INTRODUCTION
I: Erie and Erieus In Canada. A Descriptive Poem, Written at Quebec, 1805, Cornwall Bayley refers only in passing to the region that little more than a decade later became the setting for the first surviving poem of length by a writer born in Canada: Adam Hood Burwell's Talbot Road: A Poem (1818). To Bayley, the very subject that Burwell takes as his theme--the advance of European settlement on the shores of Lake Erie--is a source of delighted surprise: Now on wild Erie . . . the scatter'd cot, But proves the former deserts of the spot; . . . [and] the frequent fires that blaze, declare How cultivation even travels there!1 Behind these lines lie two passages that may also have been in Burwell's mind when he "Aw[o]ke [his] muse" (1) to celebrate Colonel Thomas Talbot's contribution to the "cultivation" of part of Lake Erie's north shore. The first of these is Isaac Weld's lengthy description in his Travels of the violent storms that he encountered while travelling along the lake towards the "[s]ettlements . . . now [in 1796] scattered" to its southeast.2 The second is Thomas Campbell's imaginative account in The Pleasures of Hope of the salutary effects of "Improvement" on what he, too, regarded as an extraordinarily "wild" part of the world:
When
Burwell wrote and published Talbot
Road in 1818, the day when
"[t]he Town, the Village shall be seen to rise" (574)
on the north shore of Lake Erie still lay some distance in the future;
however, the "glittering haunts of men" were by then abundantly
evident in the "chain of . . . farms" (607) that stretched along the Talbot Road--along, that is, the
system of roads, surveyed mainly by the poet's brother, Mahlon, in
1809-1811,
which connected Port Talbot (the site of the Colonel's residence and
centre of his settlement) with Niagara to the east, Amherstburg to the
west, and Westminster Township (near present-day London, Ontario) to the
north.4 Like the later and betterknown settlement poems with which it
invites comparison, Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village and Alexander McLachlan's The Emigrant, Talbot Road chronicles and celebrates the past
achievements, present state, and future prospects of a pioneer community,
in this case one that had taken root in a part of Canada that only a few
years earlier had been regarded as particularly remote and inhospitable. The
fact that Talbot Road is
carefully sited and dated "Talbot
Road, Southwold, /
28th May, 1818" points to the presence in
Burwell's poem of a commemorative dimension that is absent from the works
of Goldsmith and McLachlan. It was fifteen years earlier, in May, 1803, that Colonel Talbot took possession of his original land grant
of five thousand acres in Middlesex County,5 and, as Michael Williams has
revealed, the Anniversary of this event was celebrated annually on May 21
in Port Talbot, and, later, in London, from 1817
onwards.6 For a time in the early 'twenties Burwell was the Secretary
of the Committee responsible for organizing the Talbot Anniversary
celebration, a jamboree held, at least on the occasion described by the
poet in a letter of 1822, at a
tavern on the Talbot Road.7 Did Burwell compose Talbot
Road for the Talbot Anniversary in 1818?
Was the poem read aloud as part of the festivities, perhaps during or
after a formal dinner, in Port Talbot? There is no evidence to support
these speculations, but some notable parallels between Talbot
Road and the Talbot Anniversary celebration described by Burwell in
1822
(see Appendix I) suggest the suitability of the poem for the occasion.
Among the toasts drunk at the anniversary dinner in 1822
were several that have clear echoes in the themes of Talbot Road--a toast to Talbot, a toast to the Talbot Anniversary (with the hope
that it "may . . . be celebrated every year with increasing
festivity"), a toast to "Agriculture and Commerce," and a
toast to the "Memory of General Brock."8 Between praising Talbot and looking
optimistically towards the future of his settlement, Talbot Road
similarly celebrates agriculture, "Commerce" (563), and the
"patriot brave" (401) of the war of 1812. To see Burwell's poem
in the context of the Talbot Anniversary celebration in a local tavern is
to be reminded of the primacy given to memories of "past events"--to
reminiscences of "danger, trouble, hardship, toil, and strife"
successfully overcome--in Goldsmith's account of the "social
pleasures" of the "tavern" in the The
Rising Village,9 and, moreover, to recognize the kinship between the
poet of settlement and the `old man with his pint' as custodians and
raconteurs of local history. By
Burwell's own account in a letter of August 23, 1831, he received notice
of his poetic gifts in a dream sometime before he had even "begun to
learn the rudiments of language."
While this extraordinary event left Burwell with the
"strong impression" that he had a "duty to serve [his]
native country in some singular degree,"11 it did not,
unfortunately, specify the precise direction that his "duty"
should take. Indeed, a few moments with the curriculum vita of the "poeta
homo magnus" reveals three distinct phases to Burwell's life, each
with its own duties and greater or lesser relevance to Talbot Road. In
1831 when he recounted his oracular dream to his friend John Macauley, the editor of The Kingston Chronicle, Burwell had been for four years a priest in
the Church of England. At that time, his literary duties were taking two
principal forms: (1) a series of essays, broadly Anglican and largely
conservative in emphasis, in Macauley's newspaper over the pseudonym
"One of the People"; and (2) the editorship of The
Christian Sentinel and Anglo-Canadian
Churchman's Magazine, a short-lived "diocesan chronicle under the
patronage of the Bishop of Quebec [Jacob Mountain]" to which Burwell
himself, according to John Strachan, contributed "far too much . . .
and often upon difficult [theological] subjects."12 By the
mid-thirties, Burwell had abandoned the Church of England and entered a
new phase of his life in the Catholic Apostolic Church, the evangelical
organization to which he would devote the remainder of his spiritual and
literary energies. Such essays as "On the Doctrine of Social
Unity" and "On the Philosophy of Human Perfection and
Happiness," which expresses his "commitment to achieving a
fundamentalist Christian society," were published in The
Literary Garland only months before Burwell's death in November, 1849
in Kingston, where he had "helped to found the first Catholic
Apostolic Church in North America."13 None of this is entirely
irrelevant to Talbot Road, for
in the aggregate Burwell's activities in the later phases of his life
arose from the same intense concern with religio-political matters that is
evident in the poem, not least in its praise of Talbot's
"Philanthropy" (557) and its emphasis on "meek
Religion" (641). But
obviously the phase of Burwell's life that is most relevant to Talbot
Road is the phase surrounding the execution of the poem in c. 1818.
