The War Poetry of Canada
MRS. MOODIE—ANNIE ROTHWELL CHRISTIE—ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD—JOHN MCCRAE—CANADIAN POEMS OF THE GREAT WAR.
I. THE POETRY OF THE CIVIL REBELLION
AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
It is a literary phenomenon by itself that the best or most popular of the inspirational and the commemorative war verse by permanently resident émigrés or native-born Canadians was the work of the country’s women poets. No samples of martial verse inspired by the War of 1812-14 seem to be extant. The records of martial verse produced in Canada begin with the Civil War of 1837-38 and the inspirational war lyrics of Mrs. Susanna Moodie.
Fifteen years after the war opened, Mrs. Moodie’s martial lyrics were published in her Roughing It In The Bush (1852, two vols.). In ‘The Advertisement’ (which is a sort of publisher’s Preface) to this work, the publisher recounts the origin and effect of Mrs. Moodie’s inspirational war verse. ‘During the rebellion,’ he says, ‘her loyal lyrics, prompted by strong affection for her native country [England], were circulated and sung throughout the colony [Ontario], and produced a great effect in rousing an enthusiastic feeling in favor of public order.’ But Mrs. Moodie herself modestly remarks (op. cit. sup., Vol. 2):—
I must own that my British spirit was fairly aroused, and as I could not aid in subduing the enemies of my beloved country with my arm, I did what little I could to serve the good cause with my pen. It may probably amuse my readers, to give them a few specimens of these loyal staves, which were widely circulated through the colony at the time.
It will suffice to quote the first and last stanzas of her Address to the Freemen of Canada (op. cit. sup., p. 191) in order to show that Mrs. Moodie wrote no mediocre martial verse of the inspirational type:—
Canadians, will you see the flag
Beneath whose folds your fathers bled,
Supplanted by the vilest rag
That ever host to rapine led?
Thou emblem of a tyrant’s sway,
Thy triple hues are dyed in gore;
Like his, thy power has passed away,
Like his, thy short-lived triumph’s o’er.
In a footnote Mrs. Moodie explains that ‘the vilest rag’ is the tri-colored flag assumed by the rebels. The use of the phrase has, of course, both psychological and aesthetic warrant. The thought of the tri-colored flag, of its earlier bloody history in the French Revolution, revolted her sense of nobility and righteousness, and, like Homer’s, her diction and imagery sank in correspondence with the fall in the spiritual dignity of her subject. Aesthetically viewed, she was quite justified in sinking and rising with the emotional dignity of her subject. She sinks in the third stanza, but rises magniloquently in the fifth (final) stanza. Thus:—
By all the blood for Britain shed
On many a glorious battlefield,
To the free winds her standard spread,
Nor to these base insurgents yield.
With loyal bosoms beating high,
In your good cause securely trust;
‘God and Victoria’ be your cry,
And crush the traitors to the dust.
Compared with standard martial songs, such as Burns’ Scots Wha’ Hae wi’ Wallace Bled, or The March of the Men of Harlech, the first three lines of the foregoing stanza are really excellent. The vocables are mouth filling, the rhythm moves rapidly and carries one with it, and though the third line might be improved by the use of the word ‘fling’ for the word ‘spread’ in the text, still ‘To the free winds her standard spread’ increases respiration, and stimulates ideated sensations of free movement and expanding personality. Altogether, it is a vigorous—a ‘breezy’ line. No Canadian need feel ashamed of it. And what magnificent energy is in the last two lines of the stanza! The reader no sooner reaches ‘God and Victoria’ than he shifts back the accent to the word ‘God,’ emphasizes it with a full burst of breath and with a change in pitch, and then impulsively spurts out the utterance of the remaining syllables in the same changed pitch until he attacks the word ‘cry,’ which is both oxytoned and emphasized. Thus the line becomes a veritable battle-shout and inspiriting slogan. After this ringing, rousing, energizing oxytone line comes the barytone cadence, ‘And crush the traitors to the dust.’ The reader braces himself for action—takes in a full breath, fronts his eyes, sets his jaws, and all his muscles, and lunges forward to the fray. Both are brave lines; both are energizing, impelling; and the whole stanza is a magnificent sample of inspiriting martial verse. No Canadian need feel ashamed to recite it before the admirers of Robert Burns or William Duthie.
