Into the scarlet day.
All these—the poetry of her first three books, Grey Knitting, The White Comrade, and The New Joan—were but her short flights preparatory to making her eagle flight, by which she should discover the meaning of Canadian history and civilization in which is envisaged the Canadian national spirit. In Morning in the West Katharine Hale is no longer the individual lyrist fluting in the band of other Canadian lyrists. In that volume she sounds the diapason of Canadian nationality. She invents new forms of lyrism, and her themes are colored with new tones and lights of an impressionism which is the acme of realism and yet is finely spiritualized, as in the series of verbal color-sketches Going North and A Study of Shadows. But always we are being taken by the poet through Canada, and made to see what has been for us the most invisible, or, if visible, the most elusive of all things, namely, the forms and variation of the Canadian spirit and habitat.
The new forms of her lyrism may be exemplified in this example, Enchantment:—
I never see a blue jay
But I think of her;
Never hear that hoarse ‘dear—dear’
From a tree-top stir,
And the answering call
Far, far away,
And the flash of azure—