Pauline Johnson
HER ANCESTRY AND ITS INFLUENCES—LITERARY AND MUSICAL QUALITIES OF WORK—STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT IN SPIRITUAL VISION—PICTURESQUE COLOR VERSE.
The name, life, and poetry of Pauline Johnson affect the heart and imagination with the arresting pathos which attaches to the imperishable memory of a belated and beautiful spirit who came singing new and winning music of earth, and man, and love. She was the most elementally human of all Canadian poets. In some respects Pauline Johnson was the most original and engaging singer in the company of the Canadian lyrists who were born in 1860, 1861, and 1862—Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott.
Pauline Johnson’s grandfather, who attained special glory for his valorous deed of setting fire, with his own hands, to the city of Buffalo in the War of 1812, was distinguished, in times of peace, by his tribesmen with the honorable and poetic sobriquet, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ not because he could actually ‘warble’ like a present-day lyric tenor, but because he possessed a ready flow of language which he used with impassioned and dramatic eloquence. The old warrior’s granddaughter, in her ballads and poems of Indian wrongs and Indian heroic deeds, wrote with the same dramatic intensity and the same gift for dramatic picture; and in her songs of Nature and of love sang with a lyrical lilt as natural, musical, free, and passionate as the warblings of the thrush or lark or linnet.
The distinctive qualities of Pauline Johnson’s genius and poetry are here noted summarily. In general: As a story-telling balladist she must be ranked with the best Canadian poets who have essayed the same genre, though in some of her ballads there are lines which are rhetorical and melodramatic. On the whole, however, her story-telling ballads are unsurpassed by her Canadian confrères, in emotional intensity, rapid movement, terse phrasing, and dramatic pictorial vividness.
As a verbal musician, and as a nature-painter and etcher, Pauline Johnson again must be given a very high place. Some of her poems are marked by absolutely avian abandon; others by haunting melody; and others by sweetly flowing rhythm and winning cadences, and by sensuous vowel-harmonies and faultless rhymes. Many of her poems disclose the gift to paint in words a picture from Nature with the impressionist’s mastery of sensation and color. Some of them are low-keyed and full of shadows, suggested sensations, and mystery. Others are dainty word-etchings, picturesquely or subtly drawn and subdued in tone.
In particular: Pauline Johnson has yet, by other Canadian poets, to be equalled as a lyrist of the passion and pathos of romantic love, and as an inventor of picturesque, veracious, vivid, beautiful, and compelling poetic figures and images. Her love poems are full of the most poignant passion and pathos. It would be easy to make a catalogue of a half hundred or more poetic figures and images which are unique in descriptive aptness or in emotional ‘tang.’
In short, the supreme spiritual and aesthetic qualities of Pauline Johnson’s poetry are its real sincerity, its naiveté of thought, its simplicity of structure, its lovely color images, its winning music, its passion, pathos, and womanly tenderness. But first place must be given to its dulcet and insinuating music and to its original and arresting poetic figures and images.
Pauline Johnson, taking the date engraved on the monument to her memory at Vancouver, was born in 1861. She died at Vancouver in 1912. She was the youngest child of a family of four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson (Onwononsyshon) of Brantford, Ontario, Head Chief of the Six Nations Indians, and his wife, Emily S. Howells, who was of English parentage and born at Brixton, England. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) was born on her father’s estate, which is on the Reserve apportioned the Mohawk Tribe by the Canadian government. It must, therefore, pique the imagination to know that Pauline Johnson was of pure Indian and pure English descent, but that though she travelled from coast to coast in Canada and the United States and twice to England, her freedom of movement was ‘privileged’ and she was always, wherever she went, a ‘ward’ of the Canadian government.
