By the 1840's, Montreal was the center for literary activity in Canada. Montreal's Literary Garland set the standard, answering a call from genteel women for a more Victorian sensibility to moderate the cruder aspects of their colonial lives. The Garland, like its British cousins, played to a sentimental taste for romance and thinly disguised tales of religious and social propriety. Although most of the writers were Canadian, their subjects were not--except, that is, in the work of poets such as Susanna Moodie.
One of the Garland's staunch supporters, the Reverend E.H. Dewart searched out original Canadian voices, and found writers whose poetics identified the country ideally, rather than realistically. Two such poets stood out among the rest: Charles Sangster and Charles Heavysege. Both worked hard, in what one is tempted to say is a Canadian fashion, to master a form and style worthy of their English influences: Byron, Scott, Milton, Tennyson, Shakespeare and the Bible.
As students of Canadian poetry, we think of Sangster and Heavysege as proponents of the long poem or verse drama. However, critics such as Carl Klinck argue persuasively that some of their best poems were their sonnets. Here the trappings of stock diction--the insistence on idealizing and ornamenting language--fall away, allowing these poets to speak more directly.
Charles Heavysege (1816-1876), poet, journalist, and novelist, was born in Yorkshire, England in 1816. Largely self-taught in England, he was an accomplished wood carver and cabinetmaker.
After immigrating to Canada, Heavysege continued carpentry. But he also worked as a reporter for the Montreal Daily Witness, until his retirement in 1874.
Heavysege's most famous poem is "Jephthah's Daughter," both a verse drama and collection of sonnets. It relates an ancient tragedy. The Book of Judges teaches that
Jephthah, like the tragic Greek Agamemnon, unwittingly offered his daughter as sacrifice to the gods. In order to secure victory, Jephthah offers "whatsoever cometh
forth of the doors of my house to meet me when I returnƒand behold his daughter came out to meet him--his only child."
Heavysege's Biblical drama is ornate:
Oh rashly, rashly, for my peace, I vowed!
Oh dearly, dearly was the victory bought!
Its price, your ransom, my dear daughter, -she
Compared (oh foolish, vain comparison!)
With whom the glory of this victory
Seems utter darkness, misery, and shame In the sonnets of "Jephthah's Daughter" the poet's language is simpler, more direct. Childhood innocence is invoked, as are life's monotony and inevitable cruelty, the
power and allure of the "bespangled spaces" between the stars, and the hope and promised ecstasy of the unknown, beyond death. Northrop Frye contends that
"Jephthah's Daughter" signals the emergence of the central Canadian theme: the tragic indifference of nature to human values and purposes.
Charles Sangster (1822-1893) was born in Upper Canada, in Kingston. After suffering the death of his father when he was two years old, he left school at fifteen to help support his mother. Like Heavysege Sangster became a journalist as well as self taught poet. Sangster also worked clerk in the Ottawa Post Office.
In contrasting two of Sangster's poems, "The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay" poems with "Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods," one can also find reason for Klinck's critical preference for the sonnets, and a certain naivet³ in these early works. In both poems the poet is haunted by the loss of the authentic native culture. But in the first lines are encumbered by ornate language:
That diminished race
Whose birchen fleets these inky waters glassed
As they swept o'er them with the wind's swift pace.
Of the wild legends scare remains a trace. We can hear here both the Rousseauvian lament for "the noble savage" and perhaps echoes of William Wilson's "a remnant scarce remains to tell the wrongs". But in the
sonnets, Sangster addresses the tragic loss in language less ornate:
We cannot lift the mantle of the past:
We seem to wander over hallowed ground:
We scan the trail of thought, but all is overcast. It remains ironic that Sangster could feel the sense of tragedy, but express no understanding its cause, that his shedding of the ornate still did not achieve a clear
nor complete insight. Notwithstanding, Dewart and other critics of the time considered Sangster Canada's brightest literary star.
Selected Titles: Selections from Canadian Poets (Montreal 1864)
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.