The Restoration Period
THE RESTORATION OR SECOND RENAISSANCE PERIOD IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—NEW FORMS, THEMES, AND SOCIAL IDEALS—THE POETS—MARJORIE PICKTHALL—ROBERT NORWOOD—KATHERINE HALE—AND OTHERS.
We call the period beginning with the publication of Marjorie Pickthall’s first volume of verse, Drift of Pinions (1913), and on to the present, the Restoration or Second Renaissance Period in Canadian Literature. It is a ‘restoration’ period because it marks a return, after the Decadent Interim of the Vaudeville School (1907-1912), to the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the first systematic group of native-born Canadian writers. It is a ‘renaissance’ because the writers of the period undertook the systematic production of original authentic literature, and because they wrote under the inspiration of new themes, ideals, and forms.
By 1913 when the Canadian public had tired of the picaresque themes and the plashing anapaests of Robert Service, and the vogue of the Vaudeville School had passed, there was a demand for clean and sweet sustenance of the soul and refreshing new verbal music for the spirit. It was a demand for pure Beauty—
of fragrance made,
Woven and rhymed of light.
Marjorie Pickthall was the first to give the Canadian public sweet draughts of a new poetic wine of life. She engaged the attention of the Canadian public with the same immediacy and delight as the early lyrics of Tennyson and Swinburne captivated the English lovers of poetry. Set for the most part to a new or, so far as Canada was concerned, a strange music of trochaic, anapaestic, and syncopated metres and rhythms, rich in vowel-harmonies and the tone-color of consonance, assonance, and exquisite alliteration, her songs changed the world about her into an earthly paradise. At first Marjorie Pickthall arrested attention as a young unknown poet singing shyly from a corner in a daily newspaper or magazine, but singing with a rare beauty of imagery and of color from Nature, and with a fresh and dulcet verbal melody, heard as overtones above the more plashing, plangent rhythms of Service and his colleagues. It seemed as if Pan had come again to earth, so idyllic was the Nature-beauty and so simple and dulcet was the melody of her poetry, as in, for instance, The Little Fauns to Proserpine, daintily suggestive of their shadowy figures:—
Browner than the hazel-husk, swifter than the wind,
Though you turn from heath and hill, we are hard behind,
Singing, ‘Ere the sorrows rise, ere the gates unclose,
Bind above your wistful eyes the memory of the rose.’
• • • •
Now the vintage feast is done, now the melons glow
Gold along the raftered thatch beneath a thread of snow.
Dian’s bugle bids the dawn sweep the upland clear,
Where we snared the silken fawn, where we ran the deer.
Through the dark reeds wet with rain, past the singing foam
Went the light-foot Mysian maids, calling Hylas home.
Syrinx felt the silver sprite fold her at her need.
Hear, ere yet you say farewell, the wind along the reed.
There was no appeal on the part of Service and the other Vaudevillians to the spirit, to the religious imagination. It was inevitable, then, that the Canadian public—and the world—should be arrested by the spiritual beauty, tenderness, wistfulness, and the engaging music of such a poem as Marjorie Pickthall’s Mary Shepherdess, the following three stanzas of which illustrate how the thought is ‘woven and rhymed of light’:—
When the heron’s in the high wood and the last long furrow’s sown,
With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown,
Comes Mary, Mary Shepherdess, a-seeking for her own.
Saint James he calls the righteous fold, Saint John he calls the kind,
Saint Peter seeks the valiant men all to loose or bind,
But Mary seeks the little souls that are so hard to find,
All the little sighing souls born of dust’s despair,
They who fed on bitter bread when the world was bare,
Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.
One will seek far in English poetry for a picture of the human figure limned as graphically as it is in Marjorie Pickthall’s line:—
With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown;
and one will seek far in English poetry to find a line musically so in harmony with the spiritual picture of ‘all the little sighing souls’ eyeing, wistful and afraid, the wonder of the shining spectacle of Heaven, as her line:—
Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.
