On peaks just tipped with morning light,
My dauntless spirit mutely stands
With eagle wings outspread for flight.
How lowly, and yet how beautiful and compelling, are these figures in the first stanza of that poem—‘pastured with the stars,’ ‘meadow-lands of space.’ But both are derived from Canon Scott’s boyhood days in his homeland. They are Canadian.
There is a Wordsworthian humanity in his poem The Cripple, a sympathy with his kind and a tender wistfulness in his Van Elsen. There is nobility of thought in his Samson, and in Thor, and a grandeur of vision in his Hymn of Empire, which is a Canadian imperial and patriotic poem in a kind by itself. But in one poem—a sonnet—Canon Scott has achieved what is perhaps the most ingenious imagery in Canadian poetry, and one of the most extraordinary in English literature. This is his sonnet Time:—
I saw Time in his workshop carving faces;
Scattered around his tools lay, blunting griefs,
Sharp cares that cut out deeply in reliefs
Of light and shade; sorrows that smooth the traces
Of what were smiles. Not yet without fresh graces