Elegiac Monodists
THE ELEGIAC MONODISTS OF CANADA—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS—BLISS CARMAN—WILFRED CAMPBELL—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—WILLIAM MARSHALL—JAMES DE MILLE.
Canadian Literature is rich—not relatively but absolutely—in Dirges, Epicedes, Elegies, Threnodies, and Elegiac Monodies. That Canadian Elegiac Monodies, or long ‘In Memoriam’ poems inspired by the death of a real, not a mythical or imagined, person, have genuine distinction, is indisputable. In number they equal the monodies of English Literature; and in manner, in variety of form, and in several qualitative excellences they surpass the monodies of American Literature. Modern English literature possesses five great threnodies or monodies; Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s Thyrsis, and Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale. American Literature has to its credit two fine and noble monodies: Emerson’s Threnody (for his son) and Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (for Lincoln). Canadian Literature boasts of six threnodies or monodies, which all enhance New World Literature and at least two of which are a distinct contribution to the elegiac poetry of English Literature. The Canadian monodies are Roberts’ Ave! (to Shelley), Carman’s A Seamark (to Stevenson), Campbell’s Bereavement of the Fields (to Lampman), Duncan Campbell Scott’s Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris (a Canadian painter), William E. Marshall’s Brookfield (to R. R. MacLeod), and James De Mille’s Behind the Veil (which is sort of Dantean ‘Vision’ of the Beloved in Heaven).
That Canadian poets should have essayed the Elegiac Monody and have excelled in it is consistent with the genuine, the essential mood, the spiritual attitudes of the Canadian people. For while the literary traditions, forms, and methods of Canadian poets are English, the bases of Canadian culture and civilization are much more New England and Scots than English, or, in short, Puritan and Calvinistic. It was as natural for the 19th century native-born Canadian, as it was for an 18th century New England Puritan and Loyalist and a Scots Calvinist, to be preoccupied with thoughts of ‘otherworldliness.’ The meaning of life and death is almost a congenial subject of reflection to the characteristic Canadian. Fortunately the habitat of the Canadian mind, Nature in Canada, recalled Canadian poets from exclusive occupation with spiritual prosperities and great departures to thoughts of ‘the soul’s inherent high magnificence’ in daily mundane life and to the joys, consolations, spiritual transports, and peace which Nature affords the distracted human spirit. Another factor saved Canadian poets from moralistic preachments when they were moved to express in verse their sorrow over some great departure. They had the example of the form and color of the English elegies, from Milton to Swinburne, to save them from chill gravity and barren moralism. The Canadian monodists, on their own account, also loved fine technic in verse, and strove to achieve it according to their capacity. It was therefore natural that Canadian poets not only should essay the elegiac monody but also write that species of poetry with genuine distinction.
The subjects of all Canadian elegiac monodies are either presented against a background of Nature or are suffused with ‘the color of life’ and the beauty of Nature. The first, and in many ways the noblest, Canadian monody is Charles G. D. Roberts’ Ave! (sub-titled An Ode for the Centenary of Shelley’s Birth). It is a poem of thirty-one ten-line stanzas, in decasyllabics, closing with a rimed couplet, iambic pentameter. The poem is not so much, as Roberts called it, an ‘ode’ as an elegiac monody, with the subject presented against a pastoral background. That it was written ostensibly to commemorate Shelley’s birth, not his death, must not cause us to conceive the poem as other than an elegy. The centenary of Shelley’s birth occurred in 1892, when Roberts was 32 years of age. Naturally he seized the opportunity to memorialize in verse the spirit of one of his masters, but he also laments the passing of Shelley and his influence, after the manner of the true elegiac monody. The poem divides not strophically but symphonically. The first theme is a picture of the naturalistic beauties of the Tantramar marshes and the tides that rush in over it from the Bay of Fundy, and the influences that Nature about Tantramar had on Roberts as a poet. He develops this theme by marking how ‘strangely akin’ Tantramar’s marshes seem
to him whose birth
One hundred years ago
With fiery succor to the ranks of song
Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong;
and how, like these marshes, with the incoming and the outgoing floods of Fundy’s tides, Shelley’s
compassionate breast,
Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace,
Was tortured with perpetual unrest.
Now loud with flood, now languid with release,
Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife
Of tides from the salt sea of human pain
That hiss along the perilous coasts of life
Beat in his eager brain;
But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.
A few stanzas are devoted, as they say in symphonic music, to the ‘working out’ of this similitude in all its aspects. Then in stanza XXII Roberts formally announces the elegiac theme as such:—
Lament, Lerici, mourn the world’s loss!
