And bassoons.
Scott knows the ‘voices’ of instruments as intimately as those of birds and other feathered wild creatures. How finely he combines a concrete use of his two-fold musical knowledge in this respect in the following ingenious and original bit of verbal instrumentation:—
And in the two-fold dark I hear the owl
Puff at his velvet horn.
The reader must be a naturalist and, as well, have been a bandsman or orchestral instrumentalist to feel the felicitous realism and descriptive exactitude of Scott’s art, or rather inspiration, in inventing that figure of the owl as a musician. The humor of it also is exquisite.
Scott surpasses all other Canadian poets in a genius for inventing single and double terminal rhymes, and he excels in this gift, without ever dropping to impossible or bizarre rhymes, except when the comedy of life in a subject naturally requires the use of a vulgarism as in this couplet from the Burlesca movement (VIII) of Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme:—
But I keeps my quarter,
Though—perhaps I’d orter.
As ready and expert as Carman with such other musical resources as vowel-melody and harmony, assonance, consonantal tone-color and alliteration, Scott is more lyrically melodious than even Carman. Melodiousness—dulcet melody of combined vowel and consonant and rhythm—is the supreme musical quality of Scott’s poetry. Not Tennyson nor Swinburne have surpassed the melodiousness of this stanza from Scott’s The Lover to His Lass:—
Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet,