The Hayfield is found in The Last Robin, by Ethelwyn Wetherald (Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Quotations from Jean Blewett’s work, in Jean Blewett’s Poems (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
From Francis Sherman’s Matins (Copeland and Day: Boston).
From Albert E. S. Smythe’s Grave and Gay; and from The Garden of the Sun (Macmillan Co.: Toronto).
CHAPTER XV
Elegiac Monodists
THE ELEGIAC MONODISTS OF CANADA—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS—BLISS CARMAN—WILFRED CAMPBELL—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—WILLIAM MARSHALL—JAMES DE MILLE.
Canadian Literature is rich—not relatively but absolutely—in Dirges, Epicedes, Elegies, Threnodies, and Elegiac Monodies. That Canadian Elegiac Monodies, or long ‘In Memoriam’ poems inspired by the death of a real, not a mythical or imagined, person, have genuine distinction, is indisputable. In number they equal the monodies of English Literature; and in manner, in variety of form, and in several qualitative excellences they surpass the monodies of American Literature. Modern English literature possesses five great threnodies or monodies; Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s Thyrsis, and Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale. American Literature has to its credit two fine and noble monodies: Emerson’s Threnody (for his son) and Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (for Lincoln). Canadian Literature boasts of six threnodies or monodies, which all enhance New World Literature and at least two of which are a distinct contribution to the elegiac poetry of English Literature. The Canadian monodies are Roberts’ Ave! (to Shelley), Carman’s A Seamark (to Stevenson), Campbell’s Bereavement of the Fields (to Lampman), Duncan Campbell Scott’s Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris (a Canadian painter), William E. Marshall’s Brookfield (to R. R. MacLeod), and James De Mille’s Behind the Veil (which is sort of Dantean ‘Vision’ of the Beloved in Heaven).
That Canadian poets should have essayed the Elegiac Monody and have excelled in it is consistent with the genuine, the essential mood, the spiritual attitudes of the Canadian people. For while the literary traditions, forms, and methods of Canadian poets are English, the bases of Canadian culture and civilization are much more New England and Scots than English, or, in short, Puritan and Calvinistic. It was as natural for the 19th century native-born Canadian, as it was for an 18th century New England Puritan and Loyalist and a Scots Calvinist, to be preoccupied with thoughts of ‘otherworldliness.’ The meaning of life and death is almost a congenial subject of reflection to the characteristic Canadian. Fortunately the habitat of the Canadian mind, Nature in Canada, recalled Canadian poets from exclusive occupation with spiritual prosperities and great departures to thoughts of ‘the soul’s inherent high magnificence’ in daily mundane life and to the joys, consolations, spiritual transports, and peace which Nature affords the distracted human spirit. Another factor saved Canadian poets from moralistic preachments when they were moved to express in verse their sorrow over some great departure. They had the example of the form and color of the English elegies, from Milton to Swinburne, to save them from chill gravity and barren moralism. The Canadian monodists, on their own account, also loved fine technic in verse, and strove to achieve it according to their capacity. It was therefore natural that Canadian poets not only should essay the elegiac monody but also write that species of poetry with genuine distinction.
The subjects of all Canadian elegiac monodies are either presented against a background of Nature or are suffused with ‘the color of life’ and the beauty of Nature. The first, and in many ways the noblest, Canadian monody is Charles G. D. Roberts’ Ave! (sub-titled An Ode for the Centenary of Shelley’s Birth). It is a poem of thirty-one ten-line stanzas, in decasyllabics, closing with a rimed couplet, iambic pentameter. The poem is not so much, as Roberts called it, an ‘ode’ as an elegiac monody, with the subject presented against a pastoral background. That it was written ostensibly to commemorate Shelley’s birth, not his death, must not cause us to conceive the poem as other than an elegy. The centenary of Shelley’s birth occurred in 1892, when Roberts was 32 years of age. Naturally he seized the opportunity to memorialize in verse the spirit of one of his masters, but he also laments the passing of Shelley and his influence, after the manner of the true elegiac monody. The poem divides not strophically but symphonically. The first theme is a picture of the naturalistic beauties of the Tantramar marshes and the tides that rush in over it from the Bay of Fundy, and the influences that Nature about Tantramar had on Roberts as a poet. He develops this theme by marking how ‘strangely akin’ Tantramar’s marshes seem