In Pauline Johnson’s case there are nice, though not recondite, problems in literary psychology and interpretive criticism. For instance: Was Pauline Johnson’s genius Indian, or English? Was it inherited, or was she a ‘born’ poet, or how else may her gifts and tastes be explained? The poet herself always insisted, with considerable pride, on her Indian origin. Some critics, reasoning by quasi-inductions, abetted her in this belief. Yet, so far as her genius is concerned, the only one of her Indian ancestors who had anything like literary gifts was her grandfather, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ and his gifts were those of the ‘tongue’ in compelling eloquence rather than aesthetic sensibility and the power of expressing in words the beauty and the music in Nature. On the other hand, Pauline Johnson’s English ancestors were a family who possessed distinct literary tendencies and habits. The most distinguished member of the branches of that family was W. D. Howells, the American novelist, poet, and essayist. It is most probable that she inherited her literary gifts from her English ancestors. For in Flint and Feather—her complete poems—there is not one concept, or bit of color, or rhythm, or anything else, that may be described as specifically Indian. Rather it is all British or Universal. We do find in her poems Indian themes, protests against British ruthlessness in governmental treatment of the Indian, and the celebration of Indian valor and love. But these are human utterances. Moreover, of the ninety poems in Flint and Feather, only eight concern the Indian, and these only on the side of episodes which formed good material for romantic story-telling in verse. In these fine ballads Pauline Johnson became indeed the ‘Voice’ of her inarticulate Indian fellows, but the voice itself was that of a woman cultured in the forms and music of English poetry. Pauline Johnson’s loyalty to the Indian side of her ancestry, and her pride in it, were admirable; but, if heredity is to be accepted as a real cause of genius, her taste for literature, and her bent towards literary expression, must have come from her mother’s side. For her mother was both a cultured and a romantically-minded woman. If, however, we are to grant the poet any gift from her Indian ancestry, we must remember her brilliant career as a reciter or dramatic reader. If she inherited this dramatic gift, then she got it from her eloquent grandfather, ‘The Mohawk Warbler.’ Though she used it conspicuously in her dramatic readings, the gift is also observable in the vividly graphic qualities, and in the emotional intensity, of her story-telling ballads.
Pauline Johnson was the first genuinely Canadian ‘daughter of the soil’ who indubitably was born a poet; and her poetic development was one not in artistic craftsmanship, but in vision. The first important fact in her spiritual history is that at a very early age the future poet evinced an original and intense taste for verse, expressing this taste both by a fondness for memorizing verses read to her and for composing childish jingles about familiar domestic objects. A pretty illustration of Pauline Johnson’s early predilection for poetry is furnished in the Biographical Sketch to Flint and Feather, in which it is related that when she was but four years old (1865) she was asked by a friend who was going to a distant city what he should bring her as a gift, and that the child-poet replied, ‘Verses, please!’
The second important fact in Pauline Johnson’s spiritual history is that from the time she could pen words intelligently up to the close of her public-school days she devoted much of her leisure to self-cultivation in the appreciation and the writing of verse. Before she was twelve years old (1873), Pauline Johnson had thoroughly read Shakespeare and the British romantic poets, Scott and Byron, and with their texts cultivated her native sense of poetic diction and imagery, of verbal rhythm and music (vowel-harmony, rhyme, consonance, assonance, alliteration), and of color-epithets for brilliant and subtly impressionistic word-painting.
Pauline Johnson, with rare good sense, did not publish any of her verses till considerable time after she had completed her formal schooling and her personally conducted studies of versification, verbal music, and poetic imagery. But as soon as she began to offer her verses to editors, she seems to have found ready acceptances. The first periodical to welcome her verse was a small New York magazine, Gems of Poetry, published, presumably, in the early ’80’s of the last century. This, however, can not be regarded as a significant event. Really significant was the fact that The Week (founded by Goldwin Smith) was the first Canadian magazine to publish her verse. This fact assured her the recognition and sponsorship of Goldwin Smith, himself an eminent man-of-letters and a poet, and also, possibly, of Charles G. D. Roberts, who was literary editor of The Week in 1883-1884, and who was the first editor to stand sponsor for Archibald Lampman. The imprimatur of The Week, or the sponsorship of Goldwin Smith and Roberts, automatically elected Pauline Johnson to the company of the Systematic Group of Canadian poets born in 1860, 1861 and 1862, and introduced her to the English-speaking world as a new and authentically gifted singer, in whose music, though formally composed in the English manner of versification, would, in due time, be heard the hitherto unheard melancholy over-tones and wildwood notes of the aboriginal Canadian spirit.
