And whispers, ‘Thou art Mine!’
Shine, little lamp, for love hath fed thy gleam.
Sleep, little soul, by God’s own hands set free.
Cling to His arms and sleep, and sleeping, dream,
And dreaming, look for me.
Francis Thompson or Alice Meynell could have written the whole poem possibly with a more immaculate artistry, but not with any finer appeal to the religious or mystical imagination, and not with a melody a whit more winning as an end in itself.
Having thus tasted the chief engagements of Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry, we must in a more detailed way disclose her genius and art as they appear in her lyrical poems in The Drift of Pinions (1913), The Lamp of Poor Souls (1916), and the posthumous volume The Wood Carver’s Wife (1922)—the last of which contains a lyric drama (the title-poem of the volume) and several lyrics. It is as an adroit and exquisite craftswoman (or ‘artist’), rather than for originality of imaginative conception, that, from her first printed essays in verse to the last, Marjorie Pickthall appeals as a specially gifted poet in Canada, and must be accorded an honorable, possibly high, place in Canadian poetic literature.
Technically, her poetry is distinguished by an extraordinarily successful use of color epithets and verbal melody, especially alliteration. The defects of her poetry are not, on the whole, technical, but are defects, or rather limitations, of genius. Broadly viewed, her poetry lacks breadth of range and eloquence of style. By ‘style’ is not meant Matthew Arnold’s conception or formula of what he called ‘the grand style.’ Marjorie Pickthall’s verse is free, flowing, airy, graceful, tripping, musical; in a word, feminine. But by thus much does it lack originality and seriousness in the substance of its style, the qualities which give us the sense of having met with beauty which is not a mere finely distilled essence of loveliness, but which has strength, and dignity, and power over the heart and the imagination.
The key to the defects or limitations in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry was not her imagination but her ‘heart.’ She loved and had sympathy only or specially with all little creatures and things, with tender, frail, and helpless creatures and things; and she felt profoundly a sort of injustice in their fate, which begot in her a wistful wondering about the justice of the ways of God. She therefore inevitably impressed on her poetry her own feminine feeling for the little and helpless creatures of earth, her own sympathy with the evanescence of all the animate ‘little things’—children, flowers, moths, birds, and ‘the little stars of Duna’—that for her made existence tolerable or happy. Everywhere in her verse appears her preoccupancy with the very word or with suggestions of the word ‘little.’ It is this ‘heart’ limitation that causes her to show what would seem at first sight to be a mannerism, namely, her predilection for certain substantives and epithets, as, for instance, ‘moth,’ ‘dove,’ ‘stars,’ ‘silver,’ ‘golden.’ It is not really a mannerism; but a necessity of her heart and mind. For the creatures and things her heart most loved, inevitably filled her consciousness and excluded other creatures and things.
But while Marjorie Pickthall, by limitation of genius, failed to attain to the sheer reaches in style and poetic substance which mark the work of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, and while she did not possess the ecstatic lilt of Carman, still she must be ranked as a supreme lyrist of the lovely, evanescent little things in the world. She must be ranked high also as a technical artist. If her poetry does not disclose her as able to achieve the finer strength and beauties of technique in poetic style, that distinguish the poetry of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, she is less often at fault technically than the older poets. Her technical artistry was not an acquired accomplishment; it was a gift of Nature. For while the older poets won their way, by hard striving, to their perfection in technique, Marjorie Pickthall, as early as her sixteenth year of age, displayed a precocious virtuosity, which was almost an instinct, in adroit and ingenious verbal coloring and melody.