[Dec. 1933] †

Thank you for your interest in the poem 'In Absentia.' I did not have in mind a particular person whom I could call by name, but rather any teacher who was off on a fishing holiday, let us say sometime in late May when he was getting very tired giving lectures or marking exam papers. He may be assumed to be an ardent fisherman and the emotion that seized him when he hooked a 'big one' was so great that the whole life-span of seventy years (in fact the whole universe) is concentrated in the experience. The sun and the sky are mirrored in the water and are but minor features compared with that fish.

Obviously the man is a teacher of languages ('language-weathered face'). The whirling disk is the revolving trolling spoon. The asterisk or star attached to a subject in which a student has failed would bring an expression of excitement to the face of the student. I have transferred the expression to the face of the professor for there is the possibility of his failure to land the fish, but I have left it to the reader to regard that as momentary for the tug on the line indicates a pretty good hold.

May, the time of examinations, and September, the time of recommencing of lectures, are now not on the calendar for the fisherman.

†
The probable date is established by the draft letter's proximity in an early notebook to a rough version of stanzas of the poem 'Like Mother, Like Daughter.' This poem, written in the autumn of 1933, was first published in the Saturday Night Christmas Supplement [49 (2 Dec. 1933), 8].

your interest
The correspondent is unknown. The letter exists (so far as is known) only as a draft in Pratt's hand among his papers in the Victoria University Library. It is a reply to someone, probably a student or a teacher, who had written asking him to explicate his short poem 'In Absentia,' first published in Canadian Forum (1921) and later in Newfoundland Verse (1923). His correspondent had probably read the poem in Verses of the Sea (1930), used in several educational jurisdictions as a textbook. See also letter to Wendy Jenks, 19 May 1956.

any teacher
According to Arthur Phelps (in an interview with David G. Pitt, 14 June 1967), the poem was based on 'an old academic who frequented Bobcaygeon' and who enjoyed 'wetting a line' now and then in the Kawartha Lakes.