The next important date in Pauline Johnson’s history is the year 1892, when a happy social and literary soirée launched the Indian poet on a public career which, seemingly, would not affect, save negatively, Pauline Johnson’s function and art as a lyrist. From that date and for sixteen years (1892-1908), Miss Johnson assiduously applied her gifts as a reciter and dramatic reader in Canada, the United States, and England, all the while publishing intermittently in the periodical press her best verse.
In 1895, simultaneously at London, England, Boston, and Toronto, appeared her first volume of poems, The White Wampum. In 1903 her second volume of poems, Canadian Born, was issued at Toronto. In 1912, also at Toronto, there was published the definitive and inclusive edition of her collected poems, Flint and Feather. All three, upon their appearance, were highly praised in reviews by the critics of England, the United States, and Canada.
It is important to appreciate the significance of Pauline Johnson’s sixteen years of travelling over Canada, the United States, and England, as a reciter and dramatic reader. Possibly they reduced the amount of her poetic output. But there are no evidences in Flint and Feather that the experiences gained during these years diminished or increased her powers of poetic vision or craftsmanship. Pauline Johnson was self-deceived when, in a letter, she expressed her belief that the fugitive verses published in Flint and Feather, pages 135-156, surpass her poems in The White Wampum and in Canadian Born. ‘My later fugitive verse,’ she declared, ‘is, of course, my best work, as it is more mature.’ There are only fifteen of these so-called fugitive poems; but imaginative, musical, and tender as they are, notably In Grey Days, Autumn’s Orchestra, The Trail to Lillooet, The Lifting of the Mist, The King’s Consort, and Day Dawn, they are all in the early manner of the poet. They are lovely and winning poems, pervaded with seductive music, tone-color pictures of nature and of life, tinged with a tender pathos. But they show no advance in technique, verbal music, imagery, or emotional nuance—no lately acquired powers to express rhythmic ecstasy with a newer and more musical lilt than obtains in The Song My Paddle Sings (1892); or to paint with more suggestive impressionism a nature picture full of color, half-lights, or mystery, or more finely to etch a verbal portrait than she has done in Erie Waters, Marshlands, Shadow River, and Joe; or to catch and envisage a mood or emotional nuance with subtler spirituality than she accomplished in The Camper, Lady Lorgnette, Lullaby of the Iroquois, Prairie Greyhounds, Lady Icicle, and The Prodigal.
All these poems, whose titles have just been quoted, were composed in the decade from 1892 to 1902, and belong to Pauline Johnson’s first two volumes which together contained sixty-seven poems of indubitable lyric and imaginative quality. Of the poems composed by Pauline Johnson in the decade from 1902 to 1912, only twenty-three were deemed by the poet worthy to stand beside her poems from The White Wampum and in Canadian Born which, with the later twenty-three, form the contents of the original edition of Flint and Feather. Five posthumously published poems were added to the later editions.
If, then, in Flint and Feather we discover no advance in the technique of Pauline Johnson’s art, wherein did her new experiences gained by travel, by meeting men and women of foreign lands and by learning the ways of the world, work changes worth while? Solely in the poet’s heart and imagination. Here was a development, not in craftsmanship and art, but in spiritual vision. It was, too, an evolution simple and natural in its stages, and is readily traceable in the poems contained in Flint and Feather. Mr. Melvin O. Hammond, an observant and judicious Canadian critic, in a review of Flint and Feather (The Globe, Toronto, Nov. 9th, 1912), was the first to disclose these stages of Pauline Johnson’s development in spiritual vision. They are four:—
First, Pauline Johnson appeared as the ‘voice’ of the Indian people, who before her coming had been dumb or inarticulate. Her point of view was, at this stage, Indian, and she passionately protested against the abuses the Indians of Canada have suffered (as in The Cattle Thief and A Cry from An Indian Wife) or, as passionately, sang of Indian valor and love (as in her Ojistoh).