Mrs. Moodie’s modest estimate of her martial lyrics is not just to the poet. They are better than mere ‘loyal staves,’ fitted solely to ‘amuse’ casual readers. That they were widely circulated and sung throughout Canada at the time when they were needed, is proof that they possessed lyrical eloquence and the inspirational power to stir the heart and impel the will to honorable action. They are good singing verse, but they are not genuine poetry. All that is required in an inspirational war lyric is that it come warm from the heart and hand; that it be human, manly, direct in thought; that it be ringing in lilt and swinging in rhythm; and that it be respectable technically as verse. To write martial verse that fulfils all these requirements and to write it immediately on demand is no easy task. Judged by these standards Mrs. Moodie excelled in inspirational war lyricism. It is true that Harriet A. Wilkins, Mrs. Curzon, Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie, Valancy Crawford, and Agnes Machar surpassed her in poetic war lyricism. But this was due to the fact that their best martial verse was commemorative, and was written after the deeds or events celebrated by them, and at a time when they could compose in peace and at leisure.
Of these later Canadian women poets of martial verse the supreme artist was Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie. The verse of the others, even Isabella Valancy Crawford’s novel The Rose of a Nation’s Thanks, and Agnes Maule Machar’s swinging Our Lads to the Front, though choicer in diction and imagery than Mrs. Moodie’s, hardly rise above the quality of good verse. Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie’s commemorative martial verse on the other hand, attains to the dignity and beauty of pure poetry. We do not need the statement of the English poet Sir Edwin Arnold, that ‘the best war songs of the Half-breed Rebellion were written by Annie Rothwell-Christie.’ Dignity, beauty, melody and compelling pathos are in every line she wrote. These qualities can be observed in the lines we quote from her After the Battle and Welcome Home, selecting, first, two stanzas from After the Battle:—
Ay, lay them to rest on the prairie, on the spot where for honor they fell,
The shout of the savage their requiem, the hiss of the rifle their knell.
• • • •
As the blood of the martyr enfruitens his creed, so the hero sows peace
And the reaping of war’s deadly harvest is the earnest his havoc shall cease.
The extraordinary imagery of the last line of the first stanza (couplet)—‘the shout of the savage their requiem, the hiss of the rifle their knell’ and the novel beauty of the similitude in the first line of the second stanza are enough to raise these verses to the dignity of pure poetry. Besides, there is a spiritual militancy in the rhythm that soothes or solaces, while its cadences solemnize the soul, begetting resignation to the Will of the Universe. Or listen to the triumphant, sonorous verbal music of these lines from Welcome Home:—
War-worn, sun-scorched, strained with the dust of toil,
And battle-scarred they come—victorious.
Exultantly we greet them—cleave the sky
With cheers, and fling our banners to the winds;
We raise triumphant songs, and strew their path
To do them homage—bid them ‘Welcome Home!’
We hear drum beats, bugle calls, and the tramp of armed men on the march in those first two spondaic phrases—‘war-worn, sun-scorched.’ A new emotional experience comes to us with the quicker moving syllables in the next two lines; the rhythm is fitted to exultation. Also we are treated to a new but brilliant alliterative metaphor—‘cleave the sky with cheers.’ We are in the realm of poetry. But fine as are the preceding examples of Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie’s commemorative martial verse, the pathos of the following, from The Woman’s Part, is overwhelmingly human and moving and ennobling. The inspiration is derived from reflecting whether to those who, fired by love of adventure or country, have gone to war, and fallen, the mothers, sisters, and sweethearts shall give regrets, prayers, or tears. The poet disparages all these, and turns to solace the mother or wife, whose son or husband had died on the battlefield:—
O, woman-heart be strong,
Too full for words—too humble for a prayer—
Too faithful to be fearful—offer here
Your sacrifice of patience. Not for long
The darkness. When the dawn of peace breaks bright,
Blessed she who welcomes whom her God shall save,
But honored in her God’s and country’s sight
She who lifts empty arms to cry, ‘I Gave!’
After reading that noble poem of love and pathos, and being moved to emotion too deep for tears, one knows that all distinctions for sex are man-made and ephemeral and abortive—that only ‘soul,’ whatever be its form of earthly tenement, is real. For Annie Rothwell-Christie who wrote that poem was altogether soul—superman, superwoman—gifted with the speech of angels. Her martial verse is absolutely unique, and a distinct contribution to perduring war poetry.
II. THE POETRY OF THE WORLD WAR
The Canadian Poetry of the World War is, as was previous martial verse by Canadian poets, both inspirational and commemorative. What is significant for literary history, is, first, that there is a distinct advance in the excellence both of the ideas and of the artistic form of the Canadian poetry of the world war; and, secondly, that both the activity in poetic composition occasioned by the late war and the quality of the poetry became an inspiration to other poets whose genius was dormant and unawakened, and caused a genuine Renascence of the Poetic Spirit and of Poetry in Canada.
