Archibald Lampman

AN INTERPRETER OF THE ESSENTIAL SPIRIT OF CANADA—STUDY OF LAMPMAN’S ‘SAPPHICS’—POWER OF HUMANIZING NATURE—EXCELLENCE OF HIS SONNETS—CONSUMMATE ARTIST OF NATURAL BEAUTY.

In 1887 Charles G. D. Roberts had, with his poem beginning ‘O Child of Nations’ and again with his magniloquent Ode to the Canadian Confederacy, issued a ‘call’ to the Canadian people to realize a national consciousness and to achieve a national destiny. He appeared as the ‘Voice’ of Canada. But he was a mere ‘Voice.’ For aside from simply uttering the ‘call’ he did nothing else to awaken in the Canadian people a consciousness of their own native or national spirit and a love of country, except to publish some impressionistic word pictures of Canadian scenery and pastoral life.

Meanwhile Swinburne had told the world that out of Canada or Australia would come a great New Voice of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. In 1889, or two years after Roberts had trumpeted his ‘call’ to Canadians, Theodore Watts-Dunton, poet, novelist, and the most far-visioned of British critics then living, in an article on Canadian poetry made the same prophecy as had Swinburne. ‘Canada,’ he said, ‘had excellent poets, and with the development of a national consciousness of the history, resources and wealth of the country, would produce great poets.’ In 1918, or practically thirty years after the prophecies of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and the ‘call’ of Roberts, Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in an address on ‘Overseas Poetry,’ as he called it, before the Royal Colonial Institute, London, also confessed to a vision of great poets arising in Canada and said that, in his view, so far Canada had produced only ‘some good poets.’ It is probable that the prophecies of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton were merely generous pleasantries or, possibly, ‘guesses at the truth.’ In any case what they were really concerned about was the appearance of a great Imperial poet in Canada or some other one of the British Overseas Dominions.

What Canadians themselves should be concerned about is not whether Canada has produced a significant Imperial poet but whether the Dominion has produced a signally excellent poet who, if not the prophetic Voice of the Dominion, is the true Interpreter of the essential Canadian spirit.

When Sir Herbert Warren declared that Canada had produced only some good poets, he had in mind Roberts, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Valancy Crawford, W. H. Drummond, and Robert Service. But the greatest poet that Canada has produced, greatest as a nature-poet, and as an interpreter of the essential mind and heart of the Canadian people and country, is Archibald Lampman. If Lampman is not great in the sense that Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne is great, at least he is more than a good poet. He is a consummate artist. But more important, he is a subtle interpreter of the Canadian national spirit by way of a new and philosophical interpretation of Nature in Canada. He is par excellence the poet of Canadian Nature and Nationality.

For inductive proof of ‘nationality’ in literature, consider critically, and at some length, from Lampman’s poetry, an impressive example of wholly indigenous expression of the Canadian genius and the Canadian view of Nature and of Life. Justly it may be held that this example of interpretative nature-poetry by Lampman, which goes under the name of Sapphics, is, for faultless technic, for spiritual vision of Nature and for the beautiful application of noble ideas to life, an indubitable contribution to poetic art, and is peculiarly Canadian. This is not too high praise; for the poem itself, with analyses of its form and beauty, together with a commentary on its spiritual meaning, will furnish sufficient evidence that it must be given a unique place in Canadian Literature. For easy expository purposes the poem may be divided into three parts, which contain its three themes and their inspiration:—

Clothed in splendor, beautifully sad and silent,

Comes the autumn over the woods and highlands,

Golden, rose-red, full of divine remembrance,

Full of foreboding.

Soon the maples, soon will the glowing birches,

Stripped of all that summer and love had dowered them,

Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure

Ruthlessly scattered:

Yet they quail not; Winter, with wind and iron,

Comes and finds them silent and uncomplaining,

Finds them tameless, beautiful still and gracious,

Gravely enduring.

Me, too, changes, bitter and full of evil,

Dream by dream have plundered and left me naked,

Gray with sorrow. Even the days before me

Fade into twilight,

Mute and barren. Yet will I keep my spirit

Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble

Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,

Grandly ungrieving.

III

Brief the span is, counting the years of mortals,

Strange and sad; it passes and then the bright earth,

Careless mother, gleaming with gold and azure,

Lovely with blossoms—

Shining white anemones, mixed with roses,

Daisies mild-eyed, grasses and honeyed clover—

You and me, and all of us, met and equal,

Softly shall cover.

