From the dust of a world of pain
The frame of a slave set free—
The man that you ought to be,
The man you may be to-night
If you turn to the Valley of Light.
The number of women poets in the period under review is noteworthy. Along with Ethelwyn Wetherald and Jean Blewett must be mentioned appreciatively the names and poetry of Virna Sheard, Helena Coleman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald (sister of C. G. D. Roberts), Helen M. Merrill, Annie Campbell Huestis, Agnes Maule Machar (pseud. ‘Fidelis’), Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Alma Frances McCollum, and S. Frances Harrison (pseud. ‘Seranus’). Their outstanding contemporaries amongst the men were Arthur Stringer and Peter McArthur. It is impossible to review in detail the poetry of all these lyrists. They followed the ideals of the older systematic group as regards original inspiration and artistic craftsmanship. But the work of some of them may briefly be remarked.
In 1891 S. Frances Harrison published Pine, Rose, and Fleur de Lis, a volume of really poetical verse. She is, however, more to be noted as the compiler of the first noteworthy anthology of Canadian verse (A Canadian Birthday Book, 1887), which is distinguished by the fact that it contains a poem by the Indian Chief Tecumseh, the first French-Canadian poem, and some of the earliest poems of Bliss Carman (a series of quatrains). Arthur Stringer is a lyrical poet and a poetic dramatist. His art in the latter respect is appreciated in another chapter. In 1907 he published The Woman in the Rain and Other Poems, and in 1911, Irish Poems. His lyrical poetry in general is distinguished by a warm humanity and by careful craftsmanship. But he achieved a special distinction with his poems in ‘Irishy.’ Many of them have been set to music, and, amongst Canadian-born poets, his only rival in that field is Sir Gilbert Parker. By themselves Stringer’s poems in ‘Irishy’ are a novel and real, if not important, contribution to the genre and humorous poetry of Canada. In 1907 Peter McArthur (‘The Sage of Ekfrid’) published The Prodigal and Other Poems. He is never a mere aesthete in form, but he is a rare Nature and humorous poet—with the lightest and happiest touch in both departments, as in his Corn-Planting and in To the Birds. He humanizes Nature in a way altogether different from other Canadian poets, perhaps whimsically but always with an intimate, colloquial quality of diction, and a piquancy which makes his Nature poetry spiritually refreshing, even to formalists and dilettanti.
Properly Isabel Ecclestone Mackay belongs to the minor poets of the Systematic Period. For in 1904 she published her first volume of verse, Between the Lights. But with that, she turned to writing fiction, and did not publish any books of verse till the appearance of The Shining Ship and Other Poems (1919) and Fires of Driftwood (1923). Her first venture in verse was not better than passable or than good journalistic verse. But in Fires of Driftwood she disclosed a real mastery of form, color, and music, along with a spiritual sentiment which is new in Canadian poetry. She is occupied most with the vicissitudes and meaning of life, but occasionally she paints objective Nature with winning color and music. It is, however, in her poetry of childhood (rather than for children), as in The Shining Ship, that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay most displays original genius and has achieved genuine distinction. The poems in The Shining Ship are marked by the rarest of psychological gifts in a poet—insight into the real heart and mind and imagination of children, and by a diction and phrasing which appeal to the child mind as immediately and as winningly as do the child poems of Eugene Field and R. L. Stevenson. In fact, as Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse is to English Literature, so Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s A Shining Ship and Other Poems is to Canadian Literature.
Sources of quotations in this chapter: