Far-off, beyond the hills; and moaned, like one
Wounded, among the pines; as though the Earth,
Knowing some giant grief had come to birth,
Had wearied of the Summer and the Sun.
A rare spirit and exquisite craftsman, as a poet, is Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe. He was born in Ireland in 1861. He is Keltic through and through; and because he is Keltic in his reactions to the universe, in his perceptions of spiritual meanings in all things, he divines God in men and God in Nature, or God as man and God as Nature—spiritual presences everywhere. In a word, Albert E. S. Smythe exemplifies in his genius and art, as notably and profoundly as Lampman in his, but in a different way, what Wordsworth called natural piety. Smythe’s spiritual perceptions of divinity everywhere rise to a refined mysticism which he expresses with a ‘white beauty’ in exquisitely finished verse. As contrasted with other Canadian mystical poets Smythe is the poet of the Cosmic Spirit and Beauty.
In 1891 he published Poems; Grave and Gay, and in 1923, The Garden of the Sun. A sonnet (The Seasons of the Gods) and a lyric (Anastasis) from the second volume suffice to disclose his qualities in his role as the poet of the Cosmic Spirit and Beauty. As a sonneteer, Smythe is not surpassed by any of his older or younger contemporaries. The Seasons of the Gods is lofty in conception, noble in thought, rich in naturalistic imagery, dulcet in verbal melody, and perfect in formal artistry. It is music of a soul ‘in tune with the Infinite’:—
I sat with May upon a midnight hill
Wrapped in a dusk of unremembered years
And thought on buried April—on the tears
And shrouds of March, and Youth’s dead daffodil