Minor Poets
THE TERM ‘MINOR’ DEFINED—ETHELWYN WETHERALD—JEAN BLEWETT—FRANCIS SHERMAN—A. E. S. SMYTHE—S. FRANCES HARRISON—ARTHUR STRINGER—PETER MCARTHUR—ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY.
It is proper to distinguish Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick George Scott, and Pauline Johnson as the ‘major’ poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. Though of necessity with them the writing of verse was in a sense an avocation, in another sense it was a vocation. They were systematic both in the writing and the quantitative publishing of it. Contemporary with them, but, for the most part, later in production and publishing, were other poets who wrote with beauty and distinction in poetic style. They followed the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the ‘major’ poets, but they were not as systematic as Roberts and his confrères in writing or in quantitative publishing. These are denoted in this work the ‘minor’ poets of the Systematic School or Period. But nothing invidious as to quality of verse is intended by the distinction. For a few of these so-called ‘minor’ poets of the Systematic Period wrote some poetry as fine in aesthetic substance and artistic finish as the poetry of Roberts and his colleagues. The term ‘minor’ is meant to distinguish these poets as being, first, later, for the most part, than Roberts and his confrères, and as being, secondly, less eminent than the early systematic group of Canadian poets. The number of these so-called minor or later poets is legion. They ‘flourished’ from 1887 to 1907, or from the publication of Roberts’ In Divers Tones to the appearance of Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough (the beginning of the Decadent Interim). Detailed appreciation of the minor poets of the Systematic Period would, therefore, require a volume by itself. Here we may only recall the salient names, and specially remark the verse, of some of the minor poets whose lyrical poetry is particularly representative or noteworthy, or has become genuinely popular.
Worthy of a place beside the major poets of the Systematic Period is Ethelwyn Wetherald. In 1895 she published The House of the Trees and Other Poems; in 1902, Tangled in the Stars; in 1904, The Radiant Road and in 1907, an edition of her collected poems, The Last Robin; Lyrics and Sonnets. Perhaps the outstanding aesthetic quality of her poetry is a tender, subdued, melancholy, spiritual grace, ‘a grey-eyed loveliness,’ which undoubtedly derives from the characteristic pensiveness of her Quaker ancestry. But in all her verse, which is authentic poetry, she discloses pretty sentiment, reflective beauty, ingenious imagery, and fine craftsmanship. The Hay Field, which is Canadian in inspiration, setting, and color is an apt example of Ethelwyn Wetherald’s art:—
With slender arms outstretching in the sun
The grass lies dead;
The wind walks tenderly and stirs not one
Frail, fallen head.
Of baby creepings through the April day
Where streamlets wend,
Of child-like dancing on the breeze of May,
This is the end.
No more these tiny forms are bathed in dew,
No more they reach
To hold with leaves that shade them from the blue
A whispered speech.
No more they part their arms and wreathe them close
Again, to shield
Some love-full little nest—a dainty house
Hid in a field.
For them no more the splendour of the storm,
The fair delights
Of moon and star-shine, glimmering faint and warm
On summer nights.
Their little lives they yield in summer death,
And frequently
Across the field bereaved their dying breath
Is brought to me.
A poet who has won a distinct and fixed place in the popular heart and imagination of Canadians is Jean Blewett. Her first volume, Heart Songs, appeared in 1897 and immediately won a wide popularity. This was increased by her next volume, The Cornflower and Other Poems (1906). Her Collected Poems were published in 1922. Jean Blewett is essentially a ‘woman’s poet.’ By this is meant that she appeals to the domestic heart and the imagination, that she sings of the joys of home, the ways of children, the love of husband and wife. But Jean Blewett does this in an extraordinary way. She treats homely subjects indeed, but while she treats them in a homely or rather home-like way she does it with a simple and ingratiating sincerity and charm of sentiment and artistry which are quite her own and in the employment of which she is alone in Canada. If her poems deal with homely subjects, her artistry is by no means bourgeois. She rises and falls with the inherent dignity of her subject. But her human treatment of a homely subject never issues in vulgarity, or vivid ‘vaudeville’ verse. As an example of her genuine artistry and dignity of treatment in a high or serious subject we quote her Quebec:—
Quebec, the gray old city on the hill,
Lives with a golden glory on her head,
Dreaming throughout this hour so fair, so still,
Of those days and her beloved dead.
The doves are nesting in the cannons grim,
The flowers bloom where once did run a tide
Of crimson when the moon rose pale and dim
Above a field of battle stretching wide.
Methinks within her wakes a mighty glow
Of pride in ancient times, her stirring past,
The strife, the valour of the long ago
Feels at her heart-strings. Strong and tall, and vast
She lies, touched with the sunset’s golden grace,
A wondrous softness on her gray old face.