In what respect may the Canadian Poetry of the world war be said to be excellent, or even unexcelled by the martial poetry of the United States, if excelled by that of England and France? It is relatively great in noble ideas. In it we see clearly and vividly what Canadian men and women, at home and in the field of war, really thought and felt about war and death, love and home and country, self-sacrifice, and the good green earth, and peace.
Truth, beauty and splendor of ideas—these are the three supreme excellences of the Canadian poetry written by the soldier-poets in active service on the fighting field, and by the professional or amateur non-combatant poets at home, during the war.
As to the artistic form of this poetry, considering all the conditions of distraction and perturbance under which it was written, the wonder is that it has any formal finish at all. As a matter of fact, however, the Canadian poetry inspired by the world war cannot be depreciated as ‘twinkling trivialities’ either in substance or in form. All the best of it is good poetry—originally conceived, winningly suffused with beauty of sentiment, rich in noble ideas and spiritual imagery, engaging in verbal music, and technically well-wrought. If the formal finish of Canadian Poetry of the world war is not always quite the equal of the British and American poetry similarly occasioned, still the altogether most famous and most popular poem of the war and most likely to perdure in the popular memory, is neither the sonnet of the English soldier-poet, Rupert Brooke, The Soldier, nor the poem of the American soldier-poet, Alan Seeger, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, but the lyric of the Canadian soldier-poet, John McCrae, In Flanders Fields. Further, special circumstances, special sentiments, and special color and form went to making the poem by McCrae the supreme lyric of the world war, and the popularity of In Flanders Fields affected the appreciation of other Canadian poetry of the late war to such a degree as to cause the popular imagination, as well as the critical sense of the cultured, to estimate all other Canadian poetry of the world war as so far below McCrae’s exquisite lyric as to be second-rate in substance and form. This is not so. Save that they do not embody a special form and are not as musically insinuating as McCrae’s, the best of other Canadian poems of the world war are as nobly conceived, as spiritually subduing or exalting, and as technically finished as In Flanders Fields.
During the world war, as in previous wars, the women poets of Canada were to the fore in writing inspirational and commemorative martial verse. In Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War about one third (26) of the total number (73) of poets represented are women, and their war verse, especially the verse of Katherine Hale (whose poetry has been already dealt with), Helena Coleman, Frances Harrison, Isabel Graham, Agnes Maule Machar, Gertrude Bartlett, Grace Blackburn, Jean Blewett, Minnie Hallowell Bowen, Louise Morey Bowman, Isabelle Ecclestone Mackay, Lilian Leveridge, Lucy Montgomery, Beatrice Redpath, Sheila Rand, Florence Randal Livesay, Richard Scrace (Mrs. J. B. Williamson), Virna Sheard, Eloise Street, Ruth Strong, is not a whit below the level of the war verse by Canadian men and in some instances surpasses the latter’s.
Dr. O’Hagan’s Songs of Heroic Days (1916) is a popular volume, in which, for the most part, the poet recrudesces, in good newspaper verse, the traditional war spirit of bloodshed, retaliation and revenge. The poems, however, are made engaging by a ready humor and an Irish jeu d’esprit in the thought of ‘squaring things’ with an enemy guilty of ‘dhirty thricks’ in war. Several other volumes of war verse appeared during and shortly after the close of the war—The Fighting Men of Canada by Douglas Durkin; Over the Hills of Home and Other Poems by Lilian Leveridge; Sea Dogs and Men at Arms by Jesse Edgar Middleton; A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems (posthumous) by Lieutenant Bernard Freeman Trotter; Laurentian Lyrics and Other Poems (1915) by Lieutenant Arthur S. Bourinot; Insulters of Death and The New Apocalyse by Sergeant J. D. Logan, and several other volumes by returned men. The only comprehensive anthology of verse of the Great War, written by Canadians, is J. W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918). This volume furnishes adequate proof that, as foreign critics have said, ‘the war poetry written by Canadian civilians and Canadian poets on active service is as excellent as that written by the poets of the older Allied Nations.’
For the purpose of just appreciation we remark the fine, spirited, and imaginatively impressive qualities, as well as the artistic finish, of selected Canadian war poems that are really worthy to stand beside the best verse of English and American poets who were inspired by the late war. Aside from McCrae’s In Flanders Fields the most celebrated commemorative war poem by a Canadian is Dr. J. B. Dollard’s sonnet to the memory of Rupert Brooke—a sonnet in which, as English and American critics observed, Dr. Dollard made beautiful use of the supposed cause of Brooke’s death (sunstroke, ‘arrows of Apollo’) and the place of burial in the Aegean. Brooke’s grave is on the island of Scyros, not Lemnos. But the error in fact only enhances the beauty of the poem:—
Slain by the arrows of Apollo, lo!
