Poetry
The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems
William Henry Drummond · 1897
Opening lines
De place I get born, me, is up on de reever
Near foot of de rapide dat's call Cheval Blanc
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Twenty-three poems spoken by French-Canadian peasants, raftsmen and voyageurs, in a phonetic English mixed with French. A habitant describes his land at the foot of the Cheval Blanc rapids, the seasons and the winter evening when his daughter's suitor arrives; the wreck of a timber barge on Lake Saint-Pierre on a stormy night is told like a legend; an old man recalls an evening of his youth, the fiddler and the dance. The volume ranges from comic pieces to the mourning of the log drive.
Context
The author had been composing these pieces for almost twenty years and had been reciting them in public since the early 1890s; a Chicago publisher asked him for the manuscript as early as 1896. The volume appeared in New York in November 1897, with an introduction by Louis Fréchette, who praised the absence of caricature, and went through four printings before the end of the year. Reviews were favourable in Great Britain and in North America. The element of stereotype that readers see in them today remains debated.
Who it is for
A short collection, written in deliberately faulty English that is meant to be read aloud; a paperback selection has existed since 1965.
Prizes and reception
A huge success, with thirty-eight thousand copies printed in the author's lifetime; its reputation has faded since, and it has dropped out of the anthologies.
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