Most of our early Canadian writers were either British immigrants or second-generation British immigrants and they wrote primarily for a British audience. But the British it appears, were not especially interested in colonial literature. What they sought instead were the details of colonial life. As Klinck points out (L.H. 155), realism was preferred to romanticism. This was a tough audience for anyone with literary aspirations. When Oliver Goldsmith published his greatest poem, "The Rising Village", in England, he suffered such negative criticism that he almost gave up writing poetry. Alec Lucas argues (L.H. 381) that our early writers tended to see nature, particularly the Canadian wilderness (a most unWordsworthian nature), as an obstacle on the road to civilization. Both Goldsmith and Susanna Moodie are interesting in this light as they imposed 19th century British form and myth on a Canadian wilderness that would not conform to the paradigm.
Oliver Goldsmith, born in St. Andrews, N.B., was the son of a Loyalist and grand nephew of the Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and novelist, Oliver Goldsmith. "The Rising Village" was modeled on his great uncle's famous poem "The Deserted Village". In Oliver Goldsmith, the senior's poem, the poet elegizes rural depopulation and the irrecoverable loss of the modest life to the crass desires and exploitation of commerce. He idealizes village life, and when he realizes that it is gone beyond recall, compels common men to emigrate to unknown lands.
It is here that Oliver Goldsmith junior takes up the torch. "The Rising Village" of the new
world is also presented as vulnerable to change, exploitation and destruction. This poem too captures the decay latent in the established order of the village's growth. This
pre-confederation narrative poem in three sections tells of the hardships of the pioneers and how, out of the ruggedness of the bush, a village rises and prospers. It produces a beautiful youth, Albert, who falls in love with Flora. The couple fixes a wedding day, but on the wedding morn, Albert fails to appear. Instead, just the note: Albert has fled. Flora, like Ophelia, is devastated, ruined.
Here the lovers and the village are analogous. The day breaks, "the village rises gently
into day/ How sweet it is, at first approach to morn, before the silvery dew has left the
lawn" but by nightfall all that is left is "the hopeless sorrows of its mournful tales". This
passage also stands as a reference to time. The poem celebrates the coming of civilization and Acadia's maturing, but warns of the historical danger of the loss of virtue. The Achilles' heel of the village youths is their vain glory:
The rugged urchins spurn at all control
Which cramps the movements of the free-born soul,
Till, in their own conceit so wise they've grown,
They think their knowledge far exceeds his own. This false pride, the belief that their knowledge far exceeds others, was also the Achilles' heel of British imperialism.
Selected Titles: The Rising Village and Other Poems (1834)
William Wilson was a young, talented Ojibway youth sent to study at the Upper Canada Academy at Cobourg who excelled in classics and as a poet. Educated in the British narrative tradition, Wilson wrote, like Goldsmith, long, narrative tributes, in heroic couplets, to Canada and the British connection. However, unlike Goldsmith, Wilson's most famous narrative poem "England and British America" is also a powerful protest, a lament for the vanishing Indian:
Though nature here has wrought her grandest plan,
Yet does the mind deplore the fate of man.
Those lordly tribes that lin'd these mighty lakes
Have fled, and disappear'd like wintry flakes.
Lo! On the mountain-tops their fires are out,
In blithesome vales, all silent is their shout;
A solemn voice is heard from every shore,
That now the Indian nations are no more, --
A remnant scare remains to tell their wrongs,
But soon will fade to live in poets' songs. Wilson recited this poem at a public examination; it was published in The Christian
Guardian and in Peter Jones History Of the Ojebway Indians (1961). Wilson died in New
York from smallpox, shortly after leaving the College.
Selected Titles: Penny Petrone Native Literature in Canada (1990) Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Nations of Canada (Coles Canadiana collection 1972)
Susanna Moodie is best known for her prose, including Roughing it in the Bush. But scattered among the prose is poetry that also describes a pioneer life in Canada. Moodie immigrated to Canada with her British officer husband in 1832; first to a farm in Cobourg, then the backwoods near Petersborough where they struggled to establish a farm until 1839, then to Belleville.
Unlike her sister, Catherine Parr Trail, Moodie was not a happy camper. She documents
the hardships, struggles, and the terrible losses of her life in the bush. To Moodie, the land which "never yet...received the impress of civilizationƒinspires a melancholy awe, which becomes painful in its intensity". In her perception, "the land of vast hills and mighty streams" is overshadowed by "shadowy forests dark as night," and further that
"silence--awful silence broods/profoundly o'er these solitudes".
It is hard to think of Moodie's poetry without thinking of Margaret Atwood's interpretation of her life and sensibility, captured in "The Journals of Susanna Moodie". In this brilliant poetry collection, Atwood imagines Moodie's inner life, her thoughts on the events she describes in her journals: her feelings of alienation in a foreign country devoid of all the civilizing comforts of home, the contempt of her neighbours for her lack of basic skills, the devastation of fire ("their scorched dreams"), the death of a son by drowning. Atwood, however, takes Moodie one step further and places her in the present, where she can witness the destruction of her past and meaning:
I am the old woman
Sitting across from you on the bus
Turn, look down:
There is no city;
This is the centre of a forest
Your place is empty Selected Titles: Roughing it in the Bush
Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825-1868) is a transitional figure between early Canadian writers and the Dominion poets. McGee was a poet, journalist, editor, and one of the leading orators favouring Confederation. He was an Irishman who adopted Canada to become not only a member of the Legislature, but one of the Fathers of Confederation. When his dream of a new nation for Ireland failed, and he was driven into exile, he moved his dream to the new world.
His eloquence before the legislature in May 2, 1860 celebrating the Northern Nation, is
noteworthy:
I look to the future of my adopted country with hope, though not without
anxiety; I see in the not remote distance one great nationality bound, like the
shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of OceanƒI see a generation of
industrious contented, moral men, free in name and in fact, -men capable of
maintaining, in peace and in war, a Constitution worthy of such a country.McGee wrote ballads celebrating Canadian landscape and history. In "Jacques Cartier" he
describes Cartier's journey in glowing terms, much like "The Ballad of Nova Scotia"--of a land where:
the magic wand of summer clad the landscape to his eyes
like the dry bones of the just when they awoke in Paradise However, his own troubled Irish history trailed him; a Fenian assassin killed him in Ottawa in April 1868, because he had denounced the Fenians for bringing the quarrels of the old country to the new, and threatening the Canadian peace.
Selected Titles: Canadian Ballads (1858)
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.