The pure beauty of that poem, of its spiritual imagery, of its rhythmic flow and cadences, andante tranquillo, and the noble mood and emotion it induces—how it all affects the heart and imagination like music heard in dim cathedral aisles, or recalls us from the vulgar distractions of life to sequestered retreats in the Canadian wildwood, there to contemplate existence with a subdued joy and tender peace! Nay more, we rise from communing with the poet, as he did from his communion with Nature, anointed with a new spiritual grace and with a new strength to achieve, amidst ten thousand vicissitudes of fortune, a right worthy destiny—‘grandly ungrieving.’

Each of the three parts of the poem has its own theme and inspiration. The first section gives us the poet’s vision of Nature and of Nature’s own (as well as the poet’s) autumnal mood. This is an important distinction. It distinguishes a peculiar Canadian pictorializing and humanizing vision of Nature. Who can mistake in what land comes that autumn, ‘clothed in a splendor,’ and ‘beautifully sad and silent,’ in what land flourish those woods, ‘golden, rose-red,’ and in what land rise those hills, ‘full of divine remembrance’? Those are indisputably, unmistakably, Canadian woods and hills, in their precise autumnal garb and mood.

Some would contend that this way of pictorializing Nature is Grecian or even English. Rather is it peculiarly Canadian. It is so for this reason: The Greeks, as it were, ‘decked out’ Nature solely for the sensuous enjoyment of a world made lovely to look upon or pleasant to dwell in. The external beauty of Nature was with them, as with Keats and Wordsworth, when these two did not assume the moralizing attitude, the sufficient reason for their impressionistic word-painting. With Lampman, as with the Kelts (and Lampman was a Gael on his mother’s side), the physical loveliness of the face and garb of Nature is an essential, living aspect of earth. For does not Nature herself, as if conscious and reflective, change her aspect and garb becomingly with her seasons and moods? Lampman’s attitude to Nature is not the attitude of an impressionistic landscape painter, but of one for whom physical loveliness is supremely a spiritual revealment. This, however, might be wholly Keltic, and not Canadian. But it is Canadian, and not Keltic, because the interior revealment expresses a special view of Nature and a special mode of intimate communion between the Canadian heart and the spirit of Nature in Canadian woods and streams and hills.

Part second of the poem gives us an altogether novel and original spiritual interpretation of Nature’s mood and temper. It is a mood or temper, be it remarked, not expressed by Nature in any land save Canada, and not to be divined, and sympathized with, by any other racial genius save by the mind and heart indigenous to Canada, sensitive emotionally to the varying aspects and manner of Nature in Canada, as children to the meaning of changes in the facial expression and manner of a mother.

The uncritical, having in mind that inveterate sermonizer Wordsworth, may think that Lampman in this poem does but ‘moralize’ Nature. Far from it, Lampman ‘humanizes’ Nature in a peculiar way, namely, by reciprocal sympathy. We must mark that—‘reciprocal sympathy’—as an original Canadian contribution to the poetic interpretation, the spiritual revealment, of Nature. Lampman, as he says himself, is ‘brother’ to Nature. Her reflections on her own vicissitudes are as his own on his fortunes of life. The Poet and Nature, though two physically, are one by mutual bonds of sympathy. The poet sympathizes with Nature as he himself feels that she sympathizes with him. Thus does he humanize, not sentimentally, but nobly, the Canadian maples and birches, which, as he says:—

Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure

Ruthlessly scattered:

Yet they quail not . . . .

‘Yet they quail not’—there we have envisaged the mood and temper of Canadian Nature! The Gael, visioning the maples and birches, with his racial melancholy sentiment for glories departed, might say of them that they ‘dream, sad-limbed.’ But only a Canadian, or a Canadian Gael, apprehending, through sympathy, their inmost mood, could say of them, nobly, inimitably: ‘Yet they quail not.’ And so Lampman, divining, with a more than Keltic subtlety of vision, the spirit of the Canadian woods in autumn, sympathetically responds to their mood, and is heartened to endure, as they do, ‘silent and uncomplaining.’

Yet I will keep my spirit

Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble

Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,

Grandly ungrieving.

