• • • •
and dawn
Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces;
and, finally, consider the compelling romantic fantasy of color and simile in this stanza from The Piper of Arll:—
There were three pines above the cone
That, when the sun flared and went down,
Grew like three warriors reaving home
The plunder of a burning town.
It was said that there is more of Canada in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. So far this appears to be true of Scott’s painting of Nature in Canada. Scott, it must be observed, is a Nature painter, never a Nature interpreter, as were Lampman and Carman. Yet there is in Scott’s poetry a decided interpretative or philosophical element. It is on the side of his philosophical poetry that Scott’s verse contains more of the Canadian spirit than does the verse of any other Canadian poet. As a philosophical poet Scott is, first, an interpreter of humanity and life in Canada—and his interpretations possess highly novel distinction and spiritual import. His philosophical poetry is contained in three volumes, Labor and the Angel (1898), New World Lyrics and Ballads (1905), and Via Borealis (1906).
In his New World Lyrics and Ballads, Scott aims to reveal the kind of mind or thought which the strange humanity of the Northwest in Canada—the Indian heart in the wild North of Canada—contains. In the volume Indian themes predominate, and the so called Ballads are more aptly named Legends, because Scott’s Ballads are art and the product of a reflective mind thinking into Indian mind the thoughts of a civilized man, whereas the genuine Ballad is a spontaneous story told in simple verse. Moreover, Scott’s genius is lyrical; but in these so called Ballads he attempts dramatic situation and emotion. It all lands him in recondite psychological symbolism, as, for instance, in The Mission of the Trees or in The Forsaken, which is later attempted in The Half-Breed Girl (from Via Borealis), a striking essay in Indian introspection. What we get from these poems is Scott’s perception and revealment of spiritual Beauty in loneliness—his half-mystical intuition that the spirit in civilized man, in the Indian soul, and in Nature everywhere is one and the same spirit, and that civilization has only resulted in veiling the face of God and in separating his creatures from one another and from the Creator.