Not once, or even for a moment, could the earthward vision of the Vaudevillian poets conceive, and much less could they write, such a poem of the pure in heart who shall see God as Marjorie Pickthall’s The Lamp of Poor Souls, and its subdued, sacramental music, ending thus:—
Shine, little lamp, fed with sweet oil of prayers.
Shine, little lamp, as God’s own eyes may shine,
When He treads softly down His starry stairs
And whispers, ‘Thou art Mine!’
Shine, little lamp, for love hath fed thy gleam.
Sleep, little soul, by God’s own hands set free.
Cling to His arms and sleep, and sleeping, dream,
And dreaming, look for me.
Francis Thompson or Alice Meynell could have written the whole poem possibly with a more immaculate artistry, but not with any finer appeal to the religious or mystical imagination, and not with a melody a whit more winning as an end in itself.
Having thus tasted the chief engagements of Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry, we must in a more detailed way disclose her genius and art as they appear in her lyrical poems in The Drift of Pinions (1913), The Lamp of Poor Souls (1916), and the posthumous volume The Wood Carver’s Wife (1922)—the last of which contains a lyric drama (the title-poem of the volume) and several lyrics. It is as an adroit and exquisite craftswoman (or ‘artist’), rather than for originality of imaginative conception, that, from her first printed essays in verse to the last, Marjorie Pickthall appeals as a specially gifted poet in Canada, and must be accorded an honorable, possibly high, place in Canadian poetic literature.
Technically, her poetry is distinguished by an extraordinarily successful use of color epithets and verbal melody, especially alliteration. The defects of her poetry are not, on the whole, technical, but are defects, or rather limitations, of genius. Broadly viewed, her poetry lacks breadth of range and eloquence of style. By ‘style’ is not meant Matthew Arnold’s conception or formula of what he called ‘the grand style.’ Marjorie Pickthall’s verse is free, flowing, airy, graceful, tripping, musical; in a word, feminine. But by thus much does it lack originality and seriousness in the substance of its style, the qualities which give us the sense of having met with beauty which is not a mere finely distilled essence of loveliness, but which has strength, and dignity, and power over the heart and the imagination.
The key to the defects or limitations in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry was not her imagination but her ‘heart.’ She loved and had sympathy only or specially with all little creatures and things, with tender, frail, and helpless creatures and things; and she felt profoundly a sort of injustice in their fate, which begot in her a wistful wondering about the justice of the ways of God. She therefore inevitably impressed on her poetry her own feminine feeling for the little and helpless creatures of earth, her own sympathy with the evanescence of all the animate ‘little things’—children, flowers, moths, birds, and ‘the little stars of Duna’—that for her made existence tolerable or happy. Everywhere in her verse appears her preoccupancy with the very word or with suggestions of the word ‘little.’ It is this ‘heart’ limitation that causes her to show what would seem at first sight to be a mannerism, namely, her predilection for certain substantives and epithets, as, for instance, ‘moth,’ ‘dove,’ ‘stars,’ ‘silver,’ ‘golden.’ It is not really a mannerism; but a necessity of her heart and mind. For the creatures and things her heart most loved, inevitably filled her consciousness and excluded other creatures and things.
But while Marjorie Pickthall, by limitation of genius, failed to attain to the sheer reaches in style and poetic substance which mark the work of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, and while she did not possess the ecstatic lilt of Carman, still she must be ranked as a supreme lyrist of the lovely, evanescent little things in the world. She must be ranked high also as a technical artist. If her poetry does not disclose her as able to achieve the finer strength and beauties of technique in poetic style, that distinguish the poetry of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, she is less often at fault technically than the older poets. Her technical artistry was not an acquired accomplishment; it was a gift of Nature. For while the older poets won their way, by hard striving, to their perfection in technique, Marjorie Pickthall, as early as her sixteenth year of age, displayed a precocious virtuosity, which was almost an instinct, in adroit and ingenious verbal coloring and melody.
