Highways of Canadian LiteratureLogan, J. D. (John Daniel)
History
Highways of Canadian Literature
Logan, J. D. (John Daniel)
Canadian literature -- History and criticism
Call it lust, or call it honor. Call it glory in a name!
We’re a handful, more or less, of what we were,
But we praise the grim Almighty that we stuck and played the game,
Till we chased them at the double to their lair.
For the word came, ‘Up and over!’
And our answer was a yell
As we scrambled out of cover—
And we dealt the dastards hell!
Mr. Durkin’s ballad is a human, veracious war-poem in the traditional
spirit of Campbell’s _Battle of the Baltic_, Tennyson’s _Ballad of the
Revenge_, Newbolt’s _Drake’s Drum_. It is designedly inspirational after
the manner, and with the substance, of the old heroic ‘fighting spirit.’
It is, therefore, a recrudescence of a war spirit and an ideal of poetic
inspiration, aim, and content which were not the real and authentic
spirit, motive, and ideal of the best Canadian, British, French, or
American poetry of the world war. In short, Mr. Durkin’s poem, _The
Fighting Men of Canada_, lilting, spirited, and inspiriting as it is,
must critically be estimated as an obsolete form of ‘recruiting’ ballad
rather than as a true inspirational poem conceived and written according
to the characteristic genius of the poetry of the world war. As a
reversion to the old type of martial poem, it deserves mention. Possibly
it may be instanced as the nearest approach to a Canadian war-song,
though the extraordinary fact is that not a single war-song, of the
popular or of the marching species, was written by a Canadian civilian
or soldier-poet.
In the war verse of another poet we find the kind of poetry that fired
the imagination and moved the will of the men of Canada who went to the
world war. To Lloyd Roberts, son of Charles G. D. Roberts, the war
poetry of the British Empire, as well as Canada, is indebted for two of
the most striking and impressive short poems in the new spirit of
inspirational verse inspired by the world war. His _Come Quietly,
England_, simple and direct in thought, free in form, colloquial in
diction, but positive, candid, sincere, is one of the most arresting and
convincing poems that have for a theme ‘the call to arms’—not for King,
or Country, nor for fear or anything else undivine:—
But for the sake of simple goodness
And His laws,
We shall sacrifice our all
For The Cause!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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