Thanks to the researches of Carl F. Klinck, Mary Lu MacDonald, and Michael
Williams, Burwell is known to have published over forty poems in various
newspapers and periodicals in Upper and Lower Canada between his oracular
dream and his ordination as a deacon in the Church of England (March,
1827).14 Most of these are signed "Erieus," a pseudonym that
Burwell abandoned at the end of 1826 when he left the Talbot Settlement to
study for holy orders in Quebec, a departure rendered eloquently and
appropriately enough in terms of the natale
solum motif ("Land of my birth! one lingering, last adieu, / One
fond expression of unfeigned regard . . ." and so on) in
"Farewell to the Shores of Erie," dated "December 26,
1826."15 On August 5, 1819, the Niagara Gleaner
contained a proposal for "publishing by subscription"
"The Original Poems of Erieus" by "Adam Hood Burwell,
of Talbot-Road, Upper Canada," a "Volume of
about 250 Pages, octavo" that was to have included "The
Gourlayad, a Poem in doggerel verse, with notes" (presumably on the
controversial reformer Robert Gourlay) and would have cost its subscribers
7s. 6d.16 Apart from its proposal, no trace of "[t]his . . .
first attempt" to publish a volume of verse in Upper Canada has
survived.17 Talbot Road, originally
published in two instalments in the Niagara
Spectator on July [31 ] and August 6,18 1818 and subsequently
reprinted in Klinck's Adam Hood
Burwell: Pioneer Poet of Upper Canada, thus remains Burwell's longest,
extant poem--the most considerable product of the phase of his life in
which he styled himself "Erieus," a name embodying his
conviction that he had been "[n]ursed by . . . [Erie's] wilds and
solitudes [and] / Grew like the plants that flourish on . . . [Erie's]
soil . . . ."19 Almost
needless to say, the difference between cataloguing Canada's plants and
counting oneself among them is the difference between an emigrant and a
native sensibility. With Burwell and Talbot
Road, then, comes a parting of the ways for poetry in Canada. Poems by
British emigrants (later, immigrants)--Standish O'Grady, Alexander
McLachlan, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and others--will and do continue to
appear. But slightly to one side of them--the side, it is tempting to say,
nearer the country--runs a poetic continuity consisting of the work of
such native-born writers as Burwell, Goldsmith, Charles Sangster, and
Archibald Lampman. Yet, despite differences in attitude certainly and
sensibility also perhaps, the poets ranged along these parallel
continuities have much in common; throughout the nineteenth century (and
well into the twentieth) a similar cultural climate regulated intellectual
developments both in Britain and Canada; writers born in both places
shared the same epistemological assumptions, sought publication in very
similar niches, and, unless they were at the innovative edge of their
craft, selected models from the same array of choices. Much may separate
Burwell and Goldsmith, for example, from Thomas Cary and Cornwall Bayley,
but Talbot Road, The Rising Village, Abram's Plains, and Canada
have much in common, from their use of the decasyllabic couplet to
their deployment of the picturesque aesthetic, and the question of how,
where, and with what success these and other conventions are brought to
bear on the landscape of Canada remains as pertinent to a poem published
in 1818 as it is to other works written in Georgian Canada, whether by
emigrants or natives. II: Talbot Road and Talbot Road: A Poem The generic tag in the title of Talbot Road may well have been intended by Burwell to emphasize the
literary and elevated quality of his most extended work. Here, says Talbot
Road: A Poem, resides a formal treatment of an important subject, a
`capital P' Poem in which the manner--heroic couplets--both suits the
matter--Canada's most impressive road--and aggrandizes it, raises it to a
hitherto unattempted level of dignity and significance. Nor is such an
initial impression contradicted either by the appearance of an
"Argument" between the title and the poem proper or by the
presence in Burwell's opening verse paragraphs of an "Invocation"
and of such expressions as "Direct my hand . . .," "A
nobler theme . . . / Is now the arduous task to me assign'd . . .,"
and "For Talbot Road, say first, what master hand / This work
protected, and its order plann'd?" (3, 5-6, 11-12). That the
Argument, the Invocation, and even the locution "say first"
bring to mind the opening pages of both Paradise
Lost and An Essay on Man20 is, of course, very much to the point, for
the purpose of the title and preliminaries of Talbot Road is surely to signal the presence in Burwell's work of
the highest literary art: a divinely inspired and rationally ordered poem
which, if the "muse" but "grant . . . [the poet's] humble
prayer" (9) will both reflect and enhance the "dignity" (7)
of Talbot Road and its "philanthropic" (16) creator by
describing them in the language and form of England's great
Christian-humanist poets. Yet
already evident in the title Talbot
Road: A Poem, and increasingly so in such lines as "For Talbot
Road, say first, what master hand . . .?" and "There Otter Creek
unfolds a beauteous scene . . ." (39), there is evident a curious
jostling between Burwell's matter and manner. Very likely, the major
source of this problem is the great gap between the elevated diction of
the poet's chosen medium ("master hand," "beauteous
scene") and the very mundane reality ("Talbot Road,"
"Otter Creek") that he imbeds in it. Burwell was not, of course,
the first or the last poet writing in Canada to encounter the difficulty
of finding, a decorous fit between his North American subject-matter and
the language of English poetry, but his difficulties may well have been
compounded by a further problem: the disjunction between the rhetoric of
magnification associated with traditional heroism (such as that of Wolfe,
as celebrated by Cary in Abram's
Plains, for example) and the traditionally rather unheroic
nature of the activities celebrated in Talbot
Road--pioneering, farming, and road-building. The only road-building
in Paradise Lost, it may be
observed, takes place in Book II under the ægis of Satan ("Sin and
Death amain .... Pav'd after him a broad and beat'n way . . ." [ 1025-1026]),
a fact that either reinforces the unintended
irony of the link between Talbot and the "infernal Serpent"
which comes by way of "say first" and other phrases in Talbot Road or raises the unlikely possibility that Burwell saw
Satan with Romantic eyes as the hero of Milton's poem and thus as an
appropriately energetic analogue for Talbot. (This would, of course, make
"Lake Erie's shore" [31] the equivalent of Hell and render
completely anomalous the "little Eden" [618] created by each
farmer in the Talbot Settlement.) To the extent that he was the first poet
in Canada to grapple with the difficulty of presenting the activities of
the pioneer, the farmer, and the road-builder in heroic terms--a
difficulty shortly to be encountered again by Goldsmith and again much
later by the Crawford of Malcolm's
Katie and the Pratt of Towards
the Last Spike--Burwell must be admired for his own pioneering
efforts. It must also be said that the points in Talbot Road where incongruities of manner and matter (or levels of diction) court a tone-shattering pathos are also the points at which Burwell most succeeds in conveying something of the reality of his place and time. "Thro' a broad valley rapid Catfish [Creek] glides,-- / O'er pebbly beds. . ." (55-56) and "Talbot Street / And Otter Creek, at proper angles meet" (199-200) are brief instances of this phenomenon. But more remarkable and memorable is Burwell's later and longer description of a log cabin:
In these lines Burwell abandons for a moment his
attempt to aggrandize his subject and, instead, allows the realities of
the Talbot Settlement to enter the poem and dictate the movement of its
couplets. The cxsuras that occur near the centre of each line but one
mimic the additive process ("Logs pil'd on logs . . . A paper window,
and a blanket door") involved in building a cabin, and some well-placed
extra stresses ("Lógs píl'd on logs . . . And rough-héwn planks .