In the invention of winsome and vivid color epithets and images and in her power for alliterative music in verse, Marjorie Pickthall was, perhaps, surpassed by Pauline Johnson. But Miss Pickthall was the more ingenious of the two poets. The following examples are impressive:—‘Dark with the green silence under the gold weather,’ ‘And close the cowslips’ cups of honeyed gold,’ ‘Yellow for the ripened rye, white for ladies’ wearing,’ ‘Where cling the moths that are the longings of men,’ ‘Thy lips are bright as the edge of the sword,’ ‘On the great green lawns o’ heaven,’ ‘He saw the moonlit rafters of the world,’ ‘Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world,’ ‘And hear new stars come singing from God’s hand,’ ‘To the wind that cried last night like a soul in sin.’
Nature was Marjorie Pickthall’s chief mistress. In the pictorial treatment of Nature the poet displayed special gifts. It is not true to say that she had the Greek ‘feeling’ for Nature, or that the Nature in her verse was that of the ancient Greeks. It was impossible for Marjorie Pickthall, an Anglo-Canadian, to have a Greek imagination; and they who claim that she had the ancient Greek feeling for Nature, might as rightfully claim that she had the ancient Gaelic or Keltic feeling for Nature, or the ancient Semitic feeling for the presence of God, or the medieval Breton feeling for Nature and the mystery of religious faith, which some have remarked as ‘mysticism’ in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry.
The truth is that, first, Marjorie Pickthall had a mind and imagination which were naturally pagan, and that, secondly, Nature was to her but the material for her fanciful and pretty treatment in verse. But to the Greeks, Nature, as perceived and embodied in their mythology and poetry, was their vision of the real face and heart of Nature. They actually believed in gods, goddesses, heroes, muses, naiads, mermaids, satyrs, fauns, as being Nature herself. This is what we mean by saying that the Greeks were pagans. But Marjorie Pickthall had, by native gift, only the sensibility and imagination that were naturally pagan in a love of and preference for thus visualizing Nature. She had saturated her mind, by reading, with the mythology of the Greeks; and her naturally pagan sensibility and imagination re-colored and re-expressed this material in a delightful pagan—not Greek—way in verse. Marjorie Pickthall had no such lively sense of the reality of divinity in Nature as had the Greeks. But she did have a lively pagan, if Anglo-Canadian, imagination. And so, with imaginative ‘make-believe’ she peopled Nature with spirits, mermaids, pixies, fauns, elfs, playing with the Old Nurse Nature, or with themselves, and rejoicing in the sights, sounds, and the shy forest creatures, which they see and hear amongst the woodlands, streams, hills. She thus paganly poetizes Nature, beautifully, winningly; but it is all a tour de force of the senses and imagination, achieved in her ‘closet,’ where she was temporarily shut off from the roar and turmoil of great cities.
Had she steeped herself as thoroughly in ancient Gaelic lore, myths and legends, she would have written as engagingly of the Nature of the Kelts. In her single poetic essay in Gaelic ‘feeling’ for Nature—the Gael’s innate love of Nature and the Homeland, his nostalgia—she failed in a double way; first, by infelicitously giving her poem a German title, Wanderlied, and, secondly, by a dull and commonplace imitation, if not a parody, of Ethna Carbery, Nora Hopper, Moira O’Neil, Katharine Tynan. When she was sincerely and naturally pagan, as in most of her verse, she succeeded admirably. But when she attempted to write a ‘literary’ poem in the pagan spirit, as in Wanderlied, she failed.
More of her imagery is derived from actual Nature in Canada than from mythological Nature in ancient Greece. The coloring from Canadian woods in Spring, Autumn, and Winter is in her verse, also visualizations of Canadian fields and flowers, and the subtle handwork of ‘the Frost King,’ and even Canadian domestic felicities made possible by Nature, such as the winter arabesque on the windowpanes in contrast with the inviting glow of burning logs on the hearth:—
Here where the bee slept and the orchis lifted
Her honeying pipes of pearl, her velvet lip,
Only the swart leaves of the oak lie drifted
In sombre fellowship.
Here where the flame-weed set the lands alight,
Lies the bleak upland, webbed and crowned with white.
Build high the logs, O love, and in thine eyes
Let me believe the summer lingers late.
We shall not miss her passive pageantries,
We are not desolate,
When on the sill, across the window bars,
Kind winter flings her flowers and her stars.
