SOURCE: "Margaret Avison's Portrait of a Lady: 'The Agnes Cleves Papers'," in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 12, No. 2, Fall, 1979, pp. 17-24.

In the essay below, Kertzer provides a thematic analysis of "The Agnes Cleves Papers," focusing on the protagonist's search for meaning.

In a letter [to Cid Corman] of March, 1961 [printed in Origin (January 1962)], Margaret Avison declared that the poet "must listen painfully & long to the experience of living," an attentiveness possible only when he attains the proper "self-effacement." She herself achieves these aims most successfully in "The Agnes Cleves Papers," her longest and perhaps most painful poem, by adopting the mask of a dramatic monologue. It brings to conclusion the earlier poetry of Winter Sun (1960), and looks ahead, though obscurely, to the religious poetry of The Dumbfounding (1966).

"The Agnes Cleves Papers" portrays one woman's "experience of living" in a manner that recalls Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient mariner." In...