At the foot of enchanted cliffs.
It is a question difficult of settlement whether Duncan Campbell Scott is greater as a verbal colorist and nature-painter than as a melodist. But there can be no doubt that as a verbal colorist and nature-painter he has the eye both of the naturalist and the impressionist. And it is indubitable that as a colorist or impressionist he has put more of the pageantry of Nature in Canada into his poetry than has even Bliss Carman. All the Canadian seasons are in it, and every phase of the light, color, and sound of the Canadian year is in it—done by ready, flexible, graphic stroke or exquisite touch, in rich or luminous and translucent coloring, with romantic eye and fantasy, and with singular ingenuity and power. It must be confessed that there is a seeming display of musical theory and technics, of musical learning, which almost savors of pedantry, in those of Scott’s poems which contain musical thought and imagery. This would be sophistication, were Scott not sincere and did he not sincerely use it all to enhance the poetic effect of his verse on the tonal sensibilities and the imagination. But there is no sophistication, no mere display of knowledge of pigments and the technic of painting in his work as a verbal colorist. He is a word-painter, a nature-colorist, an impressionist,—by innate genius. As a matter of fact, too, almost all his verbal melody is associated with color. So that, by genius rather than by art, Duncan Campbell Scott may be regarded as the supreme verbal colorist amongst Canadian poets. He is this for three reasons—inclusiveness of the seasons and phases of Nature in Canada, magic of pigmentation, and novelty and imaginative power of coloring and description.
If the poems of Scott abound in arresting and compelling phrases, lines, and stanzas of alliterative beauty, the number of brilliant and luminous color phrases, lines, and whole stanzas in his poems is astounding. The following will serve in illustration:—
Bright as a sun spot in a globe of dew.
• • • •
The leaves dry up as pale as honeycomb.
• • • •
Or peacock tints on pools of amber gloom.
• • • •
Like the curve of a fragile ivory hand.