. .") give certain phrases an appropriate weight and unevenness. By
contrast, the ensuing lines put driving alliteration, repeated anaphora
(here emphasized), and the rhythmic bounce of some lilting trochees
("faírer próspects waíted," for example) at the service of a
soaring vision of the Settlement's future:
If in the previous passage one "rude" and
"humble"--not to say wooden-- "form" found its fitting
reflection in another, here the "fairer prospects" of the future
find their formal equivalent in lines that smoothly and with apparent
effortlessness pile blessings and clauses one upon the other. Burwell may
not always have successfully managed the decorum of his poem, but he had
sufficient skill and sensitivity to give memorable and stirring expression
to the achievements and aspirations of the Talbot Settlement. The centre around which that Settlement pivoted
was, of course, Talbot himself, its aristocratic "father" and
autocratic "supervisor"21 for some thirty-five years after its
inception in 1803. While most long poems written and published in Canada
during the Georgian period contain flattering, and, no doubt,
self-interested, comments on one or more of the country's powerful men,
Talbot Road is unique in the extent and extravagance of its encomium to
Talbot. To the leading questions of "what master hand / . . .
projected, and . . . plann'd" the Settlement and who "[b]ade the
wild woods their rudest forms resign, / And springing beauty o'er the
desert shine?" (11-14),22
Burwell's muse replies emphatically and without hesitation:
One possible referent for the last line is the War of
1812, which, as chronicled later in the poem, dealt some severe blows to
the Talbot Settlement, including the destruction of property owned by
Talbot himself and by various members of the Burwell family, not least the
poet's brother Mahlon.23 But the line also intimates a knowledge on
Burwell's part of the resistance to Talbot's "noble plan" and
high-handed practices that had taken him between November, 1817 and June,
1818 to England to gain support from Lord Bathurst, the Colonial
Secretary, for his system of "personally selecting settlers and
withholding their fees" until they had "completed their
settlement duties."24 The fact that Burwell's poem was dedicated to
Talbot "[i]n [his] absence to England" raises the possibility
that it was also written during that period and with the aim, at least in
part, of justifying Talbot's ways and schemes to his detractors both on
the Settlement and in the Province at large. This would certainly help to
account for the encomiastic and propagandistic features of Talbot Road,
as well as its insistence on Talbot's "philanthrop[y]" and
on the "freedom" (16, 239) and "Liberty" (141) enjoyed
by the inhabitants of his Settlement. By Burwell's account, it was in about 1801, when "Talbot began farming at `Skitteewaabaa,' believed to be near the mouth of Kettle Creek on the North Shore of Lake Erie,"25 that he conceived his "noble plan" for a Settlement in the area:
As the expression "from his mind spontaneous
flow'd" already suggests, Burwell's Talbot is the seemingly God-like
and potent progenitor of a Settlement that came into being as a result of
his imaginative and physical penetration of a "fertile" (38),
"productive" (77), and, inevitably, female nature whose woods he
"pierc'd" (92) in 1803. At that time--and with a clear echo of
Genesis 1. 3-5--he "brought to light" from "geographic
night" "Bayham and Mallahide," "two fair towns"
(93-94) which, though previously surveyed, had thereto lain in chaotic and
unproductive darkness. As he interrogates himself about the "future
state" of his property, Talbot articulates his
"philanthropic" motives and clarifies his relation to divine
creativity. Nature, given to man for his use and benefit by God in Genesis
1. 28, works "`in vain"' when it remains
"`untenanted"' and "'unappropriated,"' particularly
when there are "`thousands [who] want its 'vantages the while"'
(97-100). Appropriating for himself the "task" and
"pleasure" of bringing "`human beings"' to the north
shore of Lake Erie, Talbot figures forth his "work" as an act of
transforming or reclothing an external world which both he and the
narrator continue to view as female and, moreover, less attractive when
naked and wild than when fully and elaborately dressed. "`Earth shall
resign the burden of her breast, / And wear a richer, variegated
vest'," asserts a prescient Talbot in a passage later echoed by the
narrator: "Thro' nature's wilds the muse our steps hath led, / Where
we've beheld her pristine form display'd, / And seen the changeful hand of
time prepare, / A robe, more pleasing, for herself to wear . . ."
(471-474). Carole
Fabricant could be commenting on these and other passages in Talbot
Road when she connects the eighteenth-century habit of viewing nature
as "a maiden in need of sartorial assistance, as a goddess
alternately being stripped bare and clothed in finery," with a desire
to "redress" or
"cancel out the ill effects of the Fall" by recreating a "Paradisical
existence" in a corner of the post-lapsarian world.26 Not only was
the ability to do this a sign of male power, observes Fabricant, but it
also frequently involved a masculine fantasy of regaining an Eden as yet
uncomplicated by women--"a yearning to recapture that brief moment in
human time when man had Paradise all to himself so that his mastery over the
created world was absolute . . . ."27 If there was an element of
"masculine fantasy" in Bur well's depiction of Talbot, it is
certainly continued and elaborated in the ensuing account of Talbot Road's
first settler and second father, a "solitary man" who again
deprives nature of her virginity ("pierc[es] the woods") and
demonstrates his "mastery" over her ("Then bow'd the forest
to his frequent stroke . . ."[119]). "[U]naided and alone,"
like Adam before the creation of Eve, this "solitary man"
receives encouragement in his "arduous task" from some very
Miltonic "Angels" who, after "breath[ing] celestial
love" over his "labours," speak lines reminiscent of God's
commands in Genesis 1. 28 ("Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish
the earth, and subdue it . . ."):
That the Angels' concluding words echo Gabriel's
salutation of the Virgin Mary in Luke 1. 28 ("Hail! thou that art
highly favoured . . .") is consistent with Burwell's view of nature
as both sacred and submissive, virginal and fertile. When
Burwell envisages the north shore of Lake Erie before the commencement of
the Talbot Settlement, he sees a landscape relatively unaffected by the
consequences of the Fall. True, there are "Sylvan recesses, dark
o'erhanging groves,. . . Where lurks the fox in crafty, sly career"
(81-83),28 but, for the most part, "The happiest country in the
happiest clime" (26) remains untainted by the sin, or even the
presence,29 of man; its waters are "Pure," "fair and
clear" (28, 34); its breezes are freighted with "incense"
and "the fragrance of eternal bloom" (46, 50); and, later, each
of its farms is a "little Eden" (618) of independence. Three
times the word "beauteous" (33, 39, 65) is used to describe the
aesthetic attractions of a "land . . . created for delight"
(85), a phrase with numerous echoes in Milton's descriptions of Paradise
(not least the "Plantation for delight" of Paradise
Lost, IX, 419. In contrast to the many writers who took the supposed
songlessness of North American birds as a sign of the advanced degeneracy of post-lapsarian nature in the New World,
Burwell insists on the "mellow song" of "Sweet birds!"
that are also remarkable for their bright--it is tempting to say
paradisical-- "plumage" (52-54). Little wonder that when the
emigrants start arriving in the area in their "eager hundreds"
(180), they come like "expecting pilgrim[s]" to "a smiling
land of promis'd rest" (186,185). A heaven on earth with overtones of
Canaan and the Holy Land, Burwell's terrestrial paradise "[o]n Erie's
bank" also contains for good measure the Roman goddess "Flora
and her flow'ry train" (68), classical representatives of the
fertility and plentitude that promise "Prosperity" (561) and,
eventually, "Wealth" (581) to the arriving emigrants. So
fulsome are many of Burwell's descriptions of the "country" and
"clime" chosen by Talbot for his Settlement that his poem
resembles in places a chamber of commerce brochure or, less
anachronistically, a tract encouraging emigration to the Talbot Road
area. Susanna Moodie writes memorably in the Introduction to Roughing
it in the Bush of the "misrepresentation" of Canada that
helped to create "the great tide of emigration [that] flowed
westward" in the eighteen thirties and later, but her remarks produce
many loud echoes in Talbot Road. "Public newspapers and private letters teemed with
the unheard-of advantage to be derived from a settlement in this highly-favoured
region," she writes of Canada; "Its salubrious climate, its
fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity
to the mother country, and . . . its almost total exemption from taxation
. . . were the theme of every tongue, and lauded beyond all praise. The
general interest, once excited, was industriously kept alive by pamphlets,
published by interested parties [such as `dealers in wild lands'], which
prominently set forth all the good to
be derived from a settlement in the Backwoods of Canada; while they
carefully concealed the toil and hardship to be endured in order to secure
these advantages."30 To his credit, Burwell does not minimize the
work involved in clearing a backwoods farm. Nor does he include low taxes
and closeness to Britain among the advantages of the Talbot Settlement.
But, as already seen, he does depict the north shore of Lake Erie as a
"highly-favoured region" (actually, a "highly favor'd
land") and, moreover, does so as if addressing each of the other four
categories mentioned by Moodie. (1) Salubrious
climate. Since
the mid-to-late eighteenth century at least, theregion that would become southern Ontario had been
notorious for its unhealthy climate. Very likely relying on Peter Kalm's
comment in his Travels that
"INTERMITTING fevers of all kinds . . . are very common . . . between
Lake Erie and Lake Huron . . ,"31
J.. Mackay observes in a footnote to Quebec
Hill "that the fever and ague, as well as other maladies, are . .
. prevalent in Upper Canada, a country, for the most part, covered with
forests and lakes; and intersected with swamps which, in the summer
season, emit vapours highly pernicious to the human constitution."32
With a similar reliance on Kalm and the same ignorance of the true cause
of malaria (which was not known until the final decade of the nineteenth
century), Weld also notes the prevalence of "[i]ntermittent
fevers" in "almost every part of Upper Canada," a province
that he succinctly describes as "unhealthy."33 As well as
countering such perceptions directly, Burwell's assertion that the
"air" of Upper Canada is "[h]ealthful," that "[h]ere
health presides . . . / And breathes the fragrance of eternal bloom"
(29, 49-50), addresses the miasmic theory of the origin of disease upon
which the perceptions were based.34 So, too, does his elision of swamps
from the region of the Talbot Settlement and his emphasis, rather, on the
abundance of moving (and, therefore, pure) water: to the north of Talbot
Road, the Thames "[r]olls round his silver waters fair and
clear" (34); "[t]hro' a broad valley rapid Catfish glides . .
." (55); and in the "unnumbered hills" there are "chrystal
fountains bursting from the ground," blessing the Settlement with
"rippling branches" and "purling" --later "meand'ring"--"rills"
(42-44, 79). (To
the other criticism frequently levelled at the Canadian climate--that the
winters are too long and cold and the summers too short and hot for
agricultural purposes--Talbot Road
makes no explicit response. As if taking to heart Weld's comment that,
though the "summers are intensely hot" in Upper Canada, the
province has a much shorter winter and a correspondingly longer growing
season than Lower Canada, Burwell concedes the heat of the summer and fall
in the Talbot Settlement [45, 259], makes no mention of winter whatsoever,
and refers repeatedly to "orchards" [305,611 ], a near emblem in
Canada of a temperate climate or "friendly clime" [551 ] that is
conducive to a life of relative ease.) (2) Fertile
soil. Of the fertility of the land to the immediate north of Lake Erie
there was rarely any doubt from the late eighteenth century onwards.
Certainly none is expressed in Burwell's poem. The land chosen by Talbot
for his settlement is "by nature's bounty blest, / . . . and its soil
[is] the best . . ." (27-28). Support for this assertion comes through dozens of expressions
that are either variations on the theme of fertility ("fertile
vales," "Productive nature," "fruitful fields," [38,
77, 90] and so on) or references to the lush evidence of it
"flowery banks," "majestic hemlocks," "tow'ring
pines," and, later, "meadows gay," "bleating
flocks," "well-stor'd gardens" (38,
41, 507, 508, 613) and the like. To an extent, every viable farm and
growing town on the Talbot Road is testament to the "friendly clime,
and fruitful soil" (551) of the region. But if a single emblem of the land's
fertility and its agricultural and commercial potential were to be
sought, it could be found in the "waving Cornfields" (507)
that Burwell mentions at various points. In Talbot Road, as in The Rising
Village, a "virgin crop . . . of wheat" (464) in a field "won from the wilds" (463)
constitutes proof of the soil's ability to produce the crop that will
enable a farm or an agricultural settlement first to achieve relative
self-sufficiency and then, through the sale of flour and other products,
to achieve commercial and social maturity. (3) Commercial
advantages. A
decisive factor in the ability of a community in early Canada to parlay
agricultural production into commercial advantage was the presence of a
mill to grind grain into flour. "To stimulate settlement [in the area
of his land grant, Talbot] . . . acquired mill machinery in 1804 and two years later constructed a water-powered grist-mill
which was of great value to the emerging settlement until its destruction
by American troops in 1814."35
Four
years after the War, Burwell calls attention to the "Wellington
mills, late built, on Catfish strand, / To answer agriculture's loud
demand," and remarks--with a pun on "growing" that links
agricultural fertility with social progress--that a
"substantial" mill "should be found / Where a fine growing
country spreads around" (499-502). That a "water-powered grist-mill" requires an
abundant supply of running water is a very obvious point, but one worth
making, not merely because it provides an additional reason for Burwell's
emphasis on rivers and creeks--future mill sites--in Talbot
Road, but also because it points to the inseparability in early Canada
of "commercial advantages" and what Moodie calls "water
privileges"--access to water for sustenance, energy, and, not
least, transportation. In Burwell's day, as in Moodie's, the most
desirable farms were those whose proximity to water, or, failing that,
good roads, gave them easy access to markets and ports. This meant that
the most desirable farms were those along the banks of the St. Lawrence,
an area whose popular designation--the "cash" (in
contradistinction to the "bush")--crisply sums up the economic
reality of water privileges in Upper and Lower Canada. (4) Great water
privileges. In the same way that he had to contend with Upper Canada's
reputation for unhealthiness, Burwell had to confront the perception of
Lake Erie as a body of water made extremely dangerous by violent storms
and a lack of safe ports. Weld devotes several pages in his Travels to describing murderous storms on Lake Erie and asserts that
"[o]n its north side there are but two places which afford shelter to
vessels drawing more than seven feet . . ., namely, Long Point and Point
Abineau [Albino]; and these only afford a partial shelter.36 Because it is
"very uncertain," travel on Lake Erie is also relatively
expensive--twice the cost of the equivalent journeys on Lake Ontario, and
more if a vessel "remains windbound at anchor in any harbour."37
Burwell agrees with Weld that "western storms . . . often vex the
bosom of [Lake Erie]"(444-445), but presents them as a challenge
rather than a barrier to emigration. Many emigrants make their way to the
Talbot Settlement by ox-cart along Canada's notoriously "rugged
roads" (163), but "eager hundreds plough the liquid plain"
of Lake Erie and "Stem the rude winds that oft tempestuous sweep /
The faithless bosom of the rolling deep . . ." (180-182). Burwell
also capitalizes on Weld's favourable descriptions of Lake Erie to produce
a picture of the lake that manages to be both celebratory in its tone and
balanced in its weighting of the positive and the negative:
In the section of his Travels upon which this is
based, Weld's vessel is forced "to lay at anchor for three days, the
wind not being favourable . . .," before carrying him towards the
islands at the eastern end of Lake Erie where the "gaudy" fall
colours of the trees, "intermingled with the shadows of the rocks,
were seen fancifully reflected in the unruffled surface of the surrounding
lake."38 This is but the picturesque calm before one of the
"dangerous storms that are so frequent on Lake Erie," however,
and for the next few days Weld's vessel is buffeted almost to destruction
by high winds and "tremendous" waves.39 Burwell
has as little use for Weld's poor opinion of the harbours on the north
shore of Lake Erie as he does for the traveller's accounts of close-calls
and sudden deaths in the lake's stormy waters. Between Long Point and
Point Albino, the "friendly tide" of Otter Creek enters Lake
Erie, providing emigrants with both a safe harbour from the "rough
lake" and a "broad highway" to the Talbot Road
itself:
Predictably, the majority of settlers locate
themselves either beside the water or along the road: "The fertile
banks of Otter Creek, some take; / Some Talbot Road, and some prefer the
lake; / While others claim'd a midway space between . . ." (207-209).
