Introduction
The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) by Charles Sangster (1822-1893)
is probably the most intriguing poem written in pre-Confederation
Canada. There are two principal reasons why the hundred and ten
Spenserian stanzas that compose the Kingston poet's description of a
river journey from Lake Ontario down the St. Lawrence and up the
Saguenay to Trinity Rock are of enduring interest, despite their
unevenness and occasional bathos.l The first is that the
"revelation of God in the silent northern wilderness" which
concludes the poem and which represents, for Gordon Johnston,
"the true basis of Sangster's claim to be called the Father of
Canadian Poetry"2 remains for the reader an affective experience,
an authentic response to the North that echoes forward in the Canadian
continuity to the work of Duncan Campbell Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Al Purdy and others. The second reason for the poem's continuing appeal
is that the troubled and searching love relationship between the poet-speaker
and the mysterious "Maiden" who accompanies him on his
journey remains engagingly "obscure" and
"tantalizing" 3--pregnant with allegorical possibilities that
do not fully declare themselves. As Sangster may well have intended,
the love-interest in The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay engages by its mystery, involving the
perplexed reader in a journey which, while partly a sight-seeing tour
through some of the most picturesque and sublime scenery in all of
Canada, is primarily a quest for revealed "Truth" (1249),
a search with an ever-present and hazily-defined teleological
destination that provides the poem with its ostensible raison
d'être and much of its intellectual interest. It is the hope of
the present Introduction that, by placing The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay in its biographical, religious,
literary, and historical contexts, light may be cast on various
aspects of the poem, not least on its interrelated and enduringly
engaging treatments of the Canadian landscape and "Human
Love" (1262). I 1856
was an annus mirabilis for
Sangster. In mid-summer he saw The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems published through a
printer in Auburn, New York, and in early fall he married Mary Kilborn
in Kingston, Canada West.4 At the time of his marriage, Sangster was
thirty-four years of age and his bride was twenty-one.
Apart from the fact that Mary Kilborn, who would die of pneumonia in
1858, was a Kingston woman, little is known about her, let alone about
her character or her relationship with the poet. Yet The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems was published,
and probably mostly written, at a time when a good deal of Sangster's
emotional and spiritual life must have been concentrated on his
courtship and marriage. It is therefore hardly surprising that the
volume contains many poems that are concerned with "Human
Love," several of them personal in nature and--if it is
permissible to draw an inference from their second-person
singular pronouns and present tense--probably occasioned by the
poet's bride-to-be. Unfortunately, the two poems that can
be said with almost complete certainty to be addressed to Mary Kilborn,
"The Name of Mary" and "Mary's Twentieth Birthday," divulge little
about the relationship other than that, though capable of making
Sangster's heart rule his pen, it did not overrule his conviction,
delivered in his solemn birthday homily, that man's time on earth must
be spent in "Purity," "Goodness," and
"Truth" if the Christian Hope of Heaven is to be achieved.5
An examination of Sangster's other lucubrations on human love and
related subjects in the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay volume substantiates what is hinted in
the `Marian' poems--that the poet was for the most part a
conventional and Christian Victorian with a preachily repressive
distrust for man's `lower', earthly, nature and a sublimely elevated
respect for 'higher,' spiritual, things. As
might be expected, Sangster's dualism led him to a mortal fear of
passion ("A human Niagara," "sin's dread
electricity," "Reason's eclipse" are among his
descriptions of "Uncurbed Passion")6 and an ascetic disdain
for pleasure ("whose only use," he says in "Let Them
Boast as They Will" is to teach "the wisest / . . . to
abstain . . .")7. Less predictable, though understandable in a
man who has decided to marry rather than to burn, is Sangster's fervid
desire to find the pattern of a personal yet spiritual love that would
be compatible enough with Christian ideals to be continued in a
Christian after-life:
The
similarity between Sangster's hope for a personal love that persists
"Beyond the Grave" (the title of the poem just quoted) in a
Christian heaven and that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in such poems as
"The Blessed Damozel" and "The One Hope"9 is
remarkable and--since there is no evidence of an influence
operating in either direction between the two poets--probably
explicable as a function of their shared reading of such authors as
Dante and Petrarch (both of whom are explicitly mentioned in "The
Name of Mary") and the Philip James Bailey of Festus
(which is the subject of a sonnet in the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay volume) in environments which, though
geographically separate and greatly different, were nevertheless
permeated by the same, formative Victorian ideas and ideals. It almost
goes without saying that a sanctified, earthly love such as Sangster
envisioned in 1856 was inconceivable for an orthodox Christian of the
mid-Victorian period outside the bounds and bonds of--to
quote the marriage service of the Anglican Church in which the
Canadian poet was married--the "excellent mystery" of
"holy Matrimony."10 It also need hardly be said that
many Victorian Anglicans would have found Sangster's fond hope for a
continuation of human love in Heaven disconcertingly egocentric.
