i need help with poem and need to identify each province by giving a line frm poem.
ontario and quebec be bunk house & brawnymen, prince edward island be little girl, great fisherman be nova scotia and new brunswick, BC be hunchback. Alberta, saskatchewan & manitoba be "three flat faced.
what the poet trying to find in poem? do he discover it? he just tieing all nations together?
The Provinces
First, the two older ones, the bunkhouse brawnymen,
biceps and chest, lumbering over their legend:
scooping a river up in the palm of the hand,
a dangling fish, alive; kicking open a mine;
bashing a forest bald; spitting a country to crop;
for exercise before their boar breakfast,
building a city; racing, to keep in shape,
against the white-sweatered wind; and always
bragging comparisons, and reminiscing
about their fathers’ even more mythic prowess,
arguing always, like puffing champions rising
from wrestling on the green.
Then, the three flat-faced blonde-haired husky ones.
And the little girl, so beautiful she was named—
to avert the evil of the evil eye—
after a prince, not princess. In crossed arms cradling her,
her brothers, tanned and long-limbed.
(Great fishermen, hauling out of Atlantic
their catch and their coal
and netting with appleblossom the shoals of their sky.)
And, last, as if of another birth,
the hunchback with the poet’s face; and eyes
blue as the glass he looks upon; and fruit
his fragrant knuckles and joints; of iron morrow;—
affecting always a green habit, touched with white.
Nine of them; not counting
the adopted boy of the golden complex, nor
the proud collateral albino,—nine,
a sorcery of numbers, a game’s stances.
But the heart seeks one, the heart, and also the mind
seeks single the thing that makes them one, if one.
Yet where shall one find it? In their history -
the cairn of cannonball on the public square?
Their talk, their jelous double-talk? Or in
the whim and weather of a geography
curing in drifts about the forty-ninth?
Or find it in the repute of character:
romantic as mounties? Or discover it
in beliefs that say:
this is a country of Christmas trees?
Or hear it sing
from the house of towers, from whose towers ring
bells, and the carillon of laws?
Where shall one find it? What
to name it , that is sought?
The ladder the nine brothers hold by rungs?
The birds that shine on each other? The white water
that foams from the ivy entering their eaves?
Or find it, find it, find it commonplace
but effective, valid, real, the unity
in the family feature, the not unsimilar face?
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