And what but Canadian is this compelling line from The Young Baptist?—
Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world!
In short, if we were making a formula for Marjorie Pickthall’s Nature poetry, we would employ this sub-title—‘Lyrics in the Greek and the Canadian Modes of Pictorializing Nature.’ Thus we should, by a single phrase, escape absurdly alleging that an Anglo-Canadian mind possessed Greek imagination and feeling for a mythological Nature; and thus also make clear the fact that Marjorie Pickthall, an Anglo-Canadian poet, was gifted not only with a lively pagan sense of the beauty of a vanished world, but also with a responsive sensibility to the beauty of a real and present world of Nature in Canada.
In two respects, then, Marjorie Pickthall may be regarded as having made original contributions to Canadian literature. First, she winsomely pictorialized, not, as with Lampman, spiritually interpreted, the face and pageantry of Nature. Secondly, she subtilized verse technique in verbal coloring and melody. She had a light and tender fancy, and, certainly for Canada, a rare artistry. She brought Titania and Ariel to earth again; and suffused existence with magical illusion, rhymed of light. The monument she herself raised to her genius and memory is not large and imposing; but it is, like her own spirit, chaste, exquisite, beautiful—and enduring.
Another significant creative poet of the Second Renaissance Period is Robert Norwood. Miss Pickthall was an objective poet. Whenever her imagination concerned itself with the spiritual realm it was to interpret only her own private experience, strictly from a personal point of view. Norwood is an interpreter of the Spirit to the Spirit—universalizing his imaginative experiences. He is, to be sure, a colorist and a musician in verse; but he is these secondarily in aim, whereas primarily he is the singer and interpreter of the meaning of Spiritual Love. In this field he has made a really original contribution to native Canadian poetry. In another field, however, he has made a still greater contribution to Canadian poetry.
The faculty of love, which is the deepest function of man’s spiritual nature, is the imagination, the idealizing faculty. The greatest and most spiritualizing power in the world is love because its ultimate object is the heart of the universe; that is, Immortal Love, which is God, for God is Love. The greatest and most spiritualizing earthly object of love is Woman, because it is the idealization, the love, of Woman that most inspires men to achievement in this life and to the deserving of union and companionship on earth and in the life to come. That is to say, the spiritual love of Woman is the chief inspiration of human creative ideals and activities—of material achievement, of creation in the fine arts, and of religion. Thus did Goethe apostrophize this divine function of woman:—
Das Ewig Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan
—the eternal woman-soul draws us forever upwards and on; and thus has Robert Norwood also declared Woman’s spiritualizing function:—
Much have I learned of woman and the part
She plays in shaking from the laden bough
Life’s blossoms; all that has been, and is now,
And ever shall be: Science, music and art,
Religion, these, as from a fountain start
The river, have been hers—man to endow.
It is Norwood’s mastery of verbal color and music and his power of spiritual vision and exaltation—his interpretation and treatment of Ideal Love—that constitute his novel quality of fresh excellence in the poetry of the Second Renaissance. Certainly in his sonnet-sequence His Lady of the Sonnets (1915), he has enhanced the quality of Canadian poetry. Uppermost in his heart and imagination is the refining redemptive, transmuting power of Love, an absolute joy in the thought of the spiritual union and companionship of the Lover and the Beloved. To him Love is a holy ideal; and Loving is the fusion of soul and soul, of spirit and spirit, until the Lover and the Beloved become one soul, one spirit, enamored of holiness in thought, speech, and deed.
As an example of Norwood’s sensuously colorful and musical envisagement of the Ideal Love we quote the following sonnet:—
I meet you in the mystery of the night,
A dear Dream Goddess on a crescent moon;
An opalescent splendour like a noon
Of lilies; and I wonder that the height
Should darken for the depth to give me light—
Light of your face, so lovely that I swoon
With gazing, and then wake to find how soon
Joy of the world fades when you fade from sight.
Beholding you I am Endymion,
Lost and immortal in Latmian dreams;
With Dian bending down to look upon
Her shepherd, whose aeonian slumber seems
A moment, twinkling like a starry gem
Among the jewels of her diadem.
As an example of his power for spiritualizing Love, the following sonnet from the same sequence will suffice:—
Last night I crossed the spaces to your side,
As you lay sleeping in the sacred room
Of our great moment. Like a lily’s bloom,
Fragile and white were you, my spirit-bride,
For pain and loneliness with you abide,
And Death had thought to touch you with his doom,
Until Love stood angelic at the tomb,
Drew sword, smote him and Life’s door opened wide.
I looked on you and breathed upon your hair—
Your hair of such soft, brown, translucent gold!
Nor did you know that I knelt down in prayer,
Clasped hands, and worshipped you for the untold
Magnificence of womanhood divine—
God’s miracle of Water turned to Wine!
In his exquisitely wrought, sensuously colored, yet spiritually elevating verse surely we discover something that has never before been in Canadian poetry. It is a fresh achievement in Canadian poetry, even though it is not always impeccable in rhythm and rhyme. It is, too, authentic poetry, as if Dante or Keats or Tennyson or Swinburne had returned to earth and their genius were reincarnated, in a notable degree, in the genius of Robert Norwood.
Katherine Hale (Mrs. John Garvin) is a poet by herself. For she was a poet of considerable distinction for a decade before she published the volume which revealed her as having found her métier in creative poetry, as in her Morning in the West (1923). The eye and the ear are supreme in her processes of perception. Music and pictorial art were her first aesthetic loves, and had most to do with determining her attitudes and appreciations of the spiritual world. So that, at length, the inner eye and the inner ear became the faculties by which she perceived beauty in the external world as well as in the heart of mankind. All her reactions to what she saw and heard in the external world were in terms of color beauty and tonal beauty, perhaps more in terms of color than of tone. She became a musical critic of distinction, and one of our foremost ‘color-writers.’
When, therefore, Katherine Hale felt the ‘urge’ to create poetry, her reactions to the spiritual world also were in terms of color and music. It is found that her development in poetic writing follows the same order as her development in prose writing. She began as a critic of music and reviewer of literature, but capped all her prose with a finished and arresting work in ‘color-writing,’ Canadian Cities of Romance (1922). She began her poetic creation with the musical or lyrical qualities of her verse much more accentuated than the color qualities, and her themes and forms much more earth-born and conventional than romantic and spiritualized in meaning. But always in her first three books of verse there was the feeling for pictorial or color values and for subtle emotional and spiritual nuances.
At length, as in Morning in the West, her latest volume, she found her true mode, and poetry became for her the beautiful sketching and etching and painting of the romance of the Canadian spirit. This poetry of the spirit she suffused with all the subtle variations of imaginative ‘color,’ half-lights, shadows, and chiaroscuro of Nature and social life in Canada from the days of the Scots factor and Western chevalerie to the era of the transcontinental railways.
Her first two books of verse, Grey Knitting (1914) and The White Comrade (1916), by their very titles suggest the color ‘note.’ But the gift or power of embodying spiritual beauty in lyrical music is always uppermost, as for instance in The Ultimate Hour or In Noonday containing the unforgettable alliterative and musical line:—
With dear indefinite delight;
or in this stanza from The Answer:—
Unaltered aisles that wait and wait forever,
O woods that gleam and stir in liquid gold,
What of your little lover who departed
Before the year grew old?
In addition to the winsome color and musical qualities of her earlier lyrical verse, we discover a refined spiritual quality in such a sonnet as The First Christmas, and a noble spiritualization of romantic love in her sonnet At Noon, beginning:—
Thou art my Tower in the sun at noon.
Katherine Hale’s long poem The White Comrade (1916) discloses notable gifts in blank verse and the power to make a dramatic picture that enthralls the mystical or religious imagination. Her rare gifts of delicate fancy, elfin enchantment from Nature and simple Orphean music, reminding us of Bliss Carman’s light lyrism, is finely exemplified in her spiritualized lyric I Used to Wear a Gown of Green, in which beauty and pathos are tenderly commingled:—
I used to wear a gown of green
And sing a song to May,
When apple blossoms starred the stream
And Spring came up the way.
