Archibald Lampman was one of the young poets who felt Sir Charles G.D. Roberts' influence. On reading Orion and Other Poems, at Trinity College, Toronto, Lampman was deeply affected. He said, "like most of the young fellows about me, I had been under the depressing conviction that we were hopelessly situated on the outskirts of civilization, where no art or literature could be". Reading Orion "in a state of widest excitement" he was amazed what could be accomplished by a young Canadian, "one of ourselves." It was like a voice from some new paradise of art, calling us to be up and doing".
Lampman was our Keats, at least in this respect: he was a romantic, melancholy, passionate poet who died young, in the prime of his life. Throughout this poetic life, Duncan Campbell Scott was his admirer, friend, fellow poet, and, in the end, his editor.
Archibald Lampman (1861-1899) was the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was born in Morpeth, Canada West, and grew up in several small towns in Ontario. But it was the move to Gore's Landing on Rice Lake that Lampman acquired his intimacy with the woods, lake, and "the comfort of the fields".
Here he found a kindred spirit in the elderly Catherine Parr Trail. It is also where he
contracted the rheumatic fever that eventually led to his premature death. His degree was in classics at Trinity College, Toronto, where Lampman read Sir Charles GD Roberts' book of poems Orion. It is thought by many of his critics that Lampman's second class standing in Classics at Trinity was a result of his fondness for beer, tobacco and carousing with his companions!
Following Trinity, Lampman tried teaching, but it did not, it seems, suit his disposition. He landed a job as a clerk in the Post office in Ottawa where he stayed until his death.
Lampman's life in Ottawa was a profound disappointment to him. His marriage to Maud
Playter failed, although they remained married until his death, his job at the post office
provided only a meager income, the deaths of his father and infant son caused deep
sorrow, and his poetry did not find much recognition while he was alive. Only two volumes appeared in his lifetime: Among the Millet which he published at his own expense in 1888, and Lyrics of Earth which was published by a small press--Copeland and Day of Boston-- in 1895.
Lampman died at 37 when severe pneumonia aggravated his heart condition produced by either the early bout of rheumatic fever, or, as Bliss Carmen contends, when he strained his heart on one of their canoe trips in the lake region around Ottawa.
Lampman began his poetic life as a typical romantic--indebted to Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold and Wordsworth--with visions of ideal beauty, the restorative power of nature, dejection and imaginative renewals. Many critics argue that Lampman's lasting contribution to Canadian literature is found in his nature poems--and the Canadian experience he evokes in images taken directly from the Canadian landscape. David Stouck (MCA) argues that Lampman's nature sonnets are the quintessential Lampman: intricate, visual with images exquisitely rendered, faithful to the scene around him rather than the conventions of the English landscape poets. Reading "Winter Uplands" his last poem written only eleven days before his death, it is difficult to argue with Stouck:
The frost that stings like fire upon my cheek,
The loneliness of this forsaken ground,
The long white drift upon whose powdered peak
I sit in the great silence as one bound;
The rippled sheet of snow where the wind blew
Across the open fields for miles ahead;
The far-off city towered and roofed in blue
A tender line upon the western red;
The stars that singly then in flocks appear,
Like jets of silver from the violet dome,
So wonderful, so many and so near,
And then the golden moon to light me home--
The crunching snowshoes and the stinging air,
And silence, frost and beauty everywhere. But Lampman, after 1890, had other poetic concerns: an evolutionary idealism, socialist concerns and issues such as equality for women. As Stouck points out, Lampman wrote in an article for The Globe that women must be given equalresponsibility with men in human affairs "if the race is to reach its noblest and fullest development". As he moved away from the physical landscape, he explored other forms: psychological and symbolic allegories, moral sonnets, narrative and dramatic verse to express urban and social concerns.
His most famous, most apocalyptic poem is "The City at the End of Things". The city represents the final stage of civilization's self-destruction. Some of his best poetry relies on the tension of opposites. Daniels (LH) contends that " 'Heat' provides oppositions between movement and stillness, coolness and warmth, sound and silence, darkness and light" and that "without this tension of opposites, it is questionable whether Lampman's work would have had any meaning" (413). The tension between the 'comfort of the fields' and the hell that the capitalists were making in the cities is one of Lampman's essential themes. He spent his short life fleeing the horrors of the industrial city for the serenity of nature. By the end of the poem, he describes a bleak future for the city where
All its grandeur, tower and hall,
Shall be abandoned utterly,
And into rust and dust shall fall
From century to century;
Nor ever living thing shall grow
Or trunk of tree, or blade of grass;
No drop shall fall, no wind shall blow,
Nor sound of any foot shall pass:
Alone of its accurs²d state,
One thing the hand of Time shall spare
For the grim Idiot at the gate
Is timeless and eternal there. Lampman is considered by his critics to be "the best" of the Dominion/Maple Leaf/ Confederation Poets. I'm not sure I would support such an assessment today. Crawford,
Roberts, Carmen are all good contenders for that honour. Perhaps one day soon we will discover that "the best" is not a particularly useful category, that it throws a long shadow, dulling the significant contributions of other, equally talented poets. But that is not to say that we owe a great deal to the vision, the compassion, and the delicate craftsmanship of Archibald Lampman.
