Helena Coleman, a Canadian poet and musician born in 1860, published much of her work in the early twentieth century, when Canadian poetry often turned to landscape as a source of identity and spiritual renewal. Her sonnet “The Pelican” belongs to that tradition, but it is more than a nature sketch. It stages a remembered encounter with a flock of pelicans on a Western prairie and transforms that memory into a private source of freedom against the walls of urban life.
The poem’s first eight lines form the octave of an Italian sonnet, rhyming ABBAABBA, and they recreate the initial meeting in vivid, unstable light. The birds are “a glorious sight” that shifts between “dazzling white” and “darkened to a silhouette” as they circle. This interplay of brilliance and shadow makes them seem at once physical and almost visionary. Coleman’s language emphasizes size and motion: “Great-breasted things, with sweeping pinions” rise on “rhythmic curves of slow, majestic flight.” The measured iambic pentameter reinforces that sense of controlled, deliberate power. By the time the pelicans enter the “measureless blue height,” the poem has already suggested that they belong to a realm larger than ordinary landscape.
The repeated exclamation “I see them yet !” forms the turn. Moving into the sestet, with its more urgent alternating rhymes, the speaker admits to living within “these city walls of my despite”—a phrase that packs resentment into a single small clause. The slightly archaic “of my despite” gives the city a personal, almost hostile weight. The city is not named, but it is clearly a place of confinement. Against that confinement, the pelicans reappear in memory as “buoyant forms” sweeping the skies, “Like spirits of the air, incarnate, bright.” The word “incarnate” matters: these are not mere ghosts. They are embodied spirits, and their physical reality is what gives the memory its power. The speaker does not simply watch them; something “untamed” in her rises to join them.
The final image is both spatial and emotional. The pelicans “breast those boundless seas of light,” and the speaker’s untamed self rises with them. The phrase “boundless seas” turns the prairie sky into an ocean, so the birds are not flying through empty air but swimming through glowing immensity. Meanwhile, the possessive “my despite” makes the city a personal burden, while “boundless” returns to the measureless height of the octave. The contrast is not just between city and prairie, but between a confined self and a self that remembers its capacity for freedom.
What makes the poem significant is its compact handling of a Romantic idea: the natural image as a lasting inner resource. Coleman does not need an elaborate argument. A single remembered flock, with its white bodies and slow wings, becomes a counterweight to urban alienation. Because the sonnet is tight and musical, its emotional release feels earned rather than sentimental. It also quietly celebrates a specifically North American landscape—the Western prairie—as worthy of the same elevated treatment older poets gave to European scenes. For Canadian students, this is one of the poem’s quiet achievements: it locates the sublime in pelicans, open sky, and prairie light, and insists that such beauty can be carried into the city as a form of inner freedom.