The point implicit in these lines is that all the farms in the Talbot
Settlement are within easy reach of cheap transportation and a good port,
none more so than those on the "banks of Otter Creek" itself,
where "e'en now," Burwell later observes, "the Oar fair
Commerce plies, / And the first efforts of her Empire tries-- / Ernest of
future wealth" (493-495). When, later still, Burwell envisages the
economic maturation of the Settlement, he does so with reference to its
commercially advantageous proximity to the Great Lakes:
With bigger vessels will come safe navigation on Lake
Erie,40 and the full realization within the mercantilist system of the
British Empire of the "commercial advantages" provided by the
"great water privileges" of the Talbot Settlement. Nowhere
in Talbot Road does Burwell
attempt to characterize as individuals any of the "eager
hundreds" of emigrants who flocked to the Talbot Settlement. When the
first large group of emigrants is heard from early in the poem, it is
chorically and in terms that suggest their working-class British--possibly
Irish41 and their broad motives for emigration, namely, the pursuit of
"Liberty" (141), happiness, and prosperity--in a word,
independence. On seeing the fertile and promising land on which the Talbot
Settlement is located, this first group of emigrants gives choric
declaration of its intention to return forthwith bringing (and the
hierarchy is, of course, typically patriarchal) "sons, / . . .
goods.... cattle, wives, and little ones" [147-148]). These events
and their results are then treated in an extended simile that
simultaneously aggrandizes the emigrants in its epic associations and
diminishes them in its choice of comparison:
Here as elsewhere in Talbot Road, phrases derived from Milton ("wand'ring
band," "assembled armies," "thronging bands") and
Thomson ("feather'd squadron") appear bent on bequeathing heroic
status on Canada's pioneers, an aim that seems at odds with certain
components of Burwell's epic simile, especially the description of the
birds/emigrants as "armies" that "[i]nvest the harvest, and
consume it all." Did Burwell intend a criticism of the pioneers as
opportunistic and rapacious? Support for this possibility could be drawn
from the echoes of Milton's account of Satan's behavior as he travels
towards Eden and the temptation of Eve that sound through Burwell's
subsequent descriptions of the migrant's activities en
route to the Talbot Settlement--their journeys "O'er
hills, and logs, and brooks" (165) and their camps in the
"midnight maze" (174) of the Canadian woods.42 But
overwhelmingly against the likelihood that Burwell intended a criticism
of the first wave of emigrants to the Talbot Road area stands the
commemorative and congratulatory tone of his poem as a whole. It could, of
course, be concluded that Burwell was profoundly ambivalent about the
"noble . . . theme" whose "dignity" he extols in the
invocation to Talbot Road. On balance, however, this seems a less likely
explanation of the unfortunate implications and resonances of some of
Burwell's descriptions than poetic incompetence or, more charitably,
inexperience. In The Rising Village,
for example, echoes of Paradise
Lost harmonize with the tone of the passages in which they occur
because Goldsmith was fully alert to the overtones and undertones of his
literary language.43 Lacking, or still learning, such alertness, Burwell
created periods of noise in Talbot
Road, moments of tonal and thematic confusion which undercut his
celebrations of pioneer heroism and achievement. The
first task that settlers had to undertake when they arrived at their
destinations in the Canadian bush was the felling of large trees to
prepare the land for cultivation and to provide the materials for the
construction of log houses. As indicated by the line with which he
concludes his description of the preliminary work of the "woodman's
ax"--"So evening clos'd, and so the morning broke" (211,
226)--Burwell regarded the felling of trees for the making of a farm and a house as roughly equivalent to
the creation in Genesis 1 of order and plentitude out of chaos and void.
And as indicated by his description of felled trees as "[a] heap of
chaos" (216), he also seems to have appreciated that in the creation
of a homestead, as not in the creation of a world, destruction must
precede construction. In preparation for the emergence of a human order in
the wilderness, the order of nature as manifested by the "stateliest
forest trees" (224) had to be reduced to "heaps on heaps . . .
[of] shivered timbers" (221), a sight that Burwell presumably
regarded as sublime ("A scene of terror to the astonish'd eye"
[222]) because it revealed the awesome--indeed, supernatural and
God-like--power of man to alter the face of the earth for his own
purposes. Since
most settlers in Upper Canada arrived on their land in
mid-to-late summer, they of necessity took time away from the
felling of trees during what remained of the good weather to build a crude
shelter--Burwell's "cabin rude, of humblest form"
(227)--against the approaching winter. With regard to the next stage
of preparing the land for cultivation--the burning off of brushwood
and the incineration of the felled trees (which, as Burwell is careful to
emphasize, had been "pil'd, and interpil'd" in "heaps"
by the settlers)--opinions differed on how to proceed. Was it better
to set fire to the piles of wood in the ensuing spring or to wait until
the fall to do so? Apparently, only the ignorant and the indigent opted
for the spring because at that time the wood was too damp to burn entirely
at one firing. Knowledgeable and experienced settlers "defer[red] the
burning of the felled timber till after midsummer, when the solar heats
ha[d] made preparation for the fire, which in that case perform[ed] its
office with a more thorough effect."44 As Burwell puts it:
"Now, Autumn's glowing suns with scorching ray, / Dried the fall'n
timber, as exposed it lay, / Fit for the office of consuming fire . .
." (259-261). Very likely the lengthy description in Talbot Road of the "wide wasting conflagration" (269) that
results when the "Woodman" touches a "flaming brand"
to the "leafy brushwood" (263, 265) had a basis in Burwell's own
observation of such fires in his native region; however, many details of
the description, including its "[c]olumns of flame" and
sun-obscuring smoke, derive from Weld's vivid account of a dangerous
"conflagration" that he witnessed in Virginia in the spring of
1796 and attributed to "the negligence of people who are burning
brushwood to clear the lands . . . ."45 As if taking his cue from
Weld's comment that a huge brush fire is a "sublime sight," Burwell
concentrates on the æsthetic and psychological effects of his
"flaming log-heaps," concluding with their ability,
characteristic of the Burkean sublime, to conduct the awed mind towards
the infinite:
The Miltonic qualities of this passage once again
raise the question of whether Burwell intended to insinuate a connection
between the pioneers of the Talbot Settlement and the fallen angels of Paradise
Lost, I and II. That this was not the case is indicated by the
straightforwardly heroic treatment of the settlers throughout the fire
episode in Talbot Road. In
contrast to the "negligence" of Weld's Virginians stands the
responsibility of Burwell's "assiduous labourer," who moves
among the sublimely "raging fires" using "his ready hands /
To trim the heaps, and fire th'extinguish'd brands," and does not go
"homeward" until "[t]his task [is] completed . . ."