Mourn that pure light of song extinct at noon!
Roberts develops the lyrical genius of Shelley in eight stanzas, and in the final two stanzas returns to the original theme of the Tantramar marshes where on the inner ear of the Canadian poet
once more
Resounds the ebb with destiny in its roar.
It was remarked, in a preceding chapter, that we miss the ethical note in Roberts’ genius and poetry. Here is the exception. In his Ave! he became morally or religiously, as well as imaginatively, sublimated. In that poem he treats life and death with the moral beauty and significance of his exemplars and models, Shelley’s Adonais, Arnold’s Thyrsis, and Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale. In form and substance Roberts’ Ave! is a true elegiac monody.
But is it a great poem? Fault has been found with it on the side of structure or coherency. The poem appears coherent when it is remembered that the structure is symphonic rather than strophic. For though the poem begins with a Canadian setting, which on the face of it is as far away as possible from Shelley and Shelley’s England where he was born and the Italy where he died, it is the thought of the Canadian marshes and the floods and unrest of the tides that suggests to Roberts the inner spirit and genius and life and death of Shelley. So that naturally Roberts passes from the Canadian setting and its suggestions to the subject proper of his poem, namely, Shelley; then to memorializing Shelley’s genius and lamenting his passing, and, finally, back to the Canadian setting which suggested the whole poem. Surely that is coherent logic, unity in variety of structure!
Nor is there any real contradiction between the diction and imagery of the poem and the high magnificence of the soul which the poem commemorates. The ‘properties,’ of course, are not classical—heroes and nymphs, and all the mythical personages of the Greek pastoral poets. There is genuine spiritual dignity in the Canadian setting of the Ave!—the atmosphere and color of the grassy Canadian flatlands, and tides, and mists, and air, and life, and sky. The poem, too, is in the grand manner and is marked by a spiritual sweep and lyrical eloquence which convey to the heart and the imagination of the reader the sense of profound emotion and of sincerity on the part of the poet. So that, in spite of alleged structural and dictional faults, Roberts’ Ave! is distinguished by sensuous beauty and splendor, by imaginative sweep, by emotional intensity and moral and spiritual dignity. But above all it is, as a pastoral elegy or monody, much more Canadian than English. As such, it is a really fine and distinctive contribution to Canadian creative literature. If it is not a great poem, it is a magnificent, compelling, and noble achievement in great poetry—a poem which surpasses any monody in American Literature and which indubitably takes an important status amongst the elegiac monodies of England.
In 1895 Bliss Carman published A Seamark[[1]] (sub-titled A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson). It is a poem of thirty-eight stanzas in rimed iambic tetrameter. It is all in the inimitable lyric manner of Carman, and commemorates Stevenson as ‘the master of the roving kind.’ Altiloquence is never a quality of Carman’s poetry, as it is of Roberts.’ Subtlety in simplicity is the formula of Carman’s genius. And he will color all his homely or simple images with the most apt felicity of phrase and the most insinuating verbal melody. For this reason, some miss the high spiritual, mystical, and religious note in poems which are even more sublimated, though less grandiloquent, than Roberts’ verse. On the face of A Seamark, it seems as if Carman, in commemorating the death of Stevenson ‘as the master of the roving kind,’ composed a colorful musical lyric, but not a highly spiritualized poem. How simple or homely, and yet how felicitous and colorful, are the images in Carman’s musical lines, announcing the death of Stevenson on the island of Vailima:—
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.
The hasty reader does not suspect or surmise the deeper meaning that is to come. But Carman and Stevenson were kin of mind and heart, and their kinship was a kinship of the love of searching out the haunts and ways of the joy and beauty that are on the face and in the heart of Nature. So that these master rovers are not careless, irresponsible vagabonds, but are spiritual nomads with a spiritual function and bent on a divine errand. Thus does Carman magnify their office:—
O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gypsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood
That dream of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease,
Perfection’s lovers all your lives!
What it was given to Carman to discern in the universe was the eternal meaning of youth and to hear the ever-young voice of earth singing in the heart of man and in the earth, in everything, and to be himself the lyric voice of the world. Stevenson was also such a lyric voice of earth. Carman, then, does highly spiritualize his subject when he first presents Stevenson in the manner of the outward aspect by which he was commonly conceived, a restless loved adventurer, who when he died was laid down, as Carman puts it in novel and arresting paradox:—
Beyond the turmoil of renown,
and, next, discloses the inner meaning of the ‘wander-biddings’ that were in the soul of Stevenson who, even in death, still kept
The journey-wonder on his face.
For when Stevenson died, men sorrowed and surmised not why they grieved. But Carman in A Seamark reveals why. Men thought a prince of joy had passed forever. But Carman discloses the higher spiritual truth:—
He ‘was not born for age.’ Ah no,
For everlasting youth is his!
And part of the lyric of the earth
With spring and leaf and blade he is.
In form, and in musical, colorful, simple yet subtle, spiritualization of the meaning and value of men in whom the lyric spirit of earth is supreme and vocal, there is not another elegiac monody in English like, or comparable to, Carman’s A Seamark. It, too, like Roberts’ Ave! enhances both the quality and quantity of the Canadian and the English elegy.
Wilfred Campbell was a myriad-minded man and had an inherited Keltic imagination which felt acutely the magic and mystery of earth and existence. He conceived, most beautifully and nobly, the passing of Archibald Lampman not as a bereavement suffered by mere persons but rather by the great and constant ‘companion’ of Lampman, namely, Nature. With a peculiar and lovely sense of the poetic significance of death, Campbell ennobled the spirit of Lampman, and perpetuated the meaning of his poetry, in an elegiac monody which bears the felicitous title Bereavement of the Fields.
The poem is in a seven-lined pentameter stanza, and is infused with Canadian Nature-color throughout. The diction and the structure are simple, and there is no attempt at sublimated imagination. The poem is rather in the subdued and gentle manner of Lampman himself. That is to say, there is a gentle melancholy running through the poem, but the melancholy is relieved by a simple spiritual beauty which conveys the rare essence of the spirit of Lampman, who passed from earth:—
Leaving behind him, like a summer shower,
A fragrance of earth’s beauty, and the chime
Of gentle and imperishable rhyme.
If poetry can be accepted as literary criticism, then Campbell has estimated better than the best prose critic the significance and worth of Lampman as a poet and his place in the company of the great:—
Outside this prison-house of all our tears,
Enfranchised from our sorrow and our wrong,
Beyond the failure of our days and years,
Beyond the burden of our saddest song,
He moves with those whose music filled his ears,
And claimed his gentle spirit from the throng,—
Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song.
Campbell’s threnody is simple, sensuous, and impassioned, without being impressionistic and rhetorical. It is a sincere and noble affirmation of the supremacy of the spirit of beauty in the world, wherein, as Lampman’s exemplar, Keats, once said, imperishably:—
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
Altogether in another form and with a fresh and novel poetic conception and impressive artistry, Duncan Campbell Scott wrote his Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris[[2]]. Scott’s art is singularly informed by a color and beauty derived from his intimate and exquisite appreciation of the fine arts, especially music and painting. More than any other Canadian poet, Scott is the ‘artist in words.’ He is concerned above all things to employ poetic diction and imagery with the same love of refined expressiveness and emotional nuance as inspired such musical composers or tone-painters as Ravel, Debussy, and MacDowell, and such painters as Constable, Watteau, and Monet. Or to borrow from musical criticism, Scott loves his performance, his executant artistry with words and imagery, more than he loves his poetic ideas.
Edmund Morris was a Canadian painter and his spirit perceived in Canadian Nature and in the Indian aborigines in Canada something which no other painter had perceived or attempted to envisage. Scott and Morris were companions and kindred spirits—the one an artist in words; and the other an artist in pigments. It was natural, then, that Scott, on the tragic death of his friend, should commemorate the loss which both the living friend and the country suffered by the passing of Edmund Morris. But it was impossible for Scott to write any conventionalized elegiac monody. Under inner compulsion, he wrote of life and death with all his original genius for conceiving, as he phrases his mode of conception,
Meanings hid in mist;
and with all his gifts in exquisite craftsmanship:—
Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.
Scott’s Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris is in some respects unique, but particularly in form, and its simple, intimate, direct address to the spirit. It is not a pastoral elegy in the third person but a dramatic monologue, or an epistle in verse from one spirit to another. There is nothing like it in all English Literature, not even in Browning. But intimate, even familiar, and colloquial as it is, the poem is radiant with a ‘white beauty’ of imagery and chaste artistry. More notably still, it subdues the turbulence of our souls in the presence of a great loss by death, transports the imagination to the mount of spiritual vision, refines faith, sustains hope, and fills the spirit with a serene peace. It leaves upon us imperishably the inward sense that ‘it is not death to die’:—
Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,
Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,
Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart
And loses a gold kernel to the mould,
So the old world, hanging long in the sun,
And deep enriched with effort and with love,
Shall, in motions of maturity,
Wither and part, and the kernel of it all
Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes
Where the appearance, throated like a bird,
Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,
Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.