I used to run along with Love
By lanes the world forgets,
To find in an enchanted wood
The first frail violets.
And ever ’mid the fairy blooms
And murmur of the stream,
We used to hear the pipes of Pan
Call softly through our dream.
But now, in outcry vast, that tune
Fades like some little star
Lost in an anguished judgment day
And scarlet flames of war.
What can it mean that Spring returns
And purple violets bloom,
Save that some gypsy flower may stray
Beside his nameless tomb!
To pagan Earth her gown of green,
Her elfin song to May—
With all my soul I must go on
Into the scarlet day.
All these—the poetry of her first three books, Grey Knitting, The White Comrade, and The New Joan—were but her short flights preparatory to making her eagle flight, by which she should discover the meaning of Canadian history and civilization in which is envisaged the Canadian national spirit. In Morning in the West Katharine Hale is no longer the individual lyrist fluting in the band of other Canadian lyrists. In that volume she sounds the diapason of Canadian nationality. She invents new forms of lyrism, and her themes are colored with new tones and lights of an impressionism which is the acme of realism and yet is finely spiritualized, as in the series of verbal color-sketches Going North and A Study of Shadows. But always we are being taken by the poet through Canada, and made to see what has been for us the most invisible, or, if visible, the most elusive of all things, namely, the forms and variation of the Canadian spirit and habitat.
The new forms of her lyrism may be exemplified in this example, Enchantment:—
I never see a blue jay
But I think of her;
Never hear that hoarse ‘dear—dear’
From a tree-top stir,
And the answering call
Far, far away,
And the flash of azure—
Oh, she would stay
Listening in the forest,
Loitering through the silence,
Hearing calls and singing
All the livelong day!
Her new themes and new vision and spiritual import in them—the envisagement of the qualities of the Canadian spirit—are notably presented in Cun-ne-wa-bum, Buffalo Meat, and most poignantly in An Old Lady, which is an incisively graphic and dramatic picture of the whole history of Canadian civilization from the early days of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the 20th century social life in Ottawa in these days of automobiles and bridge parties. Yet it is no mere picture, but possesses a simple pathos, tenderness, and wistfulness which spiritualize the realism in the poem, and raise it to the plane of literature. This, then, is Katherine Hale’s novel contribution to the poetic literature of Canada:—Canadian nature and civilization envisaged with a spiritual realism which has national perspective and native color and atmosphere. It is a new and distinct achievement in creative poetry in Canada.
Another significant poet of the Second Renaissance period, whose verse deserves special mention, is Lloyd Roberts. Early in 1914 he published a volume of verse entitled, England Over Seas. Lloyd Roberts is the son of Charles G. D. Roberts. No doubt, he inherited his poetic gifts from his father, and, no doubt, learned the principles of technical artistry from him. But, as a matter of fact, in his own published verse, Lloyd Roberts shows qualities—love of Nature and the gift of a singularly lyrical lilt—that are nearer the verse of his father’s cousin, the inimitable lyrist of the seasons, the vagrom heart, and the open road, Bliss Carman.
In England Over Seas, the younger Roberts is an enchanting lover of Nature, a vivid colorist, and a melodious verbal musician. Nature is, in his own phrase, ‘the star’—always the theme and in the foreground. Of his qualities as a nature-painter and a verbal melodist, the following is an excellent example:—
Crimson and gold in the paling sky;
The rampikes black where they tower on high—
And we follow the trails in the early dawn
Through the glades where the white frosts lie.
Down where the flaming maples meet;
Where the leaves are blood before our feet
We follow the lure of the twisting paths
While the air tastes thin and sweet.
Leggings and jackets are drenched with dew;
The long thin barrels are cold and blue;
But the glow of the Autumn burns in our veins,
And the eyes and hands are true.
Where the sun drifts down from overhead
(Tangled gleams in the scarlet bed),
Rush of wings through the forest aisle—
And the leaves are a brighter red.
Loud drum the cocks in the thickets nigh;
Gray is the smoke where the ruffed grouse die.
There’s blackened shell in the trampled fern
When the white moon swims the sky.