The well-belovèd of the Muses lies
On Lemnos’ Isle ’neath blue and classic skies,
And hears th’ Aegean waters ebb and flow!
How strange his beauteous soul should choose to go
Out from his body in this hallowed place,
Where Poetry and Art’s undying grace
Still breathe, and Pipes of Pan melodious blow!
Here shall he rest untroubled, knowing well
That faithful hearts shall hold his memory dear,
Moved to affection weak words cannot tell
By his short, splendid life that knew no fear;
Beloved of the gods, the gods have ta’en
Their Ganymede, by bright Apollo slain!
Almost as celebrated as Dr. Dollard’s sonnet to Brooke is Lieutenant Arthur Bourinot’s sonnet to the dead poet-soldier. For the sake of variety in forms we quote Immortality—a most winsome, tender lyric; simple, sincere, and convincing—from Lieutenant Bourinot’s Laurentian Lyrics (1915):—
They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor,
Fallen for Freedom’s sake;
They merely sleep with faces that are paler
Until they wake.
They will not weep, the mothers, in the years
The future will decree;
For they have died that the battles and the tears
Should cease to be.
They will not die, the victorious and the slain,
Sleeping in foreign soil,
They gave their lives, but to the world is the gain
Of their sad toil.
They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor,
Fallen for Freedom’s sake;
They merely sleep with faces that are paler
Until they wake.
The most lilting example of Canadian inspirational war verse is Douglas Durkin’s The Fighting Men of Canada. It is spirited and inspiriting. The colloquial diction of the refrains charges it with veracity, vividness, and with ‘the punch’ which the London critic, Mr. E. B. Osborn, desiderates in the content of what are, in his view, the only ‘true war poems,’ namely, ‘song-pictures of the campaigns and of soldiers’ life’:—
Call it lust, or call it honor. Call it glory in a name!
We’re a handful, more or less, of what we were,
But we praise the grim Almighty that we stuck and played the game,
Till we chased them at the double to their lair.
For the word came, ‘Up and over!’
And our answer was a yell
As we scrambled out of cover—
And we dealt the dastards hell!
Mr. Durkin’s ballad is a human, veracious war-poem in the traditional spirit of Campbell’s Battle of the Baltic, Tennyson’s Ballad of the Revenge, Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum. It is designedly inspirational after the manner, and with the substance, of the old heroic ‘fighting spirit.’ It is, therefore, a recrudescence of a war spirit and an ideal of poetic inspiration, aim, and content which were not the real and authentic spirit, motive, and ideal of the best Canadian, British, French, or American poetry of the world war. In short, Mr. Durkin’s poem, The Fighting Men of Canada, lilting, spirited, and inspiriting as it is, must critically be estimated as an obsolete form of ‘recruiting’ ballad rather than as a true inspirational poem conceived and written according to the characteristic genius of the poetry of the world war. As a reversion to the old type of martial poem, it deserves mention. Possibly it may be instanced as the nearest approach to a Canadian war-song, though the extraordinary fact is that not a single war-song, of the popular or of the marching species, was written by a Canadian civilian or soldier-poet.
In the war verse of another poet we find the kind of poetry that fired the imagination and moved the will of the men of Canada who went to the world war. To Lloyd Roberts, son of Charles G. D. Roberts, the war poetry of the British Empire, as well as Canada, is indebted for two of the most striking and impressive short poems in the new spirit of inspirational verse inspired by the world war. His Come Quietly, England, simple and direct in thought, free in form, colloquial in diction, but positive, candid, sincere, is one of the most arresting and convincing poems that have for a theme ‘the call to arms’—not for King, or Country, nor for fear or anything else undivine:—
But for the sake of simple goodness
And His laws,
We shall sacrifice our all
For The Cause!
The Literary Digest remarked Lloyd Roberts’ Come Quietly, England as ‘one of the most striking statements of what may be called the philosophy of the war from the English [British] point of view because it puts so candidly into words the thoughts that are in the minds of the author’s fellow-countrymen.’ The other poem by Roberts, also in his new simple, colloquial, direct style, is entitled If I Must. It is the most remarkably original ‘anti-pacifist’ poem written by an English-speaking poet. It takes the form of a quasi-dramatic monologue, and concludes with a stanza which has, in journalistic slang, ‘punch’ in it. We quote the whole poem:—
God knows there’s plenty of earth for all of us;
Then why must we sweat for it, deny for it,
Pray for it, cry for it,
Kill, maim and lie for it,
Struggle and suffer and die for it—
We who are gentle and sane?
