Gwendolyn MacEwen, Canada’s Cursed Poetess

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There is something down there and you want it told. 

– Gwendolyn MacEwen

Born in Toronto, Canada, on September 1st 1941, Gwendolyn MacEwen grew up in a dysfunctional family. From a young age, she cultivated a passion for writing that soon established her as one of the country’s best writing talents. 

However, MacEwen also witnessed her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia, lived in extreme poverty for most of her life, and followed her father’s steps into alcoholism—a disease that ultimately took her life at the age of only 46, despite her strenuous fight. Her ability and willingness to dive deep into her own mind destined her to become one of Canada’s most acclaimed writers, while also sentencing her to a life of misery and inner darkness—the kind of burden that comes solely with the excessive understanding of one’s own psyche. 

MacEwen dropped out of school at the age of 16 to pursue a writing career. By age 20, she was a respected member of Toronto’s literary community. She was close friends with writer Margaret Atwood, who edited  The Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen: Volume One (1993) in which she remembered MacEwen with admiration: “her range and craft, her poetic strength and intelligence, speak for themselves. Over the years she created, in a remarkably short time, a complete and diverse poetic universe and a powerful and unique voice, by turns playful, extravagant, melancholy, daring and profound.” 

To better understand her depth and talent, here, we propose an analysis of one of her most famous poems: Dark Pines under Water (1969):

This land like a mirror turns you inward 
And you become a forest in a furtive lake; 
The dark pines of your mind reach downward, 
You dream in the green of your time, 
Your memory is a row of sinking pines. 

Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for 
Although it is good here, and green; 
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness, 
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream. 

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper 
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper 
In an elementary world; 
There is something down there and you want it told.

The poem opens with a reference to the search for Canadian identity, a complex theme that is common in her poetry. 

This land (line 1) is a personification of Canada itself, a land of green and forests. In fact, the concept of forest has another possible meaning: MacEwen was fascinated by Jung’s theories where he often compares the mind to a forest. 

This is one of MacEwen’s many attempts to analyse the mind, something, she believed, you can best achieve while sleeping. The poem, we could argue, is describing a silver cord, the moment when you are falling asleep but something snaps you back into reality. 

The Explorer (line 6) represents the dreamer who is bewildered, disappointed, perhaps even scared by what they uncover in their self-analysis. MacEwen is in a way warning us of the danger in exploring our minds too deeply; the “dark pines”, another allusion to Jung’s theory, are dark and reach depths that can overwhelm us. 

Yet, there’s an inevitability in her words: we must dig deep into our minds. “There is something down there and you (we) want it told.” Notice how she uses the passive voice: we want the dark parts of our minds to be revealed, like a mystery unraveled by science. 

Gwendolyn MacEwan was undoubtedly a mysterious poet—and an intriguing one, too. Her life was tragically cut short, but her poems endure. Her unique voice continues to echo in Canada’s literary scene and, luckily, it is loud enough to reach us, guiding and sometimes warning us along the way.

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