Pauline Johnson possessed extraordinary, if not quite unique, gifts as a story-telling balladist. Examples of her art in this species are her compelling story of Indian love and revenge, Ojistoh, her melodramatic Indian tale, The Cattle Thief, and her Wolverine, a poem of Western chevalerie, in which species, however, she does not rank with Isabella Valancy Crawford.
Her poetry of the development of the Canadian national spirit and civilization, by which she marks a broadening in her own spiritual vision, is notably exemplified in two poems, The Riders of the Plains and Prairie Greyhounds. In the former, however, she is more British than Canadian. But she is Canadian in her Prairie Greyhounds. In this poem she achieves an extraordinary virility of rhythm, employs apt and dramatic epithets and fills the picture with a vivid suggestiveness of the vastness of Canada and the vision of the greater autonomous and powerful Dominion that is to be. Prairie Greyhounds, moreover, is a supreme achievement in suggested or ideated sensations of motion. The reader feels himself as if actually aboard the west-bound and east-bound Canadian Pacific trains, experiencing, as does a living passenger on a ‘fast express,’ the swish, and roar, and onward rush of the trains.
As a verbal musician Pauline Johnson must be given a very high place amongst Canadian poets. There is an avian abandon and ecstasy, an avian lilt and warbling, in The Birds’ Lullaby and in The Songster. There are flowing rhythm and haunting melody of rhyme, vowel-harmony, alliteration and cadences in The Trail to Lillooet:—
Song of fall, and song of forest, come you here on haunting quest,
Calling through the seas and silence, from God’s country of the west.
Where the mountain pass is narrow, and the torrent white and strong,
Down its rocky-throated canon, sings its golden-throated song.
You are singing there together through the God-begotten nights,
And the leaning stars are listening above the distant heights
That lift like points of opal in the crescent coronet