To authenticate the claim that Pauline Johnson’s genius, art, and poetry are highly original and sometimes unique, it is only necessary to cite such of her poems as represent the stages of her development and the special qualities of her poetic vision and artistry.

Beginning with the first stage, we must observe that her passionate protesting against the abuses which the Indians of Canada had suffered as, for instance, in her poems The Cattle Thief, and A Cry from an Indian Wife, is no proof that the fierce intensity of her utterance is a recrudescence of ancestral Indian fire of spirit or ferocity in herself. The poems in which this so-called Indian emotional intensity was expressed by her did, no doubt, spring out of imaginative sympathy with her father’s race, but these poems could have been written with the same show of emotional intensity by any other poet who realized with equal imaginative sympathy the wrongs that the Indians of Canada had suffered and who had the gift of fiery expression.

Pauline Johnson is fundamentally Indian when she is most pagan; that is, when, first, she realizes and expresses poignantly her racial sense of haunting presences in the natural world, and when, secondly, she expresses a melancholy regret for the passing of her Indian race and a yearning for free and pagan communion with the moods of Nature, with the wild creatures of Nature, and with the spiritual presences, which, to the imagination of the aboriginal Indian, haunted the woods, the streams, the mists, the clouds, and the sunsets before the hated British race destroyed the Indian’s ancestral habitat and robbed him both of his material and spiritual birthright. Moreover, in the two or three poems in which she protested against the wrongs which the Indians of Canada had suffered, Pauline Johnson was really, if unconsciously, affecting to be the ‘voice’ of her Indian race. For she soon turned from such affected poetic frenzy to expressing her admiration of the British and her love of Canada as a free commonwealth under British allegiance and protection, and to revealing in colorful and musical verse the spirit and beauties of the land of her birth.

Pauline Johnson, then, is essentially Indian, not when frenzied, but only when she expresses in verse the inner secrets of the joy and the pathos of her imaginative communion with past and contemporary Nature in Canada,—when she sings, with free and infectious lilt, outdoor life in Canada or impressionistically paints Canadian woods, skies, plains, snow, waters, or apostrophizes and humanizes the creatures and objects of nature as if they had a psychology of their own.

All the world knows Pauline Johnson’s lilting and infectious lyric of Canadian outdoor life, The Song My Paddle Sings. It is unsurpassed for suggested or ideated sensations of wind and stream, of the spirit of motion, of free life in the open, and wins one both by its vivid pictures of outdoor life and by its simple but musical abandon. After a two-stanza apostrophe to the West wind, closing with

we hear the poet lilting the inspiriting song itself, opening

Specially to be noted in this poem is the descriptive and musical realism which the poet effects by a sort of refrain in the third line of each stanza, a monosyllabic accent which precisely conveys to the sensibility the actual sensations experienced in canoeing through slow-moving and rushing or weltering waters—‘drift, drift,’ ‘dip, dip,’ ‘swirl, swirl,’ ‘dash, dash,’ ‘reel, reel,’ ‘sway, sway,’ ‘swings, swings.’ This is supreme in descriptive and imitative naturalism.

For examples of Pauline Johnson’s poetic power to humanize objects and creatures in Nature The Sleeping Giant and The Homing Bee may be cited. The latter is also notably suffused with delicate color, moves with a light, tripping music, and is dainty in structure, thus exemplifying several of the other qualities of her art. The opening lines indicate the ‘key’ in music and color:—

In the Canadian idyll, Pauline Johnson displayed a delicate sense of color values, and sang as well of airy things in Nature with an airy music, sometimes touched with a reflective melancholy, as, for instance, in Shadow River.

The tones of melancholy, of sadness, observed sometimes in Pauline Johnson’s poetry were not all born of a mystical yearning for union with Nature. Sometimes they were the expression of a poignant sense of the defeat of romantic love. Hers was a simple, warm or passionate, confiding, sensitive, but strong nature; and sensitive and passionate but strong natures, if they belong to poets, tend to express poignantly, rather than bitterly, any spiritual cataclysm in their lives, and, for solace or support, to turn to Nature or to religion. It was so with Pauline Johnson.

