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,