The quotations in this chapter from Pauline Johnson’s poems are from Flint and Feather, by E. Pauline Johnson, (Musson Book Co., Limited: Toronto).
CHAPTER XIII
Parker and Scott (F. G.)
PARKER AS A SONNETEER OF SPIRITUAL LOVE—ORIGIN AND THEME OF A LOVER’S DIARY—MUSICAL AND COLORFUL LYRICAL VERSE—SCOTT’S POETRY A REFLECTION OF HIS PERSONALITY—DISTINGUISHED AS THE ‘POET OF THE SPIRIT’—CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY.
It was as a poet, not as a creator of historical romances, that Sir Gilbert Parker first appeared as a man of letters and first appealed to the literary public. As a poet he was appreciated in Australia and in England, but not in Canada. That as a poet he has been unknown and unappreciated in his homeland, Canada, is due to the fact that he was expatriate when he published his two volumes of poems, the second of which was ‘privately printed,’ and that his greater reputation as a novelist, particularly of old romantic Canada, made him known in the Dominion exclusively as a writer of fiction. Sir Gilbert Parker, however, ranks high as a sonneteer of spiritual love, and as lyrist in genre verse which has attained special reputation, particularly as texts of songs for salon and recital repertory.
Sir Gilbert Parker was born in Ontario, in 1862. Never robust, he left Canada in 1886 to seek recovery of health in the warmer and more salubrious climate of Australia. While in Australia he began publishing sonnets and lyrics in magazines. The sonnets were collected and published in a volume entitled A Lover’s Diary; first edition, 1894; second edition, 1898. Before the publication of A Lover’s Diary Parker had removed to London. While in England he privately printed a volume of lyrics entitled Embers. These two volumes, the first revised, and enlarged with twenty-five sonnets, and the second, with the addition of other lyrics, were collected and published as Volume 17 of The Works of Gilbert Parker (1913). The volume containing his collected poems is distinguished by a critical Introduction by Sir Gilbert Parker himself.
In the Introduction Parker explains the origin and theme of A Lover’s Diary. It is a sonnet-sequence, the composition of which was begun when the poet was twenty-three and still resident in Canada. The sequence is a ‘hopeless love, in form of temptation, but lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toil of the journey of understanding paid.’ He adds: ‘The six sonnets . . . beginning with The Bride, and ending with Annunciation, have nothing to do with the story further than to show two phases of the youth’s mind before it was shaken by speculation, plunged into sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give a new impulse and direction to personal forces and individual sense.’
As a poet of romantic love Parker is concerned with the spiritual meaning of it. A Lover’s Diary is not concerned with the mere emotions of romantic love but with its spiritual thrall, and with it as a process of spiritual redemption and exaltation. As an interpreter of spiritual love, Parker contrasts with Robert Norwood whose sequence, His Lady of the Sonnets (1915), though having a spiritualizing intent, is highly sensuous and impressionistic in diction and imagery. Parker breathes a less earthly air. His sonnet-sequence is addressed more to the imaginative reason than to the aesthetic imagination. It is much more mystically conceived and much more chastely lovely with the ‘white beauty’ of the spirit than is Norwood’s sequence. Both sequences, however, are authentic and noble poetic creations.
In pure beauty of conception, imagery, and artistry, and in the spiritual exaltation of love, the following sonnet from Parker’s A Lover’s Diary, is characteristic of the whole sequence:—