(289-293). Once the "bosom of the ground" has been "bare[d]"
by fire (another act of undressing in order to redress), the settler must
undertake the "hardest toil" involved in "begin[ning] [a]
farm"; "pond'rous logs" must be piled (for future fires,
fences, and buildings) and the "soil" must be "clean[ed]"
for cultivation (270-274). In describing these tasks as "Herculean
labors," Burwell does more than flatter the strength of the
pioneering farmer: he connects him to "the most famous of Greek
heroes,"46 a figure noted not merely for his twelve great labours but
also for his enormous courage and endurance. As well as echoing back to the early
Greek conception of Hercules as a herald of civilization ("he drains
swamps, builds cities, . . . destroys wild animals and tyrants . . . and .
. . precedes Greek colonists wherever they go" writes G. Karl
Galinsky in The Herakles
Theme),47 Burwell's conception of pioneer labour as Herculean
echoes forward in the Canadian continuity to such works as Malcolm's
Katie and Frederick Philip Grove's Fruits
of the Earth which, as argued elsewhere ,48 contain settlerheroes
who in different ways resemble Hercules. Burwell's "assiduous
labourer" is in no sense a complex character, but with his great
physical strength, his patient commitment to clearing and building a farm,
and his patriarchal dedication to his family (after a "barn," an
"orchard," and a "garden" on his own land will come
"a farm for each deserving son" [304310]), he is the earliest
exemplar in writing on Canada of the Herculean hero and, as such, the
ancestor of Max Gordon, Abe Spalding and other characters who similarly
exemplify the baseland mentality in Canadian literature and culture.49 Following naturally upon the settler's discussion
of his "schemes for future happiness" with "wife and
sons" (293-316) in Talbot Road comes
a lengthy "Apostrophe to Hope and Anticipation" (Argument) that
can easily escape critical scrutiny, in part because it seems merely to
fulfil the requirement for "incidental meditation ,50 in a
topographical poem--and in part because it obviously contains heavy debts
both of spirit and diction to Campbell's Pleasures
of Hope. Yet Burwell's "Apostrophe to Hope and Anticipation"
occupies the structural centre of his poem and, on close examination,
emerges as a centrally important series of reflections on the varieties
and uses of expectation that aims, moreover, to provide a spiritual
framework for one of the principal motivating beliefs of the emigrant and
the pioneer--the belief that the hard work and self-sacrifice of the
present will result in ease and fulfilment in the future. "But what
are toil and labour, say?" asks Burwell after describing the
"Herculean labors" of the farmer, "They are but names that
promise steals away-- / Hope of reward will all their train disarm, / And
e'en impart to danger's self, a charm" (275-278). As a number of
subsequent passages reveal, the key word here, "reward," must be
construed, not in an other-worldly sense (as the Christian elements in the
poem might suggest), but in decidedly worldly and materialistic terms. To
the settler's sons, the farms promised by their father are the "good
reward" that they "[r]esolve to merit, by
attention true . . ." (315-316). To the narrator, the "hopes of
Talbot Road" as a settlement rise and fall with its
"prosperity" (429-434). No wonder, then, that Burwell elaborates
his sense of "Hope and Anticipation" in sustainedly financial
terms, describing the former as a "treasur[y]" whose
"interest all our daily wants supplies" (337-338) and the latter
as a "daily stipend to the sons of hope" (335). The God who
oversees these disbursements is a figure who reconciles Christianity and
capitalism, a thoughtful and thrifty banker who doles out "bounty
only as we need" while retaining the principal sum--the capital of
hope and anticipation--to protect his clients from the loanshark of
"Despair" and the prodigality that could reduce them to
"bankrupts" (339-344). Burwell's reference to the capital sum of
hope as its "principle" (339) rather than `principal' maybe no
more than a spelling mistake (or a compositor's error) but it is entirely
consistent with his negotiation of spiritual and commercial values in the
"Apostrophe to Hope and Anticipation" and, indeed, with the
attachment of ethical value to the pursuit of prosperity that
characterizes his poem as a whole. "Commerce," Burwell asserts
later, "[is] the first of friends to human kind, / That opens a new
creation in the mind; / That tames the hardy savage, rough and rude, / And
forms society for mutual good . . ." (563-566). In Talbot
Road, as in the Protestant work ethic that clearly undergirds it, God
and Mammon are not fused, but they have a good deal in common and are
sufficiently in accord both to bolster the efforts and salve the
consciences of the materially ambitious Christians who must have
constituted a goodly proportion of the poem's original audience. In
the three verse paragraphs that follow his "Apostrophe to Hope and
Anticipation," Burwell chronicles the "deadly blow [and]
desolating wound" (362) that were dealt to the growth of the Talbot
Settlement by the War of 1812. "[E]migration ceas'd at once";
the clearing and cultivation of the land
came to a halt; there were fears of violence and anarchy, and,
eventually, in 1814, the reality of an attack by "a hostile band /
That stript the people, with unsparing hand, / Of food and clothing"
while the men of the Settlement were away on "active duty, at the
frontiers . . ." (361-418).51 Between this last event and Satan's
invasion of Eden, particularly his assault on Eve in the absence of Adam,
there is a clear parallel that Burwell did not choose to emphasize. This
is somewhat curious since an awareness of the resonances in Paradise
Lost of the events of 1812-14 is clearly indicated by the echo
of Milton's "from succor far" (with reference
to Eve's remoteness from Adam)52 in Burwell's "[s]uccor far off'
(359; with reference to Canada's remoteness from Britain). The explanation
for this decision to indicate Britain rather than the men of the Talbot
Settlement as the source of Adam's succor to an endangered Eve lies in
Burwell's necessarily colonial mentality. In times of war especially, the
inhabitants of a colony look first for help not to themselves, but to the
imperial centre. In 1812 that help was quickly forthcoming and, of course,
commanded by a soldier who was serving as the senior administrator in
Upper Canada at the outbreak of the war:
In Upper Canada in 1818 it was hardly necessary to
mention Isaac Brock by name (though Burwell does so in a footnote to the
passage); the War of 1812 was a very recent memory and the role of the
General's early victories and heroic death in inspiring resistance to the
American invasion was common knowledge. If one gift of the War of 1812 to Upper Canadians was a military hero, another was the intensification of local pride that encouraged Burwell to refer to troops raised in Canada as a "patriotic band" of "woodland heroes." Brief as it was, the War helped Upper Canadians to define their loyalties and antagonisms and to perceive their strengths and blessings.53 In this way, it contributed to the development of an incipient nationalism whose tones may perhaps be heard in Burwell's references to "our infant country" (351) and its "patriot brave," the unnamed "woodman"-turnedsoldier who fought "his country's battles in his own" (395-401). But unquestionably the most desirable aspect of the War of 1812 for most Upper Canadians, including Burwell, was its termination. Peace is a precondition for prosperity in a mercantile system, and thus the "hopes of Talbot Road . . . r[i]se again" (429) with the cessation of "destructive war" and the resumption of "peaceful avocations" (426):
Once again the "copious tide of Emigration
flow'd" (454) towards Talbot Road and once again Burwell's choice of
such metaphors as "swarming" partly undercuts his celebration of
the new settlers, many of whom are the ex-soldiers--"men laborious and
brave" (460; emphasis added)--who were encouraged for military
purposes to locate themselves near the American border. The War of 1812
was over in 1814 but in 1818 its consequences for the settlement of what
was to become Canada had barely begun. It
is not necessarily a criticism of Burwell to observe that in describing
the advantages of settlement in the regions west (and then north) of Port
Talbot, he rehearses many of the points made earlier in the poem with
regard to the eastern and central portions of the Talbot Road. Here, too,
are all the ingredients for agricultural and commercial prosperity, not
least "soil" as "rich . . . as mortal e'er could
crave" (459) and, at Pointe aux Pins (Rondeau), a fine harbour to
"shelter shipping" from the "raging tumult" of Lake
Erie (443-446). Such repetitions may generate in the modern reader a weary
sense of deja vu or, worse, the
suspicion that Burwell is a poet of few words who insists on plagiarising
himself beyond endurance. It may not be possible or desirable to clear
Burwell of these charges, but it is worth suggesting that the repetitions
that give rise to them seem to be part of his attempt to structure Talbot
Road symmetrically around the War of 1812.54 Perhaps
the most obvious of the structural symmetries in Talbot
Road is the geographical one that has already come partly into view:
before the War, the eastern and central sections of Talbot Road were built
and settled; after it, the western and northern ones. The other large
symmetry is more temporal or chronological: between the inception of the
Talbot Settlement and the "sound / Of war's dread trump" the
earth "scarce . . . r[a]n, / Its annual circuit twice around the sun
. . ." (345-348); between the sounding of "the silver-throated
trump of Peace" (419) and the completion of settlement to the west of
Port Talbot another two-year period elapses ("the seasons twice . . .