Selected Titles: The Poems of Archibald Lampman edited and with an introduction by Duncan Campbell Scott (1900)
Duncan Campbell Scott: (1862-1947)
Duncan Campbell Scott was born in Ottawa, the son of a Methodist minister. He was educated at various schools in Ontario and Quebec where his father was posted. D.C. Scott wanted to go to university and become a doctor, but neither he nor his family could afford it. So, at 17, Scott joined the Department of Indian Affairs where he eventually rose to become the Deputy Superintendent.
In 1883, at the age of 21, D.C. Scott met Archibald Lampman who inspired him to begin writing poetry. During this period, he collaborated with Lampman and Wilfred Campbell in a column for The Globe, "At the Mermaid Inn". Ten years later, Scott's first book of poems was published, The Magic House and Other Poems. Unlike Lampman, D.C. Scott was honoured in his lifetime. He received honourary degrees from Queens University and the University of Toronto. In 1927, he was awarded the Lorne Pierce Metal.
D.C. Scott's private life was filled with tragedy. In 1894 he married the concert violinist Belle Warner Botsford. A year later, they had a daughter whom Scott was devoted to. The child died suddenly when she was 12 years old. Belle fell ill for long periods and died in 1929. "The Closed Door" is an elegy to his daughter:
The dew falls and the stars fall The sun falls in the west, But never more Through the closed door, Shall the one that I loved best Return to me
Like the other Confederate poets, Scott was a romantic who worked towards a distinctly Canadian poetry. However, Scott sometimes substituted portraits of native peoples for the usual pastoral subjects, and he had an opportunity to come to know the wilderness, which he said he substituted "for the church of my youth".
Here in the midnight, where the dark mainland and island Shadows mingle in shadow deeper, profounder, Sing we the hymns of the churches, while the dead water Whispers before us.
Out of this deep commitment to the Canadian wilderness came many of Scott's best poems. Roy Daniels argues that "Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon" is a small group of poems on which Scott's reputation ultimately rests.
Labour and the Angel, published in 1898, contained two sonnets about Indian women and began the association we have of Scott and the First Nations. As a member of the Department of Indian Affairs, Scott held the official position of the inevitable assimilation of the native cultures and understood his role as easing the transition. His poems, however, lament the loss of these vital cultures.
In New World Lyrics and Ballads, published in 1905, Scott hoped to adapt European form and discourse to Canadian content and experience. Here in his longer poems such as "On the Way to the Mission" and "At Gull Lake" Scott tells powerful but tragic stories of the destructive force of European domination of native life. In "On the Way to the Mission" two white men stalk an Indian trapper whose sled is heavy with what they think is valuable fur. These "servants of greed" kill the trapper for his furs only to make a ghastly discovery when they throw back the tarp:
There in the tender moonlight As sweet as they were in life Glimmered the ivory features Of the Indian's wife... He was drawing her down to the mission To bury her there in the spring.
Scott's condemnation of the white men's greed and their lack of knowledge of the Indian culture is forceful.
His poem, "At Gull Lake," describes a more complex situation. Keejgo is the daughter of a Normandy hunter and Oshawan of the Saulteaux. She is the third wife of Tabashaw, Chief of the Saulteaux. Keejgo falls in love with a white trader who refuses her advances, being too afraid of the chief's wrath. Not without cause. When Tabashaw discovers Keejgo's betrayal, he punishes her by branding her cheeks, blinding her with fire, and casting her out.
At the top of the bank The old wives caught her and cast her down Where Tabashaw crouched by his camp-fire. He snatched a live branch from the embers, Scarred her cheeks, Blinded her eyes, Destroyed her beauty with fire, Screaming, "Take that face to your lover." Keejgo held her face to the fury And made no sound. The old wives dragged her away And threw her over the bank Like a dead dog.
The poem suggests that there is no marriage, no compromise between the white and Indian nations except those that end in tragedy, and supports Scott's belief that the First Nations were doomed to extinction. I have difficulty with this position. Roy Daniels (LH) argues that Scott's imprecision of views is "in part the result of having nothing specific to oppose. Emerson, Thoreau, Byron, Shelley, and Arnold were all able in their different ways to identify the enemy, but Scott could feel only the irremediable hardship of the northern wilderness, the unavoidable increase of urban industrialism, and the mysterious sorrow of individual lives" (431). Given his inside knowledge, his compassion, why didn't Scott see the enemy? Why was Scott writing laments for a nation - why wasn't he writing protest poems? Scott's position is something the dominant white culture in Canada struggles with still. Carl Jung would argue that we have pushed our lamentable crime deep into our collective unconscious, but it will surge back.
After Belle's death, Scott retired from the Civil Service and married Elise Aylen, also a poet. He continued to write, and to travel extensively. He published nine volumes of poetry in his lifetime, his last book, The Circle of Affection was published just months before his death at the age of 85.
Selected Titles: New World Lyrics and Ballads (1905)
Selected Poems (1951)
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz, 2001. All rights reserved.