And kept his youth, and grew in sympathy,
And loved his fellows more, and had love’s victory.
Literary critics in the United States, in reviewing Marshall’s Brookfield signalized both its sensuous and spiritual beauty as extraordinary, and in line with the quality of the best English elegiac monodies. In Canada it received high praise from Sir Andrew MacPhail, who sponsored it by publishing it in The University Magazine, and from Dr. Archibald MacMechan. ‘No such poem,’ said the latter, ‘has appeared in Canada since Roberts’ Ave! In dignity and depth of feeling the Ave!, De Mille’s Behind the Veil, and Brookfield stand together—a noble trio.’ Marshall’s Brookfield is Canadian in subject and setting and is indeed a beautiful and noble application of ideas to life—a genuinely original contribution to the creative poetic literature of Canada.
James De Mille’s Behind the Veil, published posthumously in 1892, is a kind of elegiac monody. The poet himself does not so sub-title it. He designates it simply as ‘A Poem.’ Whether the ‘Loved One’ who has been lost to the poet was a real person or an imagined companion of the spirit, it is impossible to surmise from the poem. But the poem itself is concerned with life and death and yearning for union with the Beloved in Heaven, and is thus a spiritualized elegy. Essentially, however, it is a reflective or philosophical poem. If it is reflective, it is also highly melodramatic both in substance and in form. Part of its melodramatic quality derives from its metrical structure which suggests Poe’s Raven. It is written in stanzas of five lines in trochaic tetrameter—a form totally unsuited to its intended high spiritual dignity of theme. A taste of its quality is afforded from the following stanzas:—
Through the darkness rose a vision,
Where beneath the night I kneeled,
Dazzling bright with hues Elysian—
Congregated motes of glory on an ebon field
And a form from out that glory to my spirit stood revealed.
‘Son of Light’—I murmured lowly—