Robert Kroetsch | I'am Getting Old Now

          Robert Kroetsch (b. 1927), a Canadian poet, was born in Heisler, Alberta, Canada. After he graduated he worked for the US Army as a civilian education and information specialist in Labrador. After taking graduate degrees from Middlebury College and the University of Ilowa, he taught at the State University of New York at Binghampton, where he edited Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern literature. Later he returned to Canada and taught at the University of Manitoba. In his poetry, Kroetsch moves from fairly traditional beginnings, in Stone Hammer Poems (1975) to vigorous experimentation in Seed Catalogue (1977). His best known and most interesting long poem is 'Seed Catalogue' which explores history and place in comic opera or mock heroic fashion. Using the commercial diction of seed catalogues and their testimonials for his lyrical and anecdotal meditations on different subjects, Kroetsch is able to construct a touching, evocative and hilarious patchwork of life in the vanished prairie that is at once a portrait of the artist as farm boy and a testament to the perenially transforming power of art. Other volumes of his verse are The Ledger (1975), The Sad Phoenician (1979) and Field Notes (1981). He has published seven novels and a book of critical writings entitled The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (1989).

           'I'm Getting Old Now' can be described as a simple but vibrant, poetic 'prose-poem'. As a poem, it has no conventional poetic form. The eighteen lined poem resembles a sonnet; it has the effect of a sonnet, particularly the last six lines which fit into the form of a sestet. The resemblance ends here because the poet uses prose for his expression, turning this into a prose-poem. This poem is a good example of Wordsworth's view that the language of poetry is essentially the same as that of prose. The poem does not generate the effect of typical free verse either. It is poetic and yet free. It has a felicity of its own that makes it a prose-poem. The poem presents the poet's acceptance of death linking it up with his nostalgic dream about his mother. The poet's dream transforms him into accepting his own mortality. The logical as well as emotional link between the first part of the poem (about the dream) and its second part (about death) which is more or less implicit, makes it a great prose-poem.

I'm Getting Old Now

I'm getting old now, I can tell. I dream

a lot of my mother. In my dream last night 

she was in the garden, over the hill, 

behind our house. She was standing. I was

playing in the pea vines. We were both happy. Neither of us would move, in the dream. Perhaps

I wasn't playing. I was kneeling to pick peas.
My mother held in her apron the peas

we had picked together. She was standing still. 

I knew she was watching me. She was 

watching me grow. Like a bad weed, she liked 

to say. That pleased her.

I'm getting old now. I wouldn't say I'm happy. Serene is an adequate word. Death is not quite

the enemy it was. It is a kind of watching.

Death begins to seem a friend that one has almost forgotten, then remembers again. In my dream, 

last night, I was playing in the garden.

Glossary

Line 5. pea vines green pea plants; creepers 

Line 14. serene calm, tranquil, unclouded

Explantary Notes

1. Like a sonnet, the poem is divided into two parts with the repetition of the opening sentence 'I'm Getting Old Now', marking the beginning of the second part. The first 12 lines present the dream the second, the poet's attitude towards death. The 'change' in that attitude, suggested by the word 'now', is emotionally and logically linked with the dream concerning his mother. The implicit questions to be asked by the reader are: how and why does the poet's dream change his attitude towards death?

2. Note how the poet presents the past event (that comes to him as a dream) by using a kind of 'long-shot' technique of the movie camera: 'In the garden, over the hill/behind our house'. Then the poet gives a 'close-up' of the mother and d t the child, as if allowing the camera to linger on both mother and d child. It is her 'watching' him grow, in a that has really changed him when he has grown. The cinematic rechnique, appropriately visual because it presents a dream, makes ne enter into the old mother's mental process then as she saw her on prow. What was she thinking then, watching the son grow? 'Like a bad weed, she liked to say', adds the poet,

3. The poet's dream slowly grows into a symbol as we read it. Mother and son picking peas is a picture of perfect happiness. They were still and happy and, while the boy was playing, the mother was standing. happy to watch the son grow. For a Christian, this picture of the pther and her son, becomes sacred and divine. The repetition of the word 'garden', along with its idyllic quality, suggests the garden of Eden, a heaven every Christian dreams of. The dream becomes an earthly paradise that the poet experienced once, and through memory is experiencing even now. What the poet's imagination captures here, in the form of a dream, is true and beautiful. And that makes the poet. now getting old, accept his death, as his mother had probably accepted hers when she watched her son grow. Life continues, though individuals die. If man's imagination could create a garden, this eartha would become a paradise and save his soul. Death is no enemy now, 'it is a kind of watching'.