Next, her point of view became Canadian. She turned from lamenting the free and glorious past of her Indian ancestors to paint in verse the land of her birth, ‘Canadian life and scenery in the broad outdoors of the North and West,’ not merely impressionistically picturing woods, skies, plains, but also apostrophizing and humanizing both natural creatures and objects, as if they were conscious of their estate, function, and value to man, and had moods of their own, as, for example, The Sleeping Giant (Thunder Bay), and the dainty, fetching lyric The Homing Bee.
The third stage in Miss Johnson’s development in vision was also Canadian. But, in this stage, her point of view became broadened in scope. She turned to remark the progress of the Canadian national spirit and the civilization which binds the Dominion from ocean to ocean. This she accomplished with extraordinary virility in rhythm, with apt descriptive epithet, and with pictorial suggestiveness in her Prairie Greyhounds—a song represented as sung by the trans-continental trains in their passage from East to West, and West to East. The poem gives the reader vivid ideated sensations of the swish and roar and onward rush of the trains, the sweep of the vast territory of the Dominion, and the vision of the Greater Canada that is to be.
The final stage in Pauline Johnson’s increase in scope of spiritual vision was marked by cosmopolitanism, pure humanity, and by mysticism. She had lost the Indian and the Canadian points of view when she composed Give us Barrabas (commemorative of the exile of Dreyfus). She was wholly a human being and sexless when she composed her subtly sympathetic The City and the Sea, and Fasting. She was genuinely mystical when she composed her Penseroso wherein she sang persuasively:—
Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.
To authenticate the claim that Pauline Johnson’s genius, art, and poetry are highly original and sometimes unique, it is only necessary to cite such of her poems as represent the stages of her development and the special qualities of her poetic vision and artistry.
Beginning with the first stage, we must observe that her passionate protesting against the abuses which the Indians of Canada had suffered as, for instance, in her poems The Cattle Thief, and A Cry from an Indian Wife, is no proof that the fierce intensity of her utterance is a recrudescence of ancestral Indian fire of spirit or ferocity in herself. The poems in which this so-called Indian emotional intensity was expressed by her did, no doubt, spring out of imaginative sympathy with her father’s race, but these poems could have been written with the same show of emotional intensity by any other poet who realized with equal imaginative sympathy the wrongs that the Indians of Canada had suffered and who had the gift of fiery expression.
Pauline Johnson is fundamentally Indian when she is most pagan; that is, when, first, she realizes and expresses poignantly her racial sense of haunting presences in the natural world, and when, secondly, she expresses a melancholy regret for the passing of her Indian race and a yearning for free and pagan communion with the moods of Nature, with the wild creatures of Nature, and with the spiritual presences, which, to the imagination of the aboriginal Indian, haunted the woods, the streams, the mists, the clouds, and the sunsets before the hated British race destroyed the Indian’s ancestral habitat and robbed him both of his material and spiritual birthright. Moreover, in the two or three poems in which she protested against the wrongs which the Indians of Canada had suffered, Pauline Johnson was really, if unconsciously, affecting to be the ‘voice’ of her Indian race. For she soon turned from such affected poetic frenzy to expressing her admiration of the British and her love of Canada as a free commonwealth under British allegiance and protection, and to revealing in colorful and musical verse the spirit and beauties of the land of her birth.
Pauline Johnson, then, is essentially Indian, not when frenzied, but only when she expresses in verse the inner secrets of the joy and the pathos of her imaginative communion with past and contemporary Nature in Canada,—when she sings, with free and infectious lilt, outdoor life in Canada or impressionistically paints Canadian woods, skies, plains, snow, waters, or apostrophizes and humanizes the creatures and objects of nature as if they had a psychology of their own.
All the world knows Pauline Johnson’s lilting and infectious lyric of Canadian outdoor life, The Song My Paddle Sings. It is unsurpassed for suggested or ideated sensations of wind and stream, of the spirit of motion, of free life in the open, and wins one both by its vivid pictures of outdoor life and by its simple but musical abandon. After a two-stanza apostrophe to the West wind, closing with
Now fold in slumber your laggard wings
For soft is the song my paddle sings—
we hear the poet lilting the inspiriting song itself, opening
August is laughing across the sky,
Laughing while paddle, canoe and I,
Drift, drift,
Where the hills uplift
On either side of the current swift.
Specially to be noted in this poem is the descriptive and musical realism which the poet effects by a sort of refrain in the third line of each stanza, a monosyllabic accent which precisely conveys to the sensibility the actual sensations experienced in canoeing through slow-moving and rushing or weltering waters—‘drift, drift,’ ‘dip, dip,’ ‘swirl, swirl,’ ‘dash, dash,’ ‘reel, reel,’ ‘sway, sway,’ ‘swings, swings.’ This is supreme in descriptive and imitative naturalism.
For examples of Pauline Johnson’s poetic power to humanize objects and creatures in Nature The Sleeping Giant and The Homing Bee may be cited. The latter is also notably suffused with delicate color, moves with a light, tripping music, and is dainty in structure, thus exemplifying several of the other qualities of her art. The opening lines indicate the ‘key’ in music and color:—
You are belted with gold, little brother of mine,
Yellow gold, like the sun
That spills in the west, as a chalice of wine
When feasting is done.
In the Canadian idyll, Pauline Johnson displayed a delicate sense of color values, and sang as well of airy things in Nature with an airy music, sometimes touched with a reflective melancholy, as, for instance, in Shadow River.
The tones of melancholy, of sadness, observed sometimes in Pauline Johnson’s poetry were not all born of a mystical yearning for union with Nature. Sometimes they were the expression of a poignant sense of the defeat of romantic love. Hers was a simple, warm or passionate, confiding, sensitive, but strong nature; and sensitive and passionate but strong natures, if they belong to poets, tend to express poignantly, rather than bitterly, any spiritual cataclysm in their lives, and, for solace or support, to turn to Nature or to religion. It was so with Pauline Johnson.
Charles Mair, author of Dreamland and Other Poems, and Tecumseh: A Drama, is the authority for the belief that Pauline Johnson went through an experience of romantic love which, in its joy, gave wings of ecstasy and a warm emotional coloring to her nature-poetry, but which, when her love suffered a defeat that meant a spiritual cataclysm for her, drew from her the most poignant expression of yearning for union with Immortal Love. The important truth is that whichever emotion she expresses, she remains unequalled as a lyrist of the ecstasy and the pathos of romantic love. But her poems of the ecstasy of love are never merely the expression of subjective emotions. They also have an idyllic or nature setting which so colors her nature-poetry itself with the passion of love as to distinguish it, both as nature-poetry and as love poetry, from anything else of the kind in Canadian Literature. The ecstasy is somewhat subdued in Idlers; but is passionate and transporting, warmly colored with the light and tints of Nature, and set to verbal music in perfect harmony with the emotion and the nature-setting in Wave-won.
The fact of the defeat of love, in Pauline Johnson’s case, may be observed in her Overlooked, a poem which is notable for the invention on her part of a metaphor that, for originality and beauty, is worthy of the Greek idyllists or of Catullus, namely:—
O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise.
At length Pauline Johnson’s merely human passion of yearning for union with the mortal companion is transmuted into a spiritualized yearning—which, however, has not in it the sad wistfulness of the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall—for union with Immortal Love. Defeat of romantic love in Pauline Johnson’s case passed, first, into renouncement, and, at last, into resignation and the total giving of self to Immortal Love, as in Brier—
Because, dear Christ, your tender, wounded arm
Bends back the brier that edges life’s long way,
That no hurt comes to heart, to soul no harm,
I do not feel the thorn so much to-day.
Because I never knew your care to tire,
Your hand to weary guiding me aright,
Because you walk before and crush the brier,
It does not pierce my feet so much to-night.
Because so often you have hearkened to
My selfish prayers, I ask but one thing now,
That these harsh hands of mine add not unto
The crown of thorns upon your bleeding brow.
