Clasped hands, and worshipped you for the untold
Magnificence of womanhood divine—
God’s miracle of Water turned to Wine!
In his exquisitely wrought, sensuously colored, yet spiritually elevating verse surely we discover something that has never before been in Canadian poetry. It is a fresh achievement in Canadian poetry, even though it is not always impeccable in rhythm and rhyme. It is, too, authentic poetry, as if Dante or Keats or Tennyson or Swinburne had returned to earth and their genius were reincarnated, in a notable degree, in the genius of Robert Norwood.
Katherine Hale (Mrs. John Garvin) is a poet by herself. For she was a poet of considerable distinction for a decade before she published the volume which revealed her as having found her métier in creative poetry, as in her Morning in the West (1923). The eye and the ear are supreme in her processes of perception. Music and pictorial art were her first aesthetic loves, and had most to do with determining her attitudes and appreciations of the spiritual world. So that, at length, the inner eye and the inner ear became the faculties by which she perceived beauty in the external world as well as in the heart of mankind. All her reactions to what she saw and heard in the external world were in terms of color beauty and tonal beauty, perhaps more in terms of color than of tone. She became a musical critic of distinction, and one of our foremost ‘color-writers.’
When, therefore, Katherine Hale felt the ‘urge’ to create poetry, her reactions to the spiritual world also were in terms of color and music. It is found that her development in poetic writing follows the same order as her development in prose writing. She began as a critic of music and reviewer of literature, but capped all her prose with a finished and arresting work in ‘color-writing,’ Canadian Cities of Romance (1922). She began her poetic creation with the musical or lyrical qualities of her verse much more accentuated than the color qualities, and her themes and forms much more earth-born and conventional than romantic and spiritualized in meaning. But always in her first three books of verse there was the feeling for pictorial or color values and for subtle emotional and spiritual nuances.
At length, as in Morning in the West, her latest volume, she found her true mode, and poetry became for her the beautiful sketching and etching and painting of the romance of the Canadian spirit. This poetry of the spirit she suffused with all the subtle variations of imaginative ‘color,’ half-lights, shadows, and chiaroscuro of Nature and social life in Canada from the days of the Scots factor and Western chevalerie to the era of the transcontinental railways.
Her first two books of verse, Grey Knitting (1914) and The White Comrade (1916), by their very titles suggest the color ‘note.’ But the gift or power of embodying spiritual beauty in lyrical music is always uppermost, as for instance in The Ultimate Hour or In Noonday containing the unforgettable alliterative and musical line:—
With dear indefinite delight;
or in this stanza from The Answer:—