Rest on the Flight into Egypt

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

We live, we are told, in an age of unprecedented violence. This may or
may not be true—earlier ages lacked the means to preserve a firm
record of their violences. Still, violence is a fact that our poets have
to come to terms with, and the better among them know that this can
often be achieved by indirection.

A.F. Moritz is such a poet. “Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” the
title poem, takes as its subject ultimately the story told in
Matthew’s gospel, but more immediately, it concerns itself with a
painting by the early 16th-century artist Bernard van Orley. Now in the
Art Gallery of Ontario, this painting—which is reproduced on the
cover—is a scene of magnificent repose; yet behind it lies the
slaughter of the innocents, while the agony of the cross lies in the
future. Moritz’s poem takes the form of a meditation on an imaginary
reproduction of the painting; it never mentions events before and after,
yet they are in the centre of its effect.

All of the poems in this collection are written in an elegant and
fastidious style, and they range over a vast area of human experience. A
courtier heaps obsequious praise on Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, the Chinese
emperor who built the Great Wall of China to protect his people—and to
guarantee his own power. Kissinger attends the funeral of Richard Nixon,
and thinks back over past events that can never be discussed openly. A
poem with the coldly classical title “Ode to Apollo” takes as its
theme the brutal flaying of Marsyas, and speaks around the subject in
smooth-flowing triplets that oddly accentuate the horror.

There are other poems of indirection: an undertaker soliloquizes on the
nature of his profession; another poem, “Nothing Happened Here,”
begins “Nothing happened here—nothing ever / happened in our city,
and yet it was destroyed.” Other Canadian poets—Peter Dale Scott and
Gary Geddes come to mind—approach the violence of our world head-on.
Moritz’s tactic is very different, and may initially prove
disconcerting. But beauty, as Yeats knew, can be terrible, and that is
the beauty we find here.