roll'd around . . ." [441 ]). To see these symmetries as the product
merely of limited poetic resources would be a mistake, for surely they are
also, and in a more intriguing way, the product of a geometric caste of
mind, a formatively spatial way of thinking that Burwell shared, not only
with his surveyor-brother Mahlon, but also with many others who were
responsible for the organization of Upper Canadian space in the nineteenth
century. Like the Talbot Settlement itself (and, later, the Huron Tract), Talbot
Road was shaped by a survey mentality, by a mind that delighted in
straight lines, "proper angles" (200), and "cross-way[s]"
(450), in geometrical designs, architectural plans, and comprehensive
schemes. Was Burwell drawn to the decasyllabic couplet by the capacity for
parallelism, balance, and chiasmas that it exhibits in the hands of a
master such as Pope? Was he drawn to Paradise
Lost by its enormous symmetries and all-encompassing design? It is
impossible to say. What can be said, however, is that Burwell shares with
both his literary models and his historical subjects--the organizers and
settlers of Upper Canada--a strong preference for organized reality, a
powerful urge to assert or affirm, as the case may be, an order that is
God-given and rational, patriarchal and Eurocentric. No wonder that
neither Tecumseh nor Laura Secord is mentioned in Talbot
Road. No wonder that "dauntless" Brock and the patriotic
"woodman" are the second Adams who at the core of the poem
enable the Talbot Settlement "its fallen prosperity to rear . .
." (433). In its choice of war heroes, as in its treatment of space, Talbot
Road confirms its participation in the baseland continuity in Canadian
writing. What
can also be said is that the "numbers," symmetries, and
topographical focus of Talbot Road make
it the literary equivalent of a map of the Talbot Settlement or, moving
closer to home, one of Mahlon Burwell's surveys of the Talbot Road.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the
"connected survey of Talbot Road, from its eastern to its western
extremities" with
which Burwell follows yet another survey of sorts, "[a]
short recapitulation of the preceding parts of the Poem" (Argument)
that stresses the major steps in the development of Talbot Road / Talbot Road
from past to present. (Of course, the fact that Burwell twice lays out
the plan of his poem in an Argument and a "recapitulation," and,
moreover, marks the progress of his narrative with numerous process
statements, constitutes further evidence of his near-obsession with order,
rational development, and, indeed, telos, another prominent feature of the baseland orientation.) As he
draws his "brief recapitulation" to a close, Burwell invites the
reader to "see, as on a single sheet, / The Talbot Road unbroken and
complete"(485-486). A few excerpts from the long paragraph that
ensues will give a sense of its overall gist:
And so the reader is, before coming to rest finally
at the most westerly point of the Talbot Road at "Mersea . . . in
Essex County" (522-523). Perhaps the most striking thing about the
passage from which these excerpts are taken is its attempt to use the most
visually obvious aspect of traditional verse--its hypotactic arrangement
of lines in a column down a page--as an analogue for a small-scale survey
(or map) of the Talbot Road. In this context, the word "list"
("In order, next upon the list appears / Yarmouth . . .") helps
to reinforce the analogy between poem and survey, a list being to most
minds a series of words or numbers arranged in lines one below the other
on a sheet of paper. Moreover, such words and phrases as "marks"
(or "mark'd"), "lengthwise," "In order,"
and--in sections of the passage not quoted--"along side,"
"spreads around," and "along the line" (485-520) can
also be said to reinforce the connection between the poem and a survey by
referring to the linear and geometric shapes upon which the latter relies
to convey its topographical information. But,
however successful in creating and sustaining an analogy between the poem
and a survey, the visual and verbal resources that Burwell had at his
disposal could not, as he well knew, recreate vividly in the mind's eye of
the reader the "striking picture" that is afforded to "the
trav'ler's eyes" when he actually sees "St. Thomas'. . . / On a
bold bank by Kettle River, made, / O'erlooking the broad vale which 'neath
it lies . . . ." At this point, Burwell's stock, eighteenth-century
diction, though augmented by a tympanic attempt to convey through
alliteration ("bold bank . . . broad vale") something of the
"striking" scene that he is attempting to recreate, conjures up
only a generalized picture that effectively deprives the description of
its local colour, its uniquely Upper Canadian specificity. At the close of
the passage Burwell abandons his attempt to combine comprehensive survey
with celebratory description, admitting as he does so his own narrative
and poetic inadequacies. "Now to treat / Of all their merits would be
to repeat, / The praise of towns first named" (523-525), he allows
after arriving at "Mersea . . . in Essex County," adding in an
elegiac retreat from show to tell:
To modern taste, one of Burwell's chief faults is
that, by concentrating on the "beautiful" and the
"good," he left too little space in Talbot
Road for the true, for vivid and accurate descriptions of things as they
were in early nineteenth-century Canada. But to lament the paucity of
rude cabins with blanket windows in Talbot
Road (and even, perhaps, to single out for praise the description of the
one that does appear) is to judge Burwell by a standard of social realism to
which he only sporadically subscribed. For whatever reasons of flattery or
propaganda, Burwell's aim in Talbot
Road was evidently to idealize the Talbot Settlement. To this end he
resorts occasionally to realism as a means of making credible his
depiction of "[t]he happiest country, in the happiest clime" and
caps his idealizing survey of Talbot
Road with the manifestly ingenuous assurance that his "tale does
nought but truth unfold, / And is a simple story plainly told, / For truth's
sake . . ." (539-541).
