial Poem," and I will never hear about another incident without thinking of this poem.

--Carole Devine