Charles Mair, author of Dreamland and Other Poems, and Tecumseh: A Drama, is the authority for the belief that Pauline Johnson went through an experience of romantic love which, in its joy, gave wings of ecstasy and a warm emotional coloring to her nature-poetry, but which, when her love suffered a defeat that meant a spiritual cataclysm for her, drew from her the most poignant expression of yearning for union with Immortal Love. The important truth is that whichever emotion she expresses, she remains unequalled as a lyrist of the ecstasy and the pathos of romantic love. But her poems of the ecstasy of love are never merely the expression of subjective emotions. They also have an idyllic or nature setting which so colors her nature-poetry itself with the passion of love as to distinguish it, both as nature-poetry and as love poetry, from anything else of the kind in Canadian Literature. The ecstasy is somewhat subdued in Idlers; but is passionate and transporting, warmly colored with the light and tints of Nature, and set to verbal music in perfect harmony with the emotion and the nature-setting in Wave-won.

The fact of the defeat of love, in Pauline Johnson’s case, may be observed in her Overlooked, a poem which is notable for the invention on her part of a metaphor that, for originality and beauty, is worthy of the Greek idyllists or of Catullus, namely:—

At length Pauline Johnson’s merely human passion of yearning for union with the mortal companion is transmuted into a spiritualized yearning—which, however, has not in it the sad wistfulness of the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall—for union with Immortal Love. Defeat of romantic love in Pauline Johnson’s case passed, first, into renouncement, and, at last, into resignation and the total giving of self to Immortal Love, as in Brier—

Pauline Johnson possessed extraordinary, if not quite unique, gifts as a story-telling balladist. Examples of her art in this species are her compelling story of Indian love and revenge, Ojistoh, her melodramatic Indian tale, The Cattle Thief, and her Wolverine, a poem of Western chevalerie, in which species, however, she does not rank with Isabella Valancy Crawford.

Her poetry of the development of the Canadian national spirit and civilization, by which she marks a broadening in her own spiritual vision, is notably exemplified in two poems, The Riders of the Plains and Prairie Greyhounds. In the former, however, she is more British than Canadian. But she is Canadian in her Prairie Greyhounds. In this poem she achieves an extraordinary virility of rhythm, employs apt and dramatic epithets and fills the picture with a vivid suggestiveness of the vastness of Canada and the vision of the greater autonomous and powerful Dominion that is to be. Prairie Greyhounds, moreover, is a supreme achievement in suggested or ideated sensations of motion. The reader feels himself as if actually aboard the west-bound and east-bound Canadian Pacific trains, experiencing, as does a living passenger on a ‘fast express,’ the swish, and roar, and onward rush of the trains.

As a verbal musician Pauline Johnson must be given a very high place amongst Canadian poets. There is an avian abandon and ecstasy, an avian lilt and warbling, in The Birds’ Lullaby and in The Songster. There are flowing rhythm and haunting melody of rhyme, vowel-harmony, alliteration and cadences in The Trail to Lillooet:—

Pauline Johnson has also achieved what may be noted in literary history as the first strictly Canadian ‘cradle-song’—Canadian in music and in setting—her Lullaby of the Iroquois.

As a nature-colorist and etcher Pauline Johnson again must be given a very high place. For a genre etching of the human figure against a background of nature her Joe, which she herself sub-titles ‘An Etching,’ is as vividly presented and as fetching as a genre drawing by Murillo. Her Lady Lorgnette is as daintily graphic and colorful and piquant and romantic as anything done by the brush of Romney or Gainsborough or by the later modern ‘society’ miniaturists. She had the pictorial artist’s eye to spy out a picture in Nature, as in At Husking Time. She had the impressionist’s mastery of sensuous pigmentation, as in Under Canvas. She could make a picture low-keyed, full of shadows and suggested sensations and mystery, as in Nocturne and in Moonset.

