Frank Oliver Call, a Canadian poet and professor at Bishop’s University, published “In a Forest” in his 1920 collection Acanthus and Wild Grape. Writing just after the First World War, at a moment when Canadian writers and painters were turning to the northern landscape for a distinct national voice, Call turns a familiar woodland scene into a quiet spiritual parable. Silver birch and dusky pine are not merely trees in a Canadian forest; they become figures for the human soul’s climb out of darkness.
The poem opens with those two trees “reaching up to find the light” from the “forest’s gloomy night.” Everything below is tangled and threatening: a thicket where “stunted shrub and creeping vine” entwine, a damp floor where “witch-fire glows” and “poison fungus grows.” These details are precise enough to feel observed, yet they also carry symbolic weight. The stunted shrub and creeping vine suggest frustrated or cunning growth, while witch-fire and poison fungus make the lower forest feel not just dark but spiritually dangerous. Against this, the trees lift their heads to “the kisses of the breeze,” “the far-off vaulted sky,” and “the sun that shines on high.” The movement is consistently upward, away from rot and moisture toward air and light.
Then, in the final couplet, Call makes the lesson explicit: “From the dusk of earthly night / Strive, O soul, to reach the light.” The direct address shifts the poem from landscape observation to inner command. The forest is an emblem: earthly life has its own gloom, its own entanglements and toxic growths, and the soul must actively push toward clarity, hope, or divine truth. The repeated word “light” becomes the poem’s destination, just as the sun is the destination of the trees.
The poem’s construction reinforces this upward drive. It runs to fourteen lines, mostly seven syllables long, but it is not a conventional sonnet. Its rhymes gather in small clusters—“pine,” “entwine,” “vine”; “glows,” “grows”; “sky,” “by,” “high”—so the poem seems to climb from one sound-group to the next. The opening “pine” waits three lines before finding its rhyme in “entwine,” just as the trees wait for the light above. The final couplet returns to the “night”/“light” rhyme from the opening, giving the ending a prayer-like circularity. Call also uses repeated prepositional phrases—“From the thicket,” “From the damp,” “To the kisses,” “To the far-off”—to create a rhythmic pull away from the forest floor and toward the sky.
Word choices matter here. “Silver” and “dusky” set brightness against shadow from the very first line. Verbs like “reaching,” “lift,” and “strive” insist on effort and elevation, while “entwine” and “creeping” suggest being held back. The phrase “High you lift your heads, O trees” has the tone of a reverent address, almost as if the trees are worshippers in a natural cathedral. The final “Strive, O soul” then asks the reader to join that worship through effort.
The poem’s significance lies in its ability to be at once a local Canadian nature lyric and a universal moral emblem. It belongs to an early twentieth-century tradition that reads the landscape not as scenery but as a mirror for inner life. Because Call keeps the allegory quiet until the last two lines, the forest remains vivid on its own terms, and the final turn feels earned rather than preachy. If the trees can rise from the damp and gloom, the poem suggests, so can the soul.