When her subject gives her a chance for sweep of imagination and for a pearly beauty of imagery, Jean Blewett rises brilliantly to her theme, as in What Time the Morning Stars Arise, a really splendid war poem commemorating the heroic deed of Lieutenant Reginald Warneford, aviator, who unassisted destroyed a German armed Zeppelin, containing 28 men, on June 7th, 1915. We quote the first and last stanzas:—
Above him spreads the purple sky,
Beneath him spreads the ether sea,
And everywhere about him lie
Dim ports of peace and mystery.
• • • •
He sees the white mists softly curl,
He sees the moon drift pale and wan,
Sees Venus climb the stars of pearl
To hold her court of Love at dawn.
Jean Blewett is chiefly loved by the people for her forte—her sincere, simple singing of true love and faith, of childhood, and the field flowers, and the joys of the Canadian Spring and Winter. But, as a genre poet, she is gifted with a whimsical humor which is quite unique in the poetic literature of Canada. For He was Scotch and So Was She is a fetching example of Jean Blewett’s humor and humorous treatment of a simple or homely subject and is to be found in many Canadian anthologies.
Francis Sherman, one of the truest and most individual poets that Canada has produced, is a relative of Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. His literary output has been meagre, comprising only one regularly published volume, a small, thin booklet, Matins (1896), and three or four privately printed pamphlets of verse. But the quality is sufficient to fix his place in the company of the authentic Canadian poets of the First Renaissance.
Sherman’s poetry shows a distinct tendency to mysticism. He was, evidently, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite School. But he had an independent individuality. He possessed, as a poet, eyes and feelings of his own; and could express what he saw and felt, with ready and confident artistry. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on Francis Sherman and his own natural gifts for individual expression are disclosed in Between the Battles (from Matins):—
Let us bury him here
Where the maples are!
He is dead,
And he died thanking God that he fell with the fall of the leaf and the year.
Where the hillside is sheer,
Let it echo our tread
Whom he led;
Let us follow as gladly as ever we followed who never knew fear.
Ere he died, they had fled;
Yet they heard his last cheer
Ringing clear,—
When we lifted him up, he would fain have pursued, but grew dizzy instead.
Break his sword and his spear!
Let his last prayer be said
By the bed
We have made underneath the wet wind in the maple trees moaning so drear:
‘O Lord God, by the red
Sullen end of the year
That is here,
We beseech Thee to guide us and strengthen our swords till his slayers be dead!’
Many of Sherman’s poems have the ‘great out-of-doors’ world in Canada as their theme, and are marked by grave, meditative beauty, disclosing, on his part, intimate communing with and brooding on Nature’s moods. These qualities of Francis Sherman’s mind and art are observed in the following sonnet, quoted from his In Memorabilia Mortis:—
I marked the slow withdrawal of the year,
Out on the hills the scarlet maple shone—
The glad, first herald of triumphal dawn.
A robin’s song fell through the silence—clear
As long ago it rang when June was here.
Then, suddenly, a few grey clouds were drawn
Across the sky; and all the song was gone,
And all the gold was quick to disappear.
That day the sun seemed loth to come again;
And all day long the low wind spoke of rain,
Far-off, beyond the hills; and moaned, like one
Wounded, among the pines; as though the Earth,
Knowing some giant grief had come to birth,
Had wearied of the Summer and the Sun.
A rare spirit and exquisite craftsman, as a poet, is Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe. He was born in Ireland in 1861. He is Keltic through and through; and because he is Keltic in his reactions to the universe, in his perceptions of spiritual meanings in all things, he divines God in men and God in Nature, or God as man and God as Nature—spiritual presences everywhere. In a word, Albert E. S. Smythe exemplifies in his genius and art, as notably and profoundly as Lampman in his, but in a different way, what Wordsworth called natural piety. Smythe’s spiritual perceptions of divinity everywhere rise to a refined mysticism which he expresses with a ‘white beauty’ in exquisitely finished verse. As contrasted with other Canadian mystical poets Smythe is the poet of the Cosmic Spirit and Beauty.
In 1891 he published Poems; Grave and Gay, and in 1923, The Garden of the Sun. A sonnet (The Seasons of the Gods) and a lyric (Anastasis) from the second volume suffice to disclose his qualities in his role as the poet of the Cosmic Spirit and Beauty. As a sonneteer, Smythe is not surpassed by any of his older or younger contemporaries. The Seasons of the Gods is lofty in conception, noble in thought, rich in naturalistic imagery, dulcet in verbal melody, and perfect in formal artistry. It is music of a soul ‘in tune with the Infinite’:—
I sat with May upon a midnight hill
Wrapped in a dusk of unremembered years
And thought on buried April—on the tears
And shrouds of March, and Youth’s dead daffodil
All withered on a Mound of Spring. And still
The earth moved sweetly in her sleep, the Spheres
Wrought peace about her path, and for her ears
Climbed the high music of their blended will.