‘Yet I will keep my spirit clear and valiant!’—Mark that as the authentic spiritual note of the Canadian genius. It is not Canadian, however, merely because it is the expression of indomitable courage and serenity, but because the idea, the inspiration, of a self-controlled destiny, achieved with clearness of vision and valiant heart, first comes to the mind and heart and moral imagination of the Canadian poet as a gift from Canadian woods. He, for his part, conveys that gift to his compatriots, by his poetic envisagement of the ‘brotherhood’ of Man and Nature in this land of glowing birches, noble elms and maples. That ‘note’ of clear-visioned faith and courage and serenity is in Canadian poetry of earlier days, long before the Confederacy, as well as in these days of social and commercial progress. It was in the poetry of Sangster and Mair in Ontario, and in the Gaelic verses of James MacGregor in Nova Scotia. But it is most articulate and vocal in the poetry of Archibald Lampman.

Considering now the first two parts of Lampman’s poem as a whole, we become aware that the first distinctively ‘national’ note in the literature of the Canadian Confederacy is a unique humanizing of Nature, singularly apparent in the Nature-poetry of Lampman—a sympathetic identity of mood and temper, a reciprocal sense of brotherhood, between Man and Nature. This is a psychological phenomenon by itself, belonging solely to the Canadian genius and expressing itself, with fine art, solely in Canadian poetry.

Like other poets, British and American, Canadian poets have notable pictorializing gifts, and can visualize a scene so vividly as to give a reader of their verse the intimate view of an eye-witness of the reality. They can, as aptly as Wordsworth, also moralize Nature and convey a noble preachment. But of them all Lampman stands alone in this—the power to humanize Nature into personality, and sympathetically identify her spirit with his own, in mood and will.

Lampman also stands alone in this—in his love of local beauty and his power to individualize and vitalize it. This, too, is a ‘national’ note and a psychological phenomenon by itself. His is not a love of Nature’s beauty abstracted from a particular time and place, but of those very scenes and haunts where first he beheld Nature in all her physical loveliness and many moods and became her intimate companion and lover. Lampman so individualizes and vitalizes his fields and woods, as Campbell his lakes, Roberts his woods and marshes, and Carman his tide and mists and April morns, that the reader can localize the region, and ‘time’ the season, of their inspiration with the nicest perception. So singularly is this quality present, most notably in poetry of Lampman, though also in the poetry of Roberts, Carman, Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott and Pauline Johnson, that a reader can, with absolute surety, say not only, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty,’ but also, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty in Nova Scotia, in New Brunswick, in Ontario.’ Surely, then, this peculiar imaginative interpretation of Canadian Nature whereby Lampman and his confrères, first, localize Nature, and, next, humanize her noblest mood and temper into an identity with their own is a supreme expression of the national spirit and raises Post-Confederation poetry to the dignity of authentic literature.

Canadians are, in the eyes of the older nations, a notably sane and happy people. They are so because they keep their souls, in the phrase of Lampman, always ‘clear and valiant,’ having, as Lampman, and even as Roberts and the other poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature, a sure vision of the greatness of their country’s destiny and of the means to it. The peculiar moral qualities of the Canadian people are an inviolable faith in themselves, an indomitable courage, and an imperturbable serenity. The ground and inspiration of these qualities are in Canadian woods and hills and waters, and Archibald Lampman, in his nature-poetry, interprets these qualities of the Canadian people and country with sweet reasonableness and genuine nobility.

In two of his finest sonnets, rich both in aesthetic and in spiritual beauty, and worthy both of Keats and Wordsworth, possibly suggesting the spirit of their finest sonnets, Lampman has summarized his poetic and philosophical creed. So beautiful in structure and imagery, so noble in their expression of the courage and serenity and faith which obtain in his Sapphics, and yet so wistful of the heavenly beauty and so infused with the pathos of life are these sonnets, that they move the soul and subdue the spirit with ‘thoughts too deep for tears.’ If there is any genuine meaning to Arnold’s conception of the moral dignity and spiritual function of poetry as ‘the profound and powerful application of ideas of life,’ these two sonnets by Lampman quite match the finest sonnets of the same degree of poetic vision by Keats, Wordsworth, and Arnold:—

Not to be conquered by these headlong days,

But to stand free; to keep the mind at brood

On life’s deep meaning, nature’s altitude

Or loveliness, and time’s mysterious ways;

At every thought and deed to clear the haze

Out of our eyes, considering only this,

What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,

This is to live, and win the final praise.

Though strife, ill fortune, and harsh human need

Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb,

With agony; yet, patience—there shall come

Many great voices from life’s outer sea,

Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,

Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.

