In the invention of winsome and vivid color epithets and images and in her power for alliterative music in verse, Marjorie Pickthall was, perhaps, surpassed by Pauline Johnson. But Miss Pickthall was the more ingenious of the two poets. The following examples are impressive:—‘Dark with the green silence under the gold weather,’ ‘And close the cowslips’ cups of honeyed gold,’ ‘Yellow for the ripened rye, white for ladies’ wearing,’ ‘Where cling the moths that are the longings of men,’ ‘Thy lips are bright as the edge of the sword,’ ‘On the great green lawns o’ heaven,’ ‘He saw the moonlit rafters of the world,’ ‘Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world,’ ‘And hear new stars come singing from God’s hand,’ ‘To the wind that cried last night like a soul in sin.’
Nature was Marjorie Pickthall’s chief mistress. In the pictorial treatment of Nature the poet displayed special gifts. It is not true to say that she had the Greek ‘feeling’ for Nature, or that the Nature in her verse was that of the ancient Greeks. It was impossible for Marjorie Pickthall, an Anglo-Canadian, to have a Greek imagination; and they who claim that she had the ancient Greek feeling for Nature, might as rightfully claim that she had the ancient Gaelic or Keltic feeling for Nature, or the ancient Semitic feeling for the presence of God, or the medieval Breton feeling for Nature and the mystery of religious faith, which some have remarked as ‘mysticism’ in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry.
The truth is that, first, Marjorie Pickthall had a mind and imagination which were naturally pagan, and that, secondly, Nature was to her but the material for her fanciful and pretty treatment in verse. But to the Greeks, Nature, as perceived and embodied in their mythology and poetry, was their vision of the real face and heart of Nature. They actually believed in gods, goddesses, heroes, muses, naiads, mermaids, satyrs, fauns, as being Nature herself. This is what we mean by saying that the Greeks were pagans. But Marjorie Pickthall had, by native gift, only the sensibility and imagination that were naturally pagan in a love of and preference for thus visualizing Nature. She had saturated her mind, by reading, with the mythology of the Greeks; and her naturally pagan sensibility and imagination re-colored and re-expressed this material in a delightful pagan—not Greek—way in verse. Marjorie Pickthall had no such lively sense of the reality of divinity in Nature as had the Greeks. But she did have a lively pagan, if Anglo-Canadian, imagination. And so, with imaginative ‘make-believe’ she peopled Nature with spirits, mermaids, pixies, fauns, elfs, playing with the Old Nurse Nature, or with themselves, and rejoicing in the sights, sounds, and the shy forest creatures, which they see and hear amongst the woodlands, streams, hills. She thus paganly poetizes Nature, beautifully, winningly; but it is all a tour de force of the senses and imagination, achieved in her ‘closet,’ where she was temporarily shut off from the roar and turmoil of great cities.
Had she steeped herself as thoroughly in ancient Gaelic lore, myths and legends, she would have written as engagingly of the Nature of the Kelts. In her single poetic essay in Gaelic ‘feeling’ for Nature—the Gael’s innate love of Nature and the Homeland, his nostalgia—she failed in a double way; first, by infelicitously giving her poem a German title, Wanderlied, and, secondly, by a dull and commonplace imitation, if not a parody, of Ethna Carbery, Nora Hopper, Moira O’Neil, Katharine Tynan. When she was sincerely and naturally pagan, as in most of her verse, she succeeded admirably. But when she attempted to write a ‘literary’ poem in the pagan spirit, as in Wanderlied, she failed.
More of her imagery is derived from actual Nature in Canada than from mythological Nature in ancient Greece. The coloring from Canadian woods in Spring, Autumn, and Winter is in her verse, also visualizations of Canadian fields and flowers, and the subtle handwork of ‘the Frost King,’ and even Canadian domestic felicities made possible by Nature, such as the winter arabesque on the windowpanes in contrast with the inviting glow of burning logs on the hearth:—
Here where the bee slept and the orchis lifted
Her honeying pipes of pearl, her velvet lip,
Only the swart leaves of the oak lie drifted
In sombre fellowship.
Here where the flame-weed set the lands alight,