Finally: Pauline Johnson is certainly not surpassed, if equalled, by any other Canadian lyrist as an inventor of beautiful color epithets and of picturesque, vivid, and compelling metaphors. They are to be found everywhere in her poetry. Consider these as examples—‘Russet needles as censers swing to an altar,’ ‘The sea-weeds cling with flesh-like fingers,’ ‘Beaten gold that clung like coils of kisses love inlaid,’ ‘The brownish hills with needles green and gold,’ ‘O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise,’ ‘Swept beneath a shore of shade, beneath a velvet moon,’ ‘Like net work threads of fire,’ and this,

and many more as novel, colorful, musical, veracious and compelling.

As a woman Pauline Johnson was a rare and beautiful spirit. As a poet she was of all Canadian poets the most pervasively true to her Canadian origin and habitat. She is not to be given always the status of Lampman and Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott, yet to her unquestionably belongs a place beside these Canadian singers. Her poetry had a magic of music and a color of leafy lawns and lovely grey-eyed and tawny dusks and clear ecstatic morns, which were all her own. She was indeed a ‘Mohawk Warbler,’ and her songs are

The quotations in this chapter from Pauline Johnson’s poems are from Flint and Feather, by E. Pauline Johnson, (Musson Book Co., Limited: Toronto).

Parker and Scott (F. G.)

It was as a poet, not as a creator of historical romances, that Sir Gilbert Parker first appeared as a man of letters and first appealed to the literary public. As a poet he was appreciated in Australia and in England, but not in Canada. That as a poet he has been unknown and unappreciated in his homeland, Canada, is due to the fact that he was expatriate when he published his two volumes of poems, the second of which was ‘privately printed,’ and that his greater reputation as a novelist, particularly of old romantic Canada, made him known in the Dominion exclusively as a writer of fiction. Sir Gilbert Parker, however, ranks high as a sonneteer of spiritual love, and as lyrist in genre verse which has attained special reputation, particularly as texts of songs for salon and recital repertory.

Sir Gilbert Parker was born in Ontario, in 1862. Never robust, he left Canada in 1886 to seek recovery of health in the warmer and more salubrious climate of Australia. While in Australia he began publishing sonnets and lyrics in magazines. The sonnets were collected and published in a volume entitled A Lover’s Diary; first edition, 1894; second edition, 1898. Before the publication of A Lover’s Diary Parker had removed to London. While in England he privately printed a volume of lyrics entitled Embers. These two volumes, the first revised, and enlarged with twenty-five sonnets, and the second, with the addition of other lyrics, were collected and published as Volume 17 of The Works of Gilbert Parker (1913). The volume containing his collected poems is distinguished by a critical Introduction by Sir Gilbert Parker himself.

In the Introduction Parker explains the origin and theme of A Lover’s Diary. It is a sonnet-sequence, the composition of which was begun when the poet was twenty-three and still resident in Canada. The sequence is a ‘hopeless love, in form of temptation, but lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toil of the journey of understanding paid.’ He adds: ‘The six sonnets . . . beginning with The Bride, and ending with Annunciation, have nothing to do with the story further than to show two phases of the youth’s mind before it was shaken by speculation, plunged into sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give a new impulse and direction to personal forces and individual sense.’

As a poet of romantic love Parker is concerned with the spiritual meaning of it. A Lover’s Diary is not concerned with the mere emotions of romantic love but with its spiritual thrall, and with it as a process of spiritual redemption and exaltation. As an interpreter of spiritual love, Parker contrasts with Robert Norwood whose sequence, His Lady of the Sonnets (1915), though having a spiritualizing intent, is highly sensuous and impressionistic in diction and imagery. Parker breathes a less earthly air. His sonnet-sequence is addressed more to the imaginative reason than to the aesthetic imagination. It is much more mystically conceived and much more chastely lovely with the ‘white beauty’ of the spirit than is Norwood’s sequence. Both sequences, however, are authentic and noble poetic creations.

