Lies the bleak upland, webbed and crowned with white.
Build high the logs, O love, and in thine eyes
Let me believe the summer lingers late.
We shall not miss her passive pageantries,
We are not desolate,
When on the sill, across the window bars,
Kind winter flings her flowers and her stars.
And what but Canadian is this compelling line from The Young Baptist?—
Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world!
In short, if we were making a formula for Marjorie Pickthall’s Nature poetry, we would employ this sub-title—‘Lyrics in the Greek and the Canadian Modes of Pictorializing Nature.’ Thus we should, by a single phrase, escape absurdly alleging that an Anglo-Canadian mind possessed Greek imagination and feeling for a mythological Nature; and thus also make clear the fact that Marjorie Pickthall, an Anglo-Canadian poet, was gifted not only with a lively pagan sense of the beauty of a vanished world, but also with a responsive sensibility to the beauty of a real and present world of Nature in Canada.