From some fool’s garden blown afar,
Go down the gold deep tranquilly.
There is a sylvan earthly music in the poetry of Carman, Pauline Johnson, and Marjorie Pickthall. But the music of Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry is the melody of a fairy fantasy, an unearthly lyrical melody suffused with color which is imaginative rather than earth-born. Yet its vowel and alliterative melody, rhythmical refinement, and translucent or sensuous color are never unreal but only serve to etherealize real experience, to transport us with exquisite sensation of ineffable, unimagined beauty. To figure him under the title of one of his own most melodious and romantically imaginative poems, Duncan Campbell Scott is The Piper of Arll—and, like Debussy, regales us with:—
The complaint of the wind
In the plane-trees,
The far away pulse of a horn,
Ripples of fairy color,
Rhythms of Spain,
The overtones of cymbals,
The sobs of tormented souls,