In pure beauty of conception, imagery, and artistry, and in the spiritual exaltation of love, the following sonnet from Parker’s A Lover’s Diary, is characteristic of the whole sequence:—

Parker’s lyrical verse, like his sonnet-sequence, is the poetry of a young man who still possesses the enthusiasms of youth for all the lovelier and happier things in existence, and who rejoices in living. From the text of Parker’s lyrics it is plain that he had the gifts of a lyrist in the original Greek meaning, of one who wrote poems to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. He was gifted to turn a sentiment either seriously or playfully with simplicity and directness of diction and with winning musical lilt.

In truth, if he had turned to song composition, he was more ideally equipped to write the texts of poems for songs than was the greatest of American song composers, the late Edward MacDowell, who, for lack of singable lyrical texts, was compelled to compose his own poems as well as their musical settings.

There is a spontaneity of lyrical lilt, lyrical verve, in Parker’s lighter poems, which he composed both in literary English and in ‘Irishy.’ As an example of the musical and colorful qualities of his lyrics in literary English, the following poem from Embers will aptly serve:—

As an example of his musical quality and humor in ‘Irishy,’ the following lyric from Embers is apt and fetching:—

As a composer of song texts, Parker is rivalled only by his Canadian compatriot, Arthur Stringer, whose poems in ‘Irishy’ have been most winningly and humorously set to music by their compatriot, Gena Branscombe (Mrs. J. F. Tenney). It is indeed as a poet, whose lyrics are inevitable texts for songs which have literary charm and simple humanity that Sir Gilbert Parker has been most admired and appreciated.

For this view we have the authority of Sir Gilbert himself. In the Introduction to the volume of his poetry in his Collected Works, he says: ‘Mary Callaghan and Me has been set to music by Mr. Max Muller, and has made many friends, and The Crowning was the Coronation ode of The People, which gave a prize, too ample I think, for the best musical setting of the lines. Many of the other pieces in Embers have been set to music by distinguished composers, like Sir Edward Elgar, who has made a song-cycle of several, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Mr. Arthur Foote, Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, Robert Somerville, and others. The first to have musical setting was You’ll Travel Far and Wide, to which in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as An Irish Folk Song. Like O Flower of All the World, by Mrs. Amy Woolforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote’s music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the author’s words.’

Both, then, as a poet of mystical vision and sublimated emotion, and of human sentiment and instincts which add to the humanity and gaiety of life, Sir Gilbert Parker appears as a poet who has authentic creative gifts and who is a master craftsman in the ‘art’ of verse. In novelty and variety his sonnets and lyrics have significantly enhanced the quality of Canadian poetry, and have in their own degree and way given the work of the poets of the Systematic School and Period the character of a genuine ‘renaissance.’

Another poet who rightfully belongs to the Systematic School and Period of Canadian Literature is Frederick George Scott. In 1888, or in the year following the publication of Roberts’ In Divers Tones (1887), Canon Scott published his first book of verse, The Soul’s Quest and Other Poems. This volume was succeeded by five other volumes of verse, up to 1907, in which year he published The Key of Life: A Mystery Play. In 1910 appeared his Collected Poems. During the World War he published a booklet of war verse, In the Battle Silences (1916).

The forms and qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry were determined by his own moral personality and by his conception of the ‘end’ of poetry. It is a fact that in no other verse written by a Canadian is there such an absolute identification of the man and the poet as in the poetry of Canon Scott. The poetry reflects the whole personality of the man. In the world, Canon Scott is a distinguished example of the ‘Christian gentleman’—‘a man of liberal culture and wide sympathies whose life has thrilled with the larger life, political, social, and religious, a man of strong courage born of reverent unquestioning faith.’ To Canon Scott, therefore, the aim of poetry is not ‘art for art’s sake,’ but the inspiration and consolation of the people in their hour of doubt or darkness. His conception of the ‘end’ determined the forms and manner of Canon Scott’s poetry. For if, like the ancient Hebraic poets, he was to inspire and console his people, he must present his thoughts in simple forms and in diction and imagery readily understood by the people.

Canon Scott stands out from the rest of the members of the Systematic School and Period as par excellence the Poet of the Spirit; and his verse is distinguished from the bulk of the verse of his colleagues in the Systematic School as the Poetry of Faith and Consolation. There is nothing original and distinctive in his forms: they are traditional and simple. There is nothing original and distinctive in his message: it, too, is traditional and simple—a message of faith and courage and of joy in existence. His distinction is in his ‘art,’ his power to convey beautifully, sweetly—and above all, convincingly—to the human soul noble or profound thoughts for its sustenance, refreshment, and consolation. But while the ethical and spiritual ‘notes’—which must be distinguished from didacticism—are supreme in his poetry, Canon Scott is also solicitous about the craftsmanship in his verse. Though his verse forms are thoroughly socialized and though he never aims to be a ‘word virtuoso,’ nevertheless he is always the ‘artist’ in verse technique.

The chief qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry are piquant phantasy rather than imagination, ingenious imagery, sympathy with his kind, tenderness, wistfulness, simple or profound thought expressed in simple diction and in simple but dulcet verbal melody. Also in his verse is a two-fold Canadianism. The self-reliant faith and courage in it is Canadian, and the color and the naturalistic imagery are derived from the woods, and fields, and streams, and hills of his Canadian homeland, more particularly from Nature in the Laurentian district. Indeed, Canon Scott has been given the sobriquet of ‘the Poet of the Laurentians.’ But while he impregnates and suffuses his verse with color and naturalistic imagery from Nature in the Laurentians, he always transmutes his naturalistic perceptions into spiritual imagery and import. He does not do this with bald and stark didacticism, but with exquisite artistry, and yet with an intimacy, apt felicity, and naturalness that make it all an achievement in winning a reader to see the beauty and dignity of the familiar and commonplace in Nature. Canon Scott’s poetry, in a phrase, is the acme of spiritual realism.

Of his diction, rhythm, and melody, and his Canadian imagery in verse, Scott’s Dawn furnishes a short and impressive example:—

How lowly, and yet how beautiful and compelling, are these figures in the first stanza of that poem—‘pastured with the stars,’ ‘meadow-lands of space.’ But both are derived from Canon Scott’s boyhood days in his homeland. They are Canadian.

There is a Wordsworthian humanity in his poem The Cripple, a sympathy with his kind and a tender wistfulness in his Van Elsen. There is nobility of thought in his Samson, and in Thor, and a grandeur of vision in his Hymn of Empire, which is a Canadian imperial and patriotic poem in a kind by itself. But in one poem—a sonnet—Canon Scott has achieved what is perhaps the most ingenious imagery in Canadian poetry, and one of the most extraordinary in English literature. This is his sonnet Time:—

So far as derivative influences may in general be observed in the poets of the Systematic School and Period of Canadian Literature, Roberts, Lampman, and Carman are Hellenistic and impressionistic in feeling and thought. They were devoted to creating poetry that would delight the aesthetic senses and sensibilities. But Frederick George Scott is Hebraic in feeling and thought. He created poetry to satisfy the heart and the religious imagination, and to sustain and console the human spirit in its sojourn on earth. He achieved these ends simply yet beautifully. His poetry is pervaded with the most elemental and enduring ‘heart’ qualities. They give it such a direct and compelling human appeal as to win a significant and distinctive place for it in the authentic native and national poetry of Canada.

The quotations in this chapter are from A Lover’s Diary and Embers, by Sir Gilbert Parker, (Copp, Clark Co., Limited: Toronto); and from Poems, by Frederick George Scott, (Constable & Co.: London).

