Archibald McLachlan came to Canada in his twenties and he followed, in much of his writing, the themes, the dialect, and even the stanza-forms of Robert Burns. Both poets were intensely patriotic, both sang the gospel of the brotherhood of man. To both life was very much a mystery, a mystery tinged with pathos. The work of McLachlan which may be regarded as purely Canadian in tone and subject is found chiefly in the depiction of scenes of pioneer life, treated objectively: The Fire in the Woods, The Old Hoss, The Backwood’s Philosopher; and in The Emigrant he projected a pioneer epic, which opens with an apostrophe to Canada and traces the progress of the emigrant from the old land to his arrival and settlement in the new. The cutting of the first tree, the building of the log-cabin and the Indian battle are successive incidents of the poem. The style of the poem is rather formal, and recalls Scott’s Lady of the Lake, but is without so much life or color. The poet loved the spirit of freedom and independence which he found in the new land and voiced this love in some stirring patriotic lyrics, such as Hurrah for the New Dominion.
Although William Wye Smith left Scotland in his infancy and was for almost four score years a Canadian by adoption, almost all his writings show the influence of the language, the literature, the history, the religious and philosophic spirit of his homeland. A deep spiritual note is present in many of his lyrics. Yet he did on occasion enter fully into the Canadian spirit and show an appreciative understanding of Canadian conditions, the beauties of Canadian landscape, historic themes and national aspirations. Some of his best known poems are: The Second Concession of Deer, The Sheep-washing, Ridgeway, The Burial of Brock, Here’s to the Land!, Canadians on the Nile.
There was one émigré poet who deserves detailed appreciation as a creative interpreter of Western chevalerie and as a lyrist with an exquisite fancy and delicate artistry. This was Isabella Valancy Crawford. Born in Ireland in 1850, she came to Canada when but a child of eight years, her family settling in Ontario, and, later, moving to the Kawartha Lakes. Her father was a physician and it must be presumed that the daughter came under cultural influences in her home. More important is the fact she lived in Canadian districts which must have peculiarly affected her young, impressionable, and receptive mind. Undeniably she was born a poet; that is to say, she was born with a genius for seeing spiritual beauty and meaning in all common things, natural and human. Thus gifted and thus left free to be impressed by Canadian Nature and life around her, and also by Nature and life in the Western prairie regions, of which she had read, Valancy Crawford set about imaginatively to interpret and express in verse her appreciation of Nature and life in Canada.
Whether it was her sheer genius that created her sympathy with pioneer and cowboy life in Western Canada, or whether it was her imaginative sympathy with that life that fired her poetic faculty, is a question in literary psychology that does not here require discussion. The outstanding fact is that Miss Crawford’s most notable faculty was a profound sympathy with and a clear vision of the elemental dignity of the heart of men and women whose lot was cast in rude and unspiritualizing circumstances. It was out of this sympathy that she was able to handle her themes of Western chevalerie with a subtle, veracious, and genuinely human but not coarse humor. Miss Crawford saw, as no one in Canada before her or since has seen, the poetry and the poetic or religious significance of life and chevalerie in the early days in Western Canada. She took the rude material and sublimated it, not with rhetoric, but rather with verisimilitude of diction and phrase and imagery, to the dignity and beauty of authentic poetry.
We may summarize the qualities of her poetry of Western chevalerie, as in her Old Spookses’ Pass, under four distinctions. It is noted for dramatic (not melodramatic) force, rugged but characteristic humor, graphic character-drawing, and power of conveying to us the sense of the war of the elements which is felt by the wild creatures, such as cattle herds, who become the ‘playthings’ of those elements. The extraordinary fact is that, though all these qualities were, on her part, sheer imaginative invention, yet they are truer to the facts than if they had been written by an actual eye-witness. In short, Miss Crawford, as a poet of Western chevalerie, stands out as gifted with sheer and intense imaginative power and as an authentic imaginative creator.
Nevertheless, her art is all authentic realism, totally free from crass and hectic melodrama. Moreover, Miss Crawford achieved, not solely because she had imagination and a true sense of realistic values, but also because she saw that style in poetry was the only antiseptic for picaresque realism and hectic melodrama. She had genius, not merely a tale to tell.
Certainly Lowell, Bret Harte, John Hay, and others of their school, writing in dialect, did no better work than did Miss Crawford in Old Spookses’ Pass; and most certainly Robert Service did nothing so elementally human and so spiritualizing with his material from rude or picaresque life in Canada.
We shall not wait to detail the qualities of Miss Crawford’s art in other species of verse. We observe, however, that her long poem Malcolm’s Katie is specially remarkable for fine imagery, colorful descriptive passages, and for a glowing impressionism which is taken directly from Canadian Nature. Moreover, it is notable for its lyrical interludes, which as lyrics, are as dainty and as delicately constructed, as full of fancy and imagination in small form, as any one of the kind in English literature. Miss Crawford’s lyrical interlude, beginning ‘O, Love builds on the azure sea,’ is beyond criticism, and is ‘the gem’ of several Canadian anthologies. We quote the whole lyric:—
O, Love builds on the azure sea,
And Love builds on the golden sand;