Arthur Stringer was a Canadian-born writer whose career stretched across the first half of the twentieth century, a time when cities were swelling, industry was reshaping landscapes, and the gap between manual laborers and the wealthy was stark. In “Chains,” Stringer stages that gap as a brief encounter between two men on a winter day. One is a muscular worker drilling rock for a grand house; the other is a privileged youth walking a dog. The poem turns on the paradox that the man who seems to be in chains is not necessarily the one who is least free.
The opening description of the laborer gives him almost mythic stature. He stands “above the steam that hissed and billowed about him / White in the frosty air,” so that his physical struggle becomes a kind of elemental drama. Stringer calls him “Majestic, muscular, high like a god,” and compares him to Thor as he controls his “thundering drill.” The word “lordly” appears twice—first for the future house, then for the worker himself—suggesting that real power, in the poet’s eyes, belongs to the one doing the making, not the one who will live in the finished building. Even his sweat is a “crown,” an image that dignifies labor instead of pitying it. The “great steel chains” that swing over buckets of rock are part of the machinery of work, but they also introduce the poem’s central motif: chains as both literal equipment and symbolic bondage.
Against this towering figure, the youth from the nearby house seems diminished. He is “all gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,” a soft, finished creature compared with the worker’s raw energy. He is “thin-shouldered and frail and finished,” as though his privilege has smoothed away any rough strength. When he glances at the laborer, his expression is “impassive, / With almost pitying eyes,” and then he walks on down “the Avenue’s calm.” The detail of the “house-dog” on a “silver chain” seems at first like a mark of elegance, a delicate contrast to the heavy steel chains of the building site. Yet Stringer reverses the expected meaning in the final lines: the youth is “not holding, but held by his silvery chain.” The silver chain becomes a leash of luxury, status, and possession. He thinks he is leading, but his wealth and refinement have actually mastered him.
The construction of the poem reinforces this idea through sound and rhythm rather than through rhyme. Stringer writes in free verse, allowing the lines to swell and contract with the scene’s energy. The phrase “the steam that hissed and billowed” uses sibilance and internal echo to mimic the escaping steam, while “Majestic, muscular” and “thundering drill” create a heavy, emphatic pulse. The shift from the drilling site to the “clear white light of the noonday sun” on the Avenue is quieter and more restrained, matching the youth’s bloodless calm. By placing the muscular worker and the frail youth side by side, the poem’s structure becomes a comparison: two kinds of existence, each with its own chains.
What makes “Chains” significant is the way it turns a simple class critique into a more complicated reflection on freedom. The worker may be bound to backbreaking labor, but he is presented as powerful, almost heroic, in his struggle. The youth appears to have won life’s comfort, yet the poem suggests he has lost something vital—strength, purpose, agency. The silver chain is more subtle than the steel chains, but it binds just as surely. Stringer leaves the reader with a haunting image: a young man walking calmly away, unaware that the elegant leash in his hand is also around his own life.