Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song.
Campbell’s threnody is simple, sensuous, and impassioned, without being impressionistic and rhetorical. It is a sincere and noble affirmation of the supremacy of the spirit of beauty in the world, wherein, as Lampman’s exemplar, Keats, once said, imperishably:—
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
Altogether in another form and with a fresh and novel poetic conception and impressive artistry, Duncan Campbell Scott wrote his Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris[[2]]. Scott’s art is singularly informed by a color and beauty derived from his intimate and exquisite appreciation of the fine arts, especially music and painting. More than any other Canadian poet, Scott is the ‘artist in words.’ He is concerned above all things to employ poetic diction and imagery with the same love of refined expressiveness and emotional nuance as inspired such musical composers or tone-painters as Ravel, Debussy, and MacDowell, and such painters as Constable, Watteau, and Monet. Or to borrow from musical criticism, Scott loves his performance, his executant artistry with words and imagery, more than he loves his poetic ideas.
Edmund Morris was a Canadian painter and his spirit perceived in Canadian Nature and in the Indian aborigines in Canada something which no other painter had perceived or attempted to envisage. Scott and Morris were companions and kindred spirits—the one an artist in words; and the other an artist in pigments. It was natural, then, that Scott, on the tragic death of his friend, should commemorate the loss which both the living friend and the country suffered by the passing of Edmund Morris. But it was impossible for Scott to write any conventionalized elegiac monody. Under inner compulsion, he wrote of life and death with all his original genius for conceiving, as he phrases his mode of conception,
Meanings hid in mist;
and with all his gifts in exquisite craftsmanship:—
Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.
Scott’s Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris is in some respects unique, but particularly in form, and its simple, intimate, direct address to the spirit. It is not a pastoral elegy in the third person but a dramatic monologue, or an epistle in verse from one spirit to another. There is nothing like it in all English Literature, not even in Browning. But intimate, even familiar, and colloquial as it is, the poem is radiant with a ‘white beauty’ of imagery and chaste artistry. More notably still, it subdues the turbulence of our souls in the presence of a great loss by death, transports the imagination to the mount of spiritual vision, refines faith, sustains hope, and fills the spirit with a serene peace. It leaves upon us imperishably the inward sense that ‘it is not death to die’:—
Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,