All through this elegiac monody there is a singularly sweet humanity and yet in it are heard the constant overtones of ‘the soul’s inherent high magnificence,’ and the whole is suffused or informed with the color of Canadian Nature and character and life. So that the poem is a novel and important contribution to the elegiac monody in English.
In another style and with another but winning effect upon the heart and the imagination, is William Edward Marshall’s monody Brookfield. It is a poem of forty-five stanzas in the Spenserian form. Structurally viewed, however, his Brookfield is considerably an achievement in that form. Its theme is the heart and mind of a simple man, a friend of the poet, who taught the poet to love communion with the simple creatures and the life of Nature, and to observe in Nature, not the garment, but the very spiritual presence of God. There is no metaphysic of Nature in Brookfield. There is but the apprehension of divinity in the little wild creatures and in the streams and hills, and in the mists, and in all the varied life of the universal mother. Marshall’s master was Keats, and while Brookfield cannot critically be called an example of sensuous impressionism, yet it is warmly colored with pigmentation from the palette of Nature. But the loveliest strands running through the warp and woof of the poem are those of love and the heavenly vision. The sweet, gentle, even tender, Nature-quality as well as the spiritual note in the poem, may be apprehended from the following stanza:—
Ah, he was richly dowered of the earth!
The grain of sand, the daisy in the sod,
Awoke his heart; and early he went forth,
Through field and wood, with young eyes all abroad;
And saw the nesting birds and beck and nod
Of little creatures running wild and free,
(Which know not that they know, yet are of God)
And kept his youth, and grew in sympathy,
And loved his fellows more, and had love’s victory.
Literary critics in the United States, in reviewing Marshall’s Brookfield signalized both its sensuous and spiritual beauty as extraordinary, and in line with the quality of the best English elegiac monodies. In Canada it received high praise from Sir Andrew MacPhail, who sponsored it by publishing it in The University Magazine, and from Dr. Archibald MacMechan. ‘No such poem,’ said the latter, ‘has appeared in Canada since Roberts’ Ave! In dignity and depth of feeling the Ave!, De Mille’s Behind the Veil, and Brookfield stand together—a noble trio.’ Marshall’s Brookfield is Canadian in subject and setting and is indeed a beautiful and noble application of ideas to life—a genuinely original contribution to the creative poetic literature of Canada.
James De Mille’s Behind the Veil, published posthumously in 1892, is a kind of elegiac monody. The poet himself does not so sub-title it. He designates it simply as ‘A Poem.’ Whether the ‘Loved One’ who has been lost to the poet was a real person or an imagined companion of the spirit, it is impossible to surmise from the poem. But the poem itself is concerned with life and death and yearning for union with the Beloved in Heaven, and is thus a spiritualized elegy. Essentially, however, it is a reflective or philosophical poem. If it is reflective, it is also highly melodramatic both in substance and in form. Part of its melodramatic quality derives from its metrical structure which suggests Poe’s Raven. It is written in stanzas of five lines in trochaic tetrameter—a form totally unsuited to its intended high spiritual dignity of theme. A taste of its quality is afforded from the following stanzas:—
Through the darkness rose a vision,
Where beneath the night I kneeled,
Dazzling bright with hues Elysian—
Congregated motes of glory on an ebon field
And a form from out that glory to my spirit stood revealed.
‘Son of Light’—I murmured lowly—
‘All my heart is known to thee—
All my longing and my yearning for the Loved One lost to me—
May these eyes again behold her?’—and the Shape said, ‘Come and see.’
It is impossible to read one hundred and twenty-five stanzas or 625 lines like the preceding, in which the feminine endings make fixed caesural pauses that prevent enjambement and thus inhibit rhythmical variety, without the reader’s feeling himself in the realm of the musically melodramatic. So that the high seriousness of the poem suffers a loss in impressiveness because of the metre and rhythm of the poem. It is plain that De Mille was not an adroit verbal musician. The spiritual dignity and seriousness of the poem can be commended, but on the whole, it is not poetry, and is not a significant contribution to the Canadian monody.
[1] A Seamark is found in the collection Ballads and Lyrics, by Bliss Carman (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
[2] Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris is from Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).