Highways of Canadian LiteratureLogan, J. D. (John Daniel)
History
Highways of Canadian Literature
Logan, J. D. (John Daniel)
Canadian literature -- History and criticism
Altogether in another form and with a fresh and novel poetic conception
and impressive artistry, Duncan Campbell Scott wrote his _Lines in
Memory of Edmund Morris_[2]. Scott’s art is singularly informed by a
color and beauty derived from his intimate and exquisite appreciation of
the fine arts, especially music and painting. More than any other
Canadian poet, Scott is the ‘artist in words.’ He is concerned above all
things to employ poetic diction and imagery with the same love of
refined expressiveness and emotional nuance as inspired such musical
composers or tone-painters as Ravel, Debussy, and MacDowell, and such
painters as Constable, Watteau, and Monet. Or to borrow from musical
criticism, Scott loves his performance, his executant artistry with
words and imagery, more than he loves his poetic ideas.
Edmund Morris was a Canadian painter and his spirit perceived in
Canadian Nature and in the Indian aborigines in Canada something which
no other painter had perceived or attempted to envisage. Scott and
Morris were companions and kindred spirits—the one an artist in words;
and the other an artist in pigments. It was natural, then, that Scott,
on the tragic death of his friend, should commemorate the loss which
both the living friend and the country suffered by the passing of Edmund
Morris. But it was impossible for Scott to write any conventionalized
elegiac monody. Under inner compulsion, he wrote of life and death with
all his original genius for conceiving, as he phrases his mode of
conception,
Meanings hid in mist;
and with all his gifts in exquisite craftsmanship:—
Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.
Scott’s _Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris_ is in some respects unique,
but particularly in form, and its simple, intimate, direct address to
the spirit. It is not a pastoral elegy in the third person but a
dramatic monologue, or an epistle in verse from one spirit to another.
There is nothing like it in all English Literature, not even in
Browning. But intimate, even familiar, and colloquial as it is, the poem
is radiant with a ‘white beauty’ of imagery and chaste artistry. More
notably still, it subdues the turbulence of our souls in the presence of
a great loss by death, transports the imagination to the mount of
spiritual vision, refines faith, sustains hope, and fills the spirit
with a serene peace. It leaves upon us imperishably the inward sense
that ‘it is not death to die’:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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