The number of the poets of the Second Renaissance is legion. Amongst them are Arthur S. Bourinot, Gertrude Bartlett, Bernard F. Trotter (deceased), Arthur L. Phelps, Lucy M. Montgomery-MacDonald, Grace Blackburn, Beatrice Redpath, Laura E. McCully, Louise Morey Bowman, Florence Randal Livesay, Norah Holland, Amy Pennington, Carroll C. Aikins, Wm. A. Creelman, Andrew D. Merkel, Alexander Louis Fraser, Peter MacLaren MacDonald, Clare Giffen, Erica Selfridge, Charles T. Bruce, Marian Osborne, H. J. Maclean. It were worth while to review in detail the work of Arthur S. Bourinot as represented in his Laurentian Lyrics (1915), and Lyrics From the Hills (1923), and Arthur L. Phelps as represented in his Poems (1921) and A Bobcaygeon Chapbook (1923). Bourinot attracted attention by his noble and moving sonnet To The Memory of Rupert Brooke and his tender and musical war lyric beginning:—
They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor.
But he is also an artist in colorful lyrism of Nature in Canada, especially of the Laurentian district. Phelps is a refined, perhaps it were better to say, dainty lyrist; but he has also attempted new forms, and has been successful with realistic ‘free verse.’ The others, with a few exceptions, are systematic poets, but are not notable for spiritual vision or for originality in forms or substance.
It is, however, from the point of view of a fresh vision of earth and life and of originality in forms and substance that the work of Florence Randal Livesay, Grace Blackburn, Beatrice Redpath, Louise Morey Bowman, and Wilson MacDonald must be specially remarked. For their work displays a distinct advance in modernism over the work of Marjorie Pickthall, Robert Norwood, and Katherine Hale (earlier manner). In fact, there is in their work fresh origination in themes, structures, music, and social ideals. Florence Randal Livesay won distinction by her Songs of Ukraina (1916). Though formally called translations, they have such original elements of form and matter that they are no more translations in the ordinary meaning than is Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Mrs. Livesay’s work in the Songs of Ukraina, like that of Fitzgerald, has a turning of phrase and of imagery and a grace and music which are all her own and entitle the Songs to the distinction of creative verse. In 1923 she published Shepherd’s Purse. Here her genius flowered independently in what is essentially spiritual realism. But it is not a heavy spiritual realism. It exhibits a rare and light fancy for elusive emotional nuances; and all the poems have a piquancy, daintiness, and exquisite humanity which win one to the love of the evanescent beauty that is in all things human. The poems too have an air of the qualities which are in the vers de société and the ‘Blue China’ poetry of Andrew Lang and Austin Dobson. Mrs. Livesay has made a genuinely novel contribution to Canadian poetry.
Outstanding in other ways is the verse of Grace Blackburn, Beatrice Redpath, Louise Morey Bowman, and Wilson MacDonald. There is more strength and spiritual perceptiveness in the poetry of Grace Blackburn and Beatrice Redpath than in that of Louise Morey Bowman. All show equal originality and finish in the technical treatment of their themes, but Louise Morey Bowman shows at times an airy fancy which is almost so ethereal as to be altogether abstract and unearthly. On the whole, exquisite technique is their chief distinction; they are artists.
Wilson MacDonald in his Songs of the Prairie Land (1918) and The Miracle Songs of Jesus (1921) discloses an absorption in mystical psychology and psychoanalysis which, by its daring and his method of suffusing the matter with ingenious and subtilized novelty or beauty of diction and imagery, adumbrates Goethe of the Faust tradition. It is at once realistic and ultra-spiritualistic. His technique is just as original and individualized as the matter of his poems. If any Canadian has the right to the distinction of possessing sheer creative genius, that right belongs to Wilson MacDonald as a Seer and as an Artist working in a field of spiritual vision which he has pre-empted.
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
Marjorie Pickthall—The Wood Carver’s Wife and Other Poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
Robert Norwood—His Lady of the Sonnets (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
Katherine Hale—The White Comrade (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto); Morning in the West (Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Lloyd Roberts—England Overseas (Elkin Mathews: London).