Minor Poets

It is proper to distinguish Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick George Scott, and Pauline Johnson as the ‘major’ poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. Though of necessity with them the writing of verse was in a sense an avocation, in another sense it was a vocation. They were systematic both in the writing and the quantitative publishing of it. Contemporary with them, but, for the most part, later in production and publishing, were other poets who wrote with beauty and distinction in poetic style. They followed the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the ‘major’ poets, but they were not as systematic as Roberts and his confrères in writing or in quantitative publishing. These are denoted in this work the ‘minor’ poets of the Systematic School or Period. But nothing invidious as to quality of verse is intended by the distinction. For a few of these so-called ‘minor’ poets of the Systematic Period wrote some poetry as fine in aesthetic substance and artistic finish as the poetry of Roberts and his colleagues. The term ‘minor’ is meant to distinguish these poets as being, first, later, for the most part, than Roberts and his confrères, and as being, secondly, less eminent than the early systematic group of Canadian poets. The number of these so-called minor or later poets is legion. They ‘flourished’ from 1887 to 1907, or from the publication of Roberts’ In Divers Tones to the appearance of Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough (the beginning of the Decadent Interim). Detailed appreciation of the minor poets of the Systematic Period would, therefore, require a volume by itself. Here we may only recall the salient names, and specially remark the verse, of some of the minor poets whose lyrical poetry is particularly representative or noteworthy, or has become genuinely popular.

Worthy of a place beside the major poets of the Systematic Period is Ethelwyn Wetherald. In 1895 she published The House of the Trees and Other Poems; in 1902, Tangled in the Stars; in 1904, The Radiant Road and in 1907, an edition of her collected poems, The Last Robin; Lyrics and Sonnets. Perhaps the outstanding aesthetic quality of her poetry is a tender, subdued, melancholy, spiritual grace, ‘a grey-eyed loveliness,’ which undoubtedly derives from the characteristic pensiveness of her Quaker ancestry. But in all her verse, which is authentic poetry, she discloses pretty sentiment, reflective beauty, ingenious imagery, and fine craftsmanship. The Hay Field, which is Canadian in inspiration, setting, and color is an apt example of Ethelwyn Wetherald’s art:—

A poet who has won a distinct and fixed place in the popular heart and imagination of Canadians is Jean Blewett. Her first volume, Heart Songs, appeared in 1897 and immediately won a wide popularity. This was increased by her next volume, The Cornflower and Other Poems (1906). Her Collected Poems were published in 1922. Jean Blewett is essentially a ‘woman’s poet.’ By this is meant that she appeals to the domestic heart and the imagination, that she sings of the joys of home, the ways of children, the love of husband and wife. But Jean Blewett does this in an extraordinary way. She treats homely subjects indeed, but while she treats them in a homely or rather home-like way she does it with a simple and ingratiating sincerity and charm of sentiment and artistry which are quite her own and in the employment of which she is alone in Canada. If her poems deal with homely subjects, her artistry is by no means bourgeois. She rises and falls with the inherent dignity of her subject. But her human treatment of a homely subject never issues in vulgarity, or vivid ‘vaudeville’ verse. As an example of her genuine artistry and dignity of treatment in a high or serious subject we quote her Quebec:—

When her subject gives her a chance for sweep of imagination and for a pearly beauty of imagery, Jean Blewett rises brilliantly to her theme, as in What Time the Morning Stars Arise, a really splendid war poem commemorating the heroic deed of Lieutenant Reginald Warneford, aviator, who unassisted destroyed a German armed Zeppelin, containing 28 men, on June 7th, 1915. We quote the first and last stanzas:—

Jean Blewett is chiefly loved by the people for her forte—her sincere, simple singing of true love and faith, of childhood, and the field flowers, and the joys of the Canadian Spring and Winter. But, as a genre poet, she is gifted with a whimsical humor which is quite unique in the poetic literature of Canada. For He was Scotch and So Was She is a fetching example of Jean Blewett’s humor and humorous treatment of a simple or homely subject and is to be found in many Canadian anthologies.

Francis Sherman, one of the truest and most individual poets that Canada has produced, is a relative of Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. His literary output has been meagre, comprising only one regularly published volume, a small, thin booklet, Matins (1896), and three or four privately printed pamphlets of verse. But the quality is sufficient to fix his place in the company of the authentic Canadian poets of the First Renaissance.

Sherman’s poetry shows a distinct tendency to mysticism. He was, evidently, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite School. But he had an independent individuality. He possessed, as a poet, eyes and feelings of his own; and could express what he saw and felt, with ready and confident artistry. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on Francis Sherman and his own natural gifts for individual expression are disclosed in Between the Battles (from Matins):—