And ever ’mid the fairy blooms And murmur of the stream, We used to hear the pipes of Pan Call softly through our dream. But now, in outcry vast, that tune Fades like some little star Lost in an anguished judgment day And scarlet flames of war. What can it mean that Spring returns And purple violets bloom, Save that some gypsy flower may stray Beside his nameless tomb! To pagan Earth her gown of green, Her elfin song to May— With all my soul I must go on Into the scarlet day. All these—the poetry of her first three books, _Grey Knitting_, _The White Comrade_, and _The New Joan_—were but her short flights preparatory to making her eagle flight, by which she should discover the meaning of Canadian history and civilization in which is envisaged the Canadian national spirit. In _Morning in the West_ Katharine Hale is no longer the individual lyrist fluting in the band of other Canadian lyrists. In that volume she sounds the diapason of Canadian nationality. She invents new forms of lyrism, and her themes are colored with new tones and lights of an impressionism which is the acme of realism and yet is finely spiritualized, as in the series of verbal color-sketches _Going North_ and _A Study of Shadows_. But always we are being taken by the poet through Canada, and made to see what has been for us the most invisible, or, if visible, the most elusive of all things, namely, the forms and variation of the Canadian spirit and habitat. The new forms of her lyrism may be exemplified in this example, _Enchantment_:— I never see a blue jay But I think of her; Never hear that hoarse ‘dear—dear’ From a tree-top stir, And the answering call Far, far away, And the flash of azure— Oh, she would stay Listening in the forest, Loitering through the silence, Hearing calls and singing All the livelong day! Her new themes and new vision and spiritual import in them—the envisagement of the qualities of the Canadian spirit—are notably presented in _Cun-ne-wa-bum_, _Buffalo Meat_, and most poignantly in _An Old Lady_, which is an incisively graphic and dramatic _picture_ of the whole history of Canadian civilization from the early days of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the 20th century social life in Ottawa in these days of automobiles and bridge parties. Yet it is no mere picture, but possesses a simple pathos, tenderness, and wistfulness which spiritualize the realism in the poem, and raise it to the plane of literature. This, then, is Katherine Hale’s novel contribution to the poetic literature of Canada:—Canadian nature and civilization envisaged with a spiritual realism which has national perspective and native color and atmosphere. It is a new and distinct achievement in creative poetry in Canada.