The bloom of youth was on your sunburnt cheek,
The streams of life sang thro’ your violet veins,
The midnight velvet of your tangled hair
Lured, as a twilight rill . . . . . . . . . . .
Stringer’s Sappho in Leucadia is an engaging and even impressive dramatic colloquy, but it is not an authentic poetic or closet drama. It has sensuous beauty but no spiritual power. But it does increase Stringer’s reputation as a verbal colorist and melodist.
In 1915 appeared an original poet of distinct spiritual power in lyrical and dramatic forms. He was Robert Norwood. His first book was a sonnet-sequence. But in 1916 he published a poetic drama, The Witch of Endor: A Tragedy; and in 1919, another poetic drama, The Man of Kerioth. In 1921 he published Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale.’
Robert Norwood has two natural gifts. More than any other Canadian poet he has an innate genius for the philosophical or mystical interpretation of good and evil in the universe. Also, he is gifted with acute insight into the inner heart of man and woman, ancient and modern. These two gifts fit him for the office of the kind of poet who by imaginative sympathy perceives the ultimate harmony of the universe, the spiritual meaning of the tragedy and comedy of existence. As a poetic dramatist, then, Norwood is a Seer; and his voice is the voice of a Prophet. Power over the heart and imagination of the people, not Beauty and Art for art’s sake, is his aim. If he is the Poet of Beauty, as he is in all his verse, lyrical and dramatic, he is more, or supremely, the Poet of Spiritual Vision and Power in his poetic dramas.
In The Witch of Endor Norwood returns to the Biblical theme which had engaged Heavysege—the love romance and tragedy of King Saul. The characters are never shadowy but always alive. The dramatic movement is never held up by long or digressive moralizing speeches, as in Heayysege’s Saul, but each character makes his speeches according to the dramatic necessity, enough and no more, thus permitting at ‘the psychological moment’ the natural entrance of another character and his speech. The structure is logically developed to the tragic or spiritual climax. But in the development there is no uniform level of emotion, rather the emotion varies from gentle or pathetic to intense or tragic. It is indeed in its profounder imaginative vision, its more varying and rising degrees of emotional intensity, and its more logical structural development to a climax that The Witch of Endor has more incisive and compelling power as poetic drama than Campbell’s Arthurian drama Mordred. In short, The Witch of Endor is a beautiful and spiritual poetic drama—purging the emotions of pity and fear and transporting the spirit to the Mount of Vision where it sees intuitively how the ways of God to man are justified and how Love is greater than Faith and Hope.
In his next poetic drama The Man of Kerioth (that is, Judas Iscariot) Norwood made an advance in imaginative vision, construction, and power. He achieves this by reducing the magniloquence of the speeches and by modernly humanizing the characters of Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, Blind Bartimaeus, Philip, and Jesus the Carpenter. He even introduces little children into the drama. The high and the vulgar and lowly, saints and sinners, the motley of society in Jerusalem, commingle intimately and humanly. There is a distinct advance in realistic truth of characterization, and the whole drama is pervaded with a winning naturalness and humanity which are not in any preceding poetic drama by a Canadian, nor even in his own succeeding ultra-realistic ‘dramatic tale of the sea,’ Bill Boram. So that in respect of creation thoroughly humanized, noble, and clearly limned character-portraiture—as, for instance, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, and Jesus—Norwood must be ranked as the supreme creator amongst Canadian poetic dramatists. This is a matter of sheer artistry. But Norwood also shows an advance in spiritual power. With profounder mystical vision and greater truth he justifies the ways of God to man, and exalts the spirit to the Temple pinnacle where we behold Immortal Love in all its sweet beauty of humanity and in all its white radiance of redeeming light. In The Man of Kerioth he attains his acme in spiritual beauty and power as a poetic dramatist.
So far Norwood had not created any poetic drama with a definitively Canadian theme, setting, and characters. In his Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale’ told in the third person, the characters and the action being ‘reported,’ Norwood made a fresh, novel, and impressive contribution to original Canadian Literature. In doing so Norwood dropped somewhat in imaginative truth and dramatic invention; but he rose to greater heights of mystical perception and spiritual power. The theme of Bill Boram is the redemption of the human spirit by the love of beauty in Nature. Ingenious as his conception is, Norwood committed the error of conceiving the accident of a love of flowers, that is to say, of sensuous beauty, as a possible redemptive force in human life. He would have us believe that the love of sensuous beauty can transmute itself or become transmuted into an altogether different kind of love, namely, the love of spiritual beauty and thus regenerate a coarse and brutal nature and remake it into a noble and refined spirit. Such spiritual metabolism is impossible, and Bill Boram so far forth lacks imaginative truth and dramatic power.