Frank Oliver Call (1878–1956), a Canadian poet and professor, published “The Broken Mast” in his 1920 collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape*, just after the First World War, when Canadian poetry was reaching for a voice rooted in local coasts, forests, and waterways rather than borrowed from Europe. The sonnet opens on a wrecked ship’s mast thrown up onto a tide-swept shore, where it rests above a crescent beach of silver sand. Call gives this inanimate object a buried memory and a split nature: in long summer days it dreams of its origin as a tree, while in storms it thrills with “the old unrest” and shakes the wild-rose petals from its breast. That divided allegiance—between calm remembrance and violent instinct—forms the poem’s central idea.
The construction sharpens the split. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, with an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet rhyming cdcd ee. Its iambic pentameter, clear in “It lies alone upon a tide-swept shore,” has a tidal regularity, but the ninth line turns inward, from observed landscape to the mast’s dreaming mind. Rhymes such as “sand” and “hand,” “shore” and “tore” join softness to force, so the sound pattern quietly enacts the poem’s clash between the fragile and the violent.
In the octave, the storm appears as “some great hand / Stretched from the dark,” whose fingers “clutched and tore / The main-mast from the ship.” Those verbs make the gale mythic and almost monstrous. Yet around the broken mast the world can be gentle: white gulls soar, old twisted pines stand in a wild-rose tangle, and song-birds of the land “mingle soft singing with the ocean’s roar.” The roar never fully disappears, but the mast lies alone and passive, as though stunned by the force that stranded it.
The volta arrives with “And through long summer days it dreams old dreams.” That phrase reaches backward past the ship’s life to the tree it once was. Call lets the mast recall “far-off southern forests” and “the sighing / Of wind-blown boughs above bird-haunted streams.” These lines are lush and elegiac, full of warmth rather than salt. Yet the dream is only one side of the mast’s memory. When a storm returns and “sets the white spindrift flying,” the mast does not merely endure it; it “thrills and trembles with the old unrest.” The final image of shaking wild-rose petals from its breast suggests that its gentler surface can be cast off, exposing an answering violence that has never left it.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to make the mast a simple emblem of ruin. It is not only wreckage; it is a remembering, longing thing, caught between forest and ship, birdsong and gale. Call fits that unresolved tension into fourteen disciplined lines and leaves the mast still on the shore—dreaming in summer, trembling in storm—alive because it still feels the pull of both worlds.