Aside from that, Bill Boram, on the whole, is a novel achievement in dramatic narrative. The characters are vividly and veraciously drawn; they have realistic truth. There is also an air of romance in the whole tale, such an air of vital romance as obtains in the tales and novels of the sea by Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.
Summarily; Norwood’s Bill Boram is an amazing dramatic picture of rude characters in a setting of romance colored by a strange and startling commingling of coarse speech and brutalized deed and of beautiful diction and exquisite imagery. It is at once a tour de force in dramatic conception and construction and in impressionistic word-painting. Yet it is a powerful presentation of the idea of the mystical union of the human spirit with the divine through the love of pure beauty in Nature.
The Second Renaissance is noted also for the work of several other poetic dramatists. Amongst them are Dr. James B. Dollard, author of Clontarf: An Irish National Drama; Rev. Dean Llwyd, author of The Vestal Virgin; John L. Carleton, author of The Medieval Hun; A Historical Drama, and The Crimson Wing, which has the distinction of having been the winner of the first prize for original dramatic composition in the Canadian Prize Play Competition, 1918; Norah Holland, author of When Half Gods Go and Other Poems (1924), the title-poem of which has been repeated as a Christmas play for several successive seasons. These are all respectable poetic dramas and give distinction both to the quantity and the quality of poetic drama in the Second Renaissance.
But this work in poetic drama is, after all, not inspired impressing one as a stint in creation, and is not at all comparable to the work of Norwood in imaginative vision, artistic construction, and dramatic power. Comparable, however, with Norwood’s and superior to it in spiritual poignancy is the single poetic drama left by Marjorie Pickthall. Though Norwood’s poetic dramas contain lyrical interludes, and though his dramatic tale Bill Boram is for the most part rhymed, on the whole they are in blank verse. But Miss Pickthall’s single poetic drama The Wood Carver’s Wife is lyrical through and through, and is properly to be denoted as ‘lyric drama.’ In form this lyric drama stands midway between Stringer’s dramatic poems and Norwood’s poetic dramas. In that respect Marjorie Pickthall made a novel contribution to Canadian poetic literature.
The Wood Carver’s Wife was first published in The University Magazine in 1920. It was reprinted, along with other fugitive poems, in 1922, the drama supplying the title poem of the volume. The Wood Carver’s Wife has four characters, one of whom is Shagonas, an Indian lad who represents Nemesis. It is set in the time of the Intendant. The theme is ‘the eternal triangle’—a girl-wife, with a husband still alive and a secret lover. The mood of the drama is the tragedy which follows the sin of disloyalty to the sacrament of marriage, even if the disloyalty is only in the heart and never openly expressed in clandestine meeting between the wife and the lover. The mood of the dramatist, however, is not one of simply illustrating the law that the ‘soul that sinneth it shall die,’ but of wistfulness about the ways of God to men and women when spiritual unmating is permitted by Heaven. The dramatist seems to put her own feeling about the matter into her drama. She seems to feel that if the moral law is inexorable, it ought not to be so in the case of a young girl who innocently, or without knowing her own heart and what she was doing, married a man, who, after all, did not want her as an end in herself, or her spirit for its own sake, but to have her as a model for the statue of the Blessed Virgin he was creating in wood, as a chattel in his studio. Humanly, Marjorie Pickthall felt that the girl-wife was more sinned against than sinning when she allowed herself to be conscious—merely conscious—of the lover. But Marjorie Pickthall, with loyalty to the dramatic necessities, though with a spiritual wistfulness all the while, constructed the action and movement of The Wood Carver’s Wife so that the tragic ending was inevitable. For the husband knows that there is a secret lover, and Shagonas knows, and at the tragic climax it is the arrow of the Indian, representing the moral law, that sends the lover to his death. The girl-wife knows what has happened, because she has heard the twang of Shagonas’ bow-string. The tragedy is complete when she receives from Shagonas, who is again Nemesis, the sword of her lover, and dies with a mad speech on her lips, while at the same time the husband, also mad, as he was from the beginning, has Shagonas pose the beautiful dead body of the girl-wife that he may put the acme touches to his statue.
How easily the dramatist might have made certain shifts which would have resulted in reconciliation and a happy ending! But with all her spiritual wistfulness, Marjorie Pickthall loyally held to the dramatic and the artistic ideals. The climax and tragic ending are tremendous and wholly spiritualizing, purging the soul with pity for humanity through the terror which the action and the denouement awake in the spirit. There is in it all a spiritual poignancy which does not obtain in Norwood’s love-tragedy of Saul in The Witch of Endor. It is suffused with a lovely and winning beauty of diction, imagery, and verbal music; and it contains one lyric ‘cry of a soul’ which for pathos is unsurpassed in Canadian literature, namely, the Litany of Dorette, the hapless girl-wife, to the Blessed Virgin Mother beginning,
If you have lain in the night
And felt the old tears run
In their channels worn in the heart,
Pity me, Mary.