Highways of Canadian LiteratureLogan, J. D. (John Daniel)
History
Highways of Canadian Literature
Logan, J. D. (John Daniel)
Canadian literature -- History and criticism
Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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