Poetry
Brébeuf and His Brethren
E. J. Pratt · 1940
Synopsis
Twelve cantos of blank verse. In 1625, French Jesuits land at Quebec; the following year, Jean de Brébeuf goes up by canoe to the land of the Hurons to found a mission there. He learns the language, directs the compilation of a grammar, shares the life of the villages; driven out in 1629, he returns. When epidemics decimate the Hurons, they are blamed on the black robes. The Jesuits build Sainte-Marie, and more than twenty years after the arrival, the Iroquois threat to Huronia grows.
Context
The author was fifty-eight when the poem appeared in Toronto from Macmillan, in 1940. He wrote it from the Jesuit Relations, Francis Parkman's history of the missions and the works of James Frazer. The verse is blank, unrhymed. The narrative has been criticised for its ethnocentrism, which makes the missionaries an enclave besieged by “savages”; in 2018, George Elliott Clarke judged that the author could speak neither for francophones nor for Indigenous peoples.
Who it is for
An epic in blank verse, long but sustained in its reading. A few points of reference on New France and the Iroquois wars help in following the narrative.
Prizes and reception
Governor General's Award for poetry for 1940, and the high point of the author's work according to Britannica and Universalis.
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