Let us respect one another, wherever we are,
Fly your flag, O my brother;
I like its bright color, whether red, green, or yellow;
Your language is queer, but I’ll learn it in time;
And you’re a dear fellow,
If your laws are not quite so clean as our own;
But then ours need pruning, and thistles have grown.
So I won’t spill your blood, for that’s not the way
To assist in law-making, whatever some say,
I’ll try by example to lead you aright
Out of the shadows and into the light—
If you’ll do as much for me.
What! You don’t understand?
You refuse my right hand?
You say might is right,
And to live we must fight?
Are we still in such plight?
Poor, blind, stupid fool, so deep in the dust—
Well, hand me the gun—
If I must—if I must!
It is, perhaps, in the best Canadian commemorative, elegiac, or reflective poems of the Great War that the three supreme excellences, Truth, Beauty, and Splendor of Ideas, in the war poetry of Canada are most conspicuously present. The distinctive presence of these qualities not only marks a clear advance beyond the older Canadian martial verse but also establishes a high place for Canadian commemorative, elegiac and reflective war verse in the body of war poetry written by poets of the Allied Nations. Truth, Beauty, or Splendor of Ideas are in Gertrude Bartlett’s The Blessed Dead, Grace Blackburn’s Christ in Flanders, Lillie Brooks’ Bereaved, Helena Coleman’s Oh, Not When April Wakes the Daffodils, Jean Blewett’s The Lover Lads of Devon, Lilian Leveridge’s Over the Hills of Home, Florence Randal Livesay’s A Daffodil from Vimy Ridge, Agnes Maule Machar’s De Profundis, Louise Morey Bowman’s The White Garden, Virna Sheard’s The Young Knight, Frederick George Scott’s The Silent Toast, Arthur Stringer’s Christmas Bells in War Time, Archibald Sullivan’s The Plaint of the Children, Beatrice Redpath’s The Men of Canada, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s The Mother Gives, John Stuart Thomson’s His Darkest Hour, A. E. S. Smythe’s noble sonnet The Champions, S. Morgan-Powell’s magniloquent Kitchener’s Work, and W. D. Lighthall’s magnificent and exalting poem The Galahads.
One of the finest commemorative poems of the world war written by a Canadian is Duncan Campbell Scott’s sonnet To a Canadian Lad Killed in the War. It is fine in conception, novel in terminal endings and elevating in emotional appeal. But fine as it is, it pales in aesthetic and artistic dignity with the only Canadian war poem that has achieved sublimity—the same poet’s unforgettably noble elegiacs To a Canadian Aviator (Who Died for His Country in France):—
Tossed like a falcon from the hunter’s wrist
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.
Peril below thee and above, peril
Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt
Thy peerless heart; gathering wing and poise,
Thy plane transfigured, and thy motor-chant
Subdued to a whisper—then a silence,—
And thou art but a disembodied venture
In the void.
But Death, who has learned to fly,
Still matchless when his work is to be done,
Met thee between the armies and the sun;
Thy speck of shadow faltered in the sky;
Then thy dead engine and thy broken wings
Drooped through the arc and passed in fire,
A wreath of smoke—a breathless exhalation.
But ere that came, a vision sealed thine eyes,
Lulling thy senses with oblivion;
And from its sliding station in the skies
Thy dauntless soul upward in circles soared
To the sublime and purest radiance whence it sprang.
In all their eyries eagles shall mourn thy fate,
And leaving on the lonely crags and scaurs
Their unprotected young, shall congregate
High in the tenuous heaven and anger the sun
With screams, and with a wild audacity
Dare all the battle danger of thy flight;
Till weary with combat one shall desert the light,
Fall like a bolt of thunder and check his fall
On the high ledge, smoky with mist and cloud,
Where his neglected eaglets shriek aloud,
And drawing the film across his sovereign sight
Shall dream of thy swift soul immortal
Mounting in circles, faithful beyond death.
In that poem we perceive, unmistakably, how even war verse may rise to the spiritual dignity of absolute poetry, and by its ideal substance and spiritual grandeur achieve the highest moral and religious function—the function, namely, of dignifying or glorifying the human spirit with Christlikeness in self-slaying love for the perfection and happiness of humanity. Only a too fastidious and perverted criticism will deny to the best of the Canadian poetry of the World War a distinction in truth, beauty, and splendor of ideas and in technical artistry that gives it the right to an equal place beside the significant war verse of the British and United States poets. Certainly in technique it is quite as finished as the American war poetry, and in ideas of ‘uncompelled and undiluted chivalry,’ it is as noble and eloquent as the war poetry of the British singers.