Towards the Last Spike
Towards the Last Spike was written in 1952 by Canadian poet E. J. Pratt. It is a long narrative poem in blank verse about the construction of the first transcontinental railroad line in Canada, that of the Canadian Pacific Railway, from 1871 through 1885.
The poem won Pratt the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for poetry in 1952.
It is written in an epic style, where characters engage in both verbal and physical struggle. The poem also has a political context, illuminated by the debates between Prime Minister John A. Macdonald versus Edward Blake. The physical tests throughout the poem are a battle between the forces of nature versus the combined might of the construction team headed by William Van Horne.
In his introduction to Pratt's 1968 Selected Poems, literary critic says of the piece:
The poem ends with the famous driving home of the last spike at Craigellachie:
When Towards the Last Spike appeared, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye wrote that
"There would be much more to say about the poem if I had the space," Frye added. "There is the contrast between the desperate, quixotic, east-west reach from sea to sea which is the vision of Macdonald... and the practical, short-sighted vision of Blake, which sees the country realistically, as a divided series of northern extensions of the United States.... There is the portrait of Strathcona as a Canadian culture-hero, a combination of Paul Bunyan and Sam Slick.... Above all, Pratt is a poet unusually aware of the traditional connection between poetry and oratory." He concluded: "The faults of the poem are obvious and commonplace; its virtues are subtle and remarkable."
Frye later wrote that Pratt had "expressed in Towards the Last Spike the central comic theme... of the Canadian imagination."
Three years after its publication, fellow Canadian poet, F.R. Scott, critiqued Pratt for overlooking the thousands of indentured Chinese labourers who actually built the railway in his poem "All the Spikes but the Last."