Oh, she would stay
Listening in the forest,
Loitering through the silence,
Hearing calls and singing
All the livelong day!
Her new themes and new vision and spiritual import in them—the envisagement of the qualities of the Canadian spirit—are notably presented in Cun-ne-wa-bum, Buffalo Meat, and most poignantly in An Old Lady, which is an incisively graphic and dramatic picture of the whole history of Canadian civilization from the early days of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the 20th century social life in Ottawa in these days of automobiles and bridge parties. Yet it is no mere picture, but possesses a simple pathos, tenderness, and wistfulness which spiritualize the realism in the poem, and raise it to the plane of literature. This, then, is Katherine Hale’s novel contribution to the poetic literature of Canada:—Canadian nature and civilization envisaged with a spiritual realism which has national perspective and native color and atmosphere. It is a new and distinct achievement in creative poetry in Canada.
Another significant poet of the Second Renaissance period, whose verse deserves special mention, is Lloyd Roberts. Early in 1914 he published a volume of verse entitled, England Over Seas. Lloyd Roberts is the son of Charles G. D. Roberts. No doubt, he inherited his poetic gifts from his father, and, no doubt, learned the principles of technical artistry from him. But, as a matter of fact, in his own published verse, Lloyd Roberts shows qualities—love of Nature and the gift of a singularly lyrical lilt—that are nearer the verse of his father’s cousin, the inimitable lyrist of the seasons, the vagrom heart, and the open road, Bliss Carman.
In England Over Seas, the younger Roberts is an enchanting lover of Nature, a vivid colorist, and a melodious verbal musician. Nature is, in his own phrase, ‘the star’—always the theme and in the foreground. Of his qualities as a nature-painter and a verbal melodist, the following is an excellent example:—
Crimson and gold in the paling sky;
The rampikes black where they tower on high—