There is a beauty at the goal of life,

A beauty growing since the world began,

Through every age and race, through lapse and strife,

Till the great human soul complete her span:

Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn,

The currents of blind passion that appal,

To listen and keep watch till we discern

The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all;

So to address our Spirits to the height,

And so to attune them to the valiant whole,

That the great light be clearer for our light,

And the great soul the stronger for our soul:

To have done this is to have lived, though fame

Remembers us with no familiar name.

Certainly these sonnets breath a higher spiritual air than do the finest sonnets of Roberts, as, for instance, The Sower and The Potato Harvest. As certainly, in sustained serenity and moral import, as well as in profound spiritual beauty, Lampman’s sonnet-sequence The Frogs surpasses Roberts’ sonnet-sequence in his Songs of the Common Day,—not only technically and in nature-color and music but also in transporting the spirit with inevitable ‘murmurs and glimpses of eternity’:—

And slowly as we heard you, day by day,

The stillness of enchanted reveries

Bound brain and spirit with half-closèd eyes,

In some divine sweet wonder-dream astray;

To us no sorrow or upreared dismay

Nor any discord come, but evermore

The voices of mankind, the outer roar,

Grew strange and murmurous, faint and far away.

Morning and noon and midnight exquisitely,

Rapt with your voices, this alone we knew,

Cities might change and fall, and men might die,

Secure were we, content to dream with you

That change and air are shadows faint and fleet,

And dreams are real, and life is only sweet.

There we have, not talent cleverly performing an academic exercise, but serene and noble genius profoundly and finely interpreting and appreciating Beauty and Good in the universe and in existence. Indubitably Lampman is a master of the sonnet, a master whom those greatest masters of the sonnet, Keats and Wordsworth, would welcome to their company, and of whose company, as a nature-poet working in the sonnet or the lyric forms, he really is.

But Lampman is more than a philosophical interpreter of the mystery and wonder of Nature and Life. He is also a consummate artist in revealing to others his vision of the natural magic and beauty of Nature in Canada. He is even a finer colorist and melodist than is Roberts. He is such because he has finer powers of observation, and notes not merely the general superficial beauty of the face of Nature but also the minutest details of Nature’s physiognomy and garb, and the gentler, more gracious of Nature’s moods.

Unlike Roberts, Lampman is not a mere sensuous impressionist. He is an artist with the same gifts as those of Thomas Gray for discerning, appreciating, and envisaging in lyric verse the subtler and lovelier beauties of fields and woods and hills and streams and sky, and for interpreting to the spirit the meaning of pastoral beauty and life in Canadian woods. Roberts paints charmingly indeed at times the mere face of Nature. Lampman not only paints exquisitely and daintily the physical loveliness and garb of Nature but also conveys her most winsome moods and her daintiest messages for the refreshment and sustenance of the spirit. Moreover, Lampman has Gray’s gift in limning the human figure, of adding, with graphic nicety, a humanistic touch to his spiritual portraits. As a poet who paints and interprets Nature with the intimate vision and delicate brush of the artist, not with mere impressionism but with minute and lovely truth and realism, and also as a poet who humanizes Nature with graphic portraits and interprets Nature subtly and intimately to the spirit, Lampman is a master by himself.

Whatever influences Keats may have had on Lampman’s art, it must be observed that fundamentally, as an artist and as an interpreter of Nature, with the power to add here and there graphic bits of human portraiture, Lampman is nearer to Gray than to Keats or even to Wordsworth. All these qualities are incisively exemplified in Lampman’s lyric Heat. In this poem Nature and pastoral life in Canada, on a day of sultry summer heat, are painted with the nicest realistic detail; and in it the bit of human portraiture, the wagoner ‘slowly slouching at his ease,’ is as graphic and as true to life as Gray’s bit of human portraiture, the plowman homeward plodding his weary way, is graphic and true to English pastoral and natural life.

If any Canadian poet ever entered the sanctuaries of Nature and revealed the intimate observation and consummate artistry which marks the art of all the exquisite poets of Nature—that Canadian poet is Archibald Lampman. He is, however, a greater poet than he is an artist. As a poet he is the superior of Roberts. As an artist he has no superior save Duncan Campbell Scott. But as a poet of Nature, interpreting from Nature the essence of the Canadian spirit, Lampman is superb, supreme—unmatched, and even unrivalled by any other poet that Canada has yet produced.

The quotations from Archibald Lampman’s work in this chapter are from The Collected Poems of Archibald Lampman, edited, with a memoir by Duncan Campbell Scott—new edition, 1923 (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).