After an equally conventional plea to the reader
to "excuse / The honest labors of [his] humble muse" (541-542),
Burwell turns to consider the future of Talbot Road, but not before taking a
few moments once again to list the blessings of the Settlement and the
virtues of its people. Among the former--and here Burwell speaks at best a
partial truth 55 "a Government, the people's choice, / Where reason
speaks, and order lifts her voice . . ." (553-554). Among the latter
are "perseverance" and "[i]ndustry," the qualities that
have brought Talbot Road to its current "[p]rosperity" and, with
the arrival of "Commerce," will ensure the Settlement's future
"Wealth" (557-581). Grate as it doubtless does on many
twentieth-century sensibilities, Burwell's conception of
"Commerce"--which is to say, the mercantilist system of the
British Empire as a civilizing and beneficial force that "tames the
hardy savage . . . / And forms society for mutual good" (565-566) was
shared by many poets and thinkers in Georgian England and Canada,
particularly those who, like the Canadian Goldsmith, and Burwell, too, it
appears, accepted the so-called "four stages theory,56 of social
development. According to this theory, which could have reached Burwell
through any number of channels, from Adam Smith's The
Wealth of Nations to Henry James Pye's The
Progress of Refinement (which Talbot
Road may, in places, echo),57 all societies evolve through four
distinct phases: the savage (the "rough[est] and rud[est]"[565]),
the barbaric (or pastoral), the agricultural, and, finally, the commercial
(the most refined or polished). Although the final stage of a society's
development could be attended by certain dangers, including the tendencies
towards luxury and vice against which Goldsmith warns in The
Rising Village, it was also characterized by the numerous benefits of
"Wealth" such as splendid architecture (Burwell's "stately
mansion, and . . . costly hall . . ." [575]) and an abundance of
leisure in which to enjoy social pleasures and artistic pursuits. An ideal
society, then, would be one in which morality, reason, and moderation
operate to allow the benefits of "Commerce" to be enjoyed without
its banes. When
Burwell "summon[s] . . . futurity to light" (546), he sees a
"Town" humming with "business" (574-582) and a
"Village" whose "green" is the setting for various
leisurely activities ("a social walk, / And the gay pleasures of
familiar talk"[585-586]), most prominently the creative and
seductive rituals of courtship:
Obviously, the social graces are practised with polish and refinement in the Talbot Road of the future. But are the sophisticated "youths and maidens" who practice them not in danger of lapsing into moral turpitude? As if to forestall this question, Burwell immediately follows his description of the courting couples on the green with a vignette of the village church at the moment when it most resembles the biblical pillars of fire and cloud:
To Christianity as a guiding presence in the lives of the future inhabitants of the Talbot Settlement, Burwell adds "science," the acquisition of knowledge not for its own sake, but for moral purposes:
With Christian morality and right reason to guide
them, the "youths and maidens" on the green will assuredly pass
unscathed through the hazards of courtship. As
Burwell's next verse paragraph makes quite clear, courtships not only lead
to happy marriages in the future Talbot Road, but also result in the
children that assure the continuity and assist the growth of the Settlement.
"[T]ranscendent in prosperity" (604) as it will become, Talbot
Road will also be a "Blest spot! sacred to pure, domestic joy, / Where
love and duty find their sweet employ" (619-620) and where children are
free enough of care to "sport . . . in the willowy shade, / . . . [and]
watch the changing forms by moonlight made / Thro' waving branches . .
."(629-631). Just as these children chase imaginary
"phantoms," a nearby "watch-dog" barks instinctively at
passers-by (632-636). But no real spectres or dangers trouble the peace and
prosperity of the future Talbot Road; the "midnight prowler" and
the "hostile band" are things of the past, and the dog merely
"tarries at the gate, / As if entrusted with his master's fate . .
." (emphasis added). At some point in the future, the Talbot Settlement
may require its "favor'd poet" to "strike the martial lyre /
And rouse the listener's soul with glowing fire . . . If patriot virtue or
his country calls," but the future poet's more likely themes are a
nature made congenial and romantic by human association: "the murm'ring rill, / The mossy bank, or violet-cover'd hill, /
The arching arbor, or the willow grove, / Sacred to hopeless, melancholy
love" (643-652). If Burwell intended this to be a sample (or, at least,
a facsimile) of the poetry of a polished society, then perhaps by placing it
very near the end of his own poem he also meant to suggest that the Talbot
Settlement had already begun to achieve the level of refinement described in
his vision of its "futurity." No proof of such a possibility
exists, of course, but some tangential support for it can be found in The
Rising Village where Goldsmith, too, seems to suppose that a lyrical
response to nature is possible only when a society has reached a
post-agricultural level of refinement.58 Given
the consistency of Burwell's orientation towards the baseland and its
values, it is scarcely surprising that when he envisages the future of the
Talbot Road he sees no wilderness whatsoever but only a thoroughly humanized
landscape of "Town, . . . Village," and a "constant chain of
cultivated farms . . ." (574-607). Wild nature has either been tamed or
domesticated (redressed). As noticed earlier, large commercial vessels now
ride "safely on vast Erie's bosom." Each farm is now a patchwork
of geometric enclosures:
At the centre of "every farm" in this baselandscape is a "stately mansion" that "commands" all that it surveys like the "great farm house . . . With many windows looking everywhere; / So that no distant meadow might be hid . . ."59 of Katie's prosperous father in Malcolm's Katie. And in each of these lordly but democratically undifferentiated seats of omniscience an Adamic yeoman farmer "oft. . . contemplates alone, / The little Eden that he calls his own" (615-618). The rationalization of external nature evident in these passages extends even--or perhaps especially--to the parallel lines of trees that flank the Talbot Road itself:
Beneath these soldierly trees lies "nature's
rich, green velvet spread / In
grassy carpets, or . . . tufted bed,"
inviting passers-by to a "softer walk" or "innocent
delights" (625-628, emphasis added). In Burwell's fantasies at least
the "changeful hand of time" has indeed prepared a robe "more
pleasing" for nature to wear. Thus is Upper Canada envisaged by her
first native-born poet: completely domesticated and perpetually innocent,
always the bridesmaid and always the bride, Eve before and after the Fall. Michael Williams has based the present text of Talbot
Road on the newspaper clipping of the poem that is pasted into the copy
of Michael Smith's A Geographical View of the Province of Upper Canada; and Promiscuous
Remarks on the Government, 3rd. ed. ([Philadelphia]: J. Bioven, October,
1813) held by the Baldwin Room in the Metropolitan Toronto Reference
Library. This copy is evidently clipped from the Niagara
Spectator where, as noted earlier, the poem was published in two
instalments in the summer of 1818, the first on July [31 ] (to line 316) and
the second on August 6 (line 317 and following). It appears to have been
pasted into Smith's Geographical View by
Burwell in 1820, for below the title and following the poem has been stamped
"PORT TALBOT / 1820". Between "PORT TALBOT" and
"1820" on the title page Burwell has written "20th
June", and on the final page he has added: "This poem was written
by Adam Hood Burwell of Talbot Road--in the London district and Province of
Upper Canada -- ". On almost every page of the clipping in A Geographical View,60 there are revisions in what has been assumed to be Burwell's handwriting. All of these revisions have been incorporated into the present text and recorded in the list of Editorial Emendations that follows the poem. Otherwise, only minor changes, primarily in the realm of punctuation, have been made to the newspaper text in the present edition, and these, too, are recorded in the Editorial Emendations.
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