The God who dreamed the Earth, as I this frame
That makes me thrall to death and coward of birth—
Dreamed He not March below some vanished Moon—
Under an earlier Heaven’s auroral flame
The cosmic April flowering into mirth
Of May and joy of Universal June?
With what lyrical eloquence, subdued, yet direct and compelling, Smythe calls the soul, in pure poetry, to achieve its spiritual destiny, in this lyric, simple in diction and structure, but sublimated, in thought:—
What shall it profit a man
To gain the world—if he can—
And lose his soul, as they say
In their uninstructed way?
The whole of the world in gain;
The whole of your soul! Too vain
You judge yourself in the cost.
’Tis you—not your soul—is lost.
Your soul! If you only knew—
You would reach to the Heaven’s blue,
To the heartmost centre sink,
Ere you severed the silver link,
To be lost in your petty lust
And scattered in cosmic dust.
For your soul is a Shining Star
Where the Throne and the Angels are.
And after a thousand years,
With the salve of his bottled tears,
Your soul shall gather again
From the dust of a world of pain
The frame of a slave set free—
The man that you ought to be,
The man you may be to-night
If you turn to the Valley of Light.
The number of women poets in the period under review is noteworthy. Along with Ethelwyn Wetherald and Jean Blewett must be mentioned appreciatively the names and poetry of Virna Sheard, Helena Coleman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald (sister of C. G. D. Roberts), Helen M. Merrill, Annie Campbell Huestis, Agnes Maule Machar (pseud. ‘Fidelis’), Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Alma Frances McCollum, and S. Frances Harrison (pseud. ‘Seranus’). Their outstanding contemporaries amongst the men were Arthur Stringer and Peter McArthur. It is impossible to review in detail the poetry of all these lyrists. They followed the ideals of the older systematic group as regards original inspiration and artistic craftsmanship. But the work of some of them may briefly be remarked.
In 1891 S. Frances Harrison published Pine, Rose, and Fleur de Lis, a volume of really poetical verse. She is, however, more to be noted as the compiler of the first noteworthy anthology of Canadian verse (A Canadian Birthday Book, 1887), which is distinguished by the fact that it contains a poem by the Indian Chief Tecumseh, the first French-Canadian poem, and some of the earliest poems of Bliss Carman (a series of quatrains). Arthur Stringer is a lyrical poet and a poetic dramatist. His art in the latter respect is appreciated in another chapter. In 1907 he published The Woman in the Rain and Other Poems, and in 1911, Irish Poems. His lyrical poetry in general is distinguished by a warm humanity and by careful craftsmanship. But he achieved a special distinction with his poems in ‘Irishy.’ Many of them have been set to music, and, amongst Canadian-born poets, his only rival in that field is Sir Gilbert Parker. By themselves Stringer’s poems in ‘Irishy’ are a novel and real, if not important, contribution to the genre and humorous poetry of Canada. In 1907 Peter McArthur (‘The Sage of Ekfrid’) published The Prodigal and Other Poems. He is never a mere aesthete in form, but he is a rare Nature and humorous poet—with the lightest and happiest touch in both departments, as in his Corn-Planting and in To the Birds. He humanizes Nature in a way altogether different from other Canadian poets, perhaps whimsically but always with an intimate, colloquial quality of diction, and a piquancy which makes his Nature poetry spiritually refreshing, even to formalists and dilettanti.
Properly Isabel Ecclestone Mackay belongs to the minor poets of the Systematic Period. For in 1904 she published her first volume of verse, Between the Lights. But with that, she turned to writing fiction, and did not publish any books of verse till the appearance of The Shining Ship and Other Poems (1919) and Fires of Driftwood (1923). Her first venture in verse was not better than passable or than good journalistic verse. But in Fires of Driftwood she disclosed a real mastery of form, color, and music, along with a spiritual sentiment which is new in Canadian poetry. She is occupied most with the vicissitudes and meaning of life, but occasionally she paints objective Nature with winning color and music. It is, however, in her poetry of childhood (rather than for children), as in The Shining Ship, that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay most displays original genius and has achieved genuine distinction. The poems in The Shining Ship are marked by the rarest of psychological gifts in a poet—insight into the real heart and mind and imagination of children, and by a diction and phrasing which appeal to the child mind as immediately and as winningly as do the child poems of Eugene Field and R. L. Stevenson. In fact, as Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse is to English Literature, so Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s A Shining Ship and Other Poems is to Canadian Literature.
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
The Hayfield is found in The Last Robin, by Ethelwyn Wetherald (Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Quotations from Jean Blewett’s work, in Jean Blewett’s Poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
From Francis Sherman’s Matins (Copeland and Day: Boston).
From Albert E. S. Smythe’s Grave and Gay; and from The Garden of the Sun (Macmillan Co.: Toronto).