Pauline Johnson possessed extraordinary, if not quite unique, gifts as a story-telling balladist. Examples of her art in this species are her compelling story of Indian love and revenge, Ojistoh, her melodramatic Indian tale, The Cattle Thief, and her Wolverine, a poem of Western chevalerie, in which species, however, she does not rank with Isabella Valancy Crawford.
Her poetry of the development of the Canadian national spirit and civilization, by which she marks a broadening in her own spiritual vision, is notably exemplified in two poems, The Riders of the Plains and Prairie Greyhounds. In the former, however, she is more British than Canadian. But she is Canadian in her Prairie Greyhounds. In this poem she achieves an extraordinary virility of rhythm, employs apt and dramatic epithets and fills the picture with a vivid suggestiveness of the vastness of Canada and the vision of the greater autonomous and powerful Dominion that is to be. Prairie Greyhounds, moreover, is a supreme achievement in suggested or ideated sensations of motion. The reader feels himself as if actually aboard the west-bound and east-bound Canadian Pacific trains, experiencing, as does a living passenger on a ‘fast express,’ the swish, and roar, and onward rush of the trains.
As a verbal musician Pauline Johnson must be given a very high place amongst Canadian poets. There is an avian abandon and ecstasy, an avian lilt and warbling, in The Birds’ Lullaby and in The Songster. There are flowing rhythm and haunting melody of rhyme, vowel-harmony, alliteration and cadences in The Trail to Lillooet:—
Song of fall, and song of forest, come you here on haunting quest,
Calling through the seas and silence, from God’s country of the west.
Where the mountain pass is narrow, and the torrent white and strong,
Down its rocky-throated canon, sings its golden-throated song.
You are singing there together through the God-begotten nights,
And the leaning stars are listening above the distant heights
That lift like points of opal in the crescent coronet
About whose golden setting sweeps the trail to Lillooet.
Pauline Johnson has also achieved what may be noted in literary history as the first strictly Canadian ‘cradle-song’—Canadian in music and in setting—her Lullaby of the Iroquois.
As a nature-colorist and etcher Pauline Johnson again must be given a very high place. For a genre etching of the human figure against a background of nature her Joe, which she herself sub-titles ‘An Etching,’ is as vividly presented and as fetching as a genre drawing by Murillo. Her Lady Lorgnette is as daintily graphic and colorful and piquant and romantic as anything done by the brush of Romney or Gainsborough or by the later modern ‘society’ miniaturists. She had the pictorial artist’s eye to spy out a picture in Nature, as in At Husking Time. She had the impressionist’s mastery of sensuous pigmentation, as in Under Canvas. She could make a picture low-keyed, full of shadows and suggested sensations and mystery, as in Nocturne and in Moonset.
Finally: Pauline Johnson is certainly not surpassed, if equalled, by any other Canadian lyrist as an inventor of beautiful color epithets and of picturesque, vivid, and compelling metaphors. They are to be found everywhere in her poetry. Consider these as examples—‘Russet needles as censers swing to an altar,’ ‘The sea-weeds cling with flesh-like fingers,’ ‘Beaten gold that clung like coils of kisses love inlaid,’ ‘The brownish hills with needles green and gold,’ ‘O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise,’ ‘Swept beneath a shore of shade, beneath a velvet moon,’ ‘Like net work threads of fire,’ and this,
Purple her eyes as the mists that dream
At the edge of some laggard, sun-drowned stream
and many more as novel, colorful, musical, veracious and compelling.
As a woman Pauline Johnson was a rare and beautiful spirit. As a poet she was of all Canadian poets the most pervasively true to her Canadian origin and habitat. She is not to be given always the status of Lampman and Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott, yet to her unquestionably belongs a place beside these Canadian singers. Her poetry had a magic of music and a color of leafy lawns and lovely grey-eyed and tawny dusks and clear ecstatic morns, which were all her own. She was indeed a ‘Mohawk Warbler,’ and her songs are
Free and artless as the avian lays
Heard in Canadian woods on April days.
The quotations in this chapter from Pauline Johnson’s poems are from Flint and Feather, by E. Pauline Johnson, (Musson Book Co., Limited: Toronto).