Fortunately for the peace of a mind already given to
"melancholy,"11 Sangster seems to have been unembarrassed by
an awareness of his own tendency towards heterodoxy in the devices and
desires of the heart.12 The fact that The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay appeared only months before Sangster's marriage to Mary Kilborn, and, moreover, culminates in an affirmation of "Human Love," renders almost inescapable and certainly plausible the allegorical, if not literal, identification of the poem's mysterious "Maiden" with the poet's future bride. Of course it would be folly to draw on such an identification for biographical purposes and to search through the poem for the facts of Sangster's relationship with Mary Kilborn. There is a critical advantage to be gained, however, in seeing the theme of "Human Love" as central rather than peripheral to The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, for to do so may permit a defence of the poem against the charge, brought by Desmond Pacey and W.D. Hamilton, that it is irredeemably "vague," thematically "diffuse"13 and sadly deficient in a "central core of meaning."14 It is ironical that Hamilton, the first critic strongly to advocate the possibility of a coherent core of meaning in the poem, omits its crucial and climactic mention of "Human Love" when he quotes its final stanza to clinch his case that "Sangster's intention" is to symbolize in the river-journey "his spirit's search for a fount of inspiration," a search which ends successfully when he "embraces the spirit of nature" (in the form of the Maiden) and becomes "a poet of nature" (as represented by Trinity Rock).15 It is also ironical that Frank M. Tierney, while recognizing the centrality of the "theme of love" in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, argues that the "Maiden" is "not physically present on the journey" but merely a projection of the speaker's "memory and imagination" (this despite his request that she "Lean on [his] bosom" [1256] in the final stanza), and concludes, in a baffling echo of Hamilton's thesis, that at the end of the poem the "`Maiden' . . . is . . . gone, his one love unified in eternity," leaving the poet merely with the "aesthetic joy" of "the creation of [his] poem."16 Tierney's view of the "Maiden" as an imaginary figure who "seems sometimes absent but most often present"17 occasions such readings as the following:
Perhaps
the conclusion to be drawn from all this is that a confused poem (a
“highly undisciplined . . . welter of confusion”19 is Hamilton’s
description) is bound to call forth confusing interpretations. Since
there are a number of points in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay,
most notably the crucial stanza CVI (of which more in due course),
where the status of the "Maiden" and the events surrounding
her are unclear, it may not be possible fully and finally to clear the
poem of the charge of confusion. Yet the argument should be made, and
made consistently, that Sangster's poem is a coherent piece of work,
that--as will be argued here--its overall movement and major concerns
are dictated by the theme of "Human Love" --by the
poet-speaker's
search in the company of a "Maiden" (whom he sometimes
contemplates and sometimes addresses) for a revelation of the
"Truth" that will reconcile the different kinds of Love that
he finds at conflict in his own being and, by harmonizing his
attraction to Woman, Nature, and God, provide a firm foundation for
the marriage, the mystery of holy matrimony, towards which the
conclusion of the poem points. II The
opening stanza of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay introduces the theme of the poet-speaker's
love in a more complex way than might first appear:
The
first thing to notice here is that Sangster's love is at once singular
and self-centered: it is directed towards "one" woman
who, he asserts (three times, and with no fewer than five uses of the
word "my"),20 constitutes the sole focus of his
"hopes," "thoughts," "heart,"
"Feeling and passion." Both intellectua121 and passionate,
the poet-speaker's love for his monna
innominata is obsessive to the point of uxoriousness (the sin of
Adam, of course, and also of Samson, who appears later in the poem).
It is also spiritually and emotionally renovating, lightening the
speaker's melancholy spirit and gladdening his heart in a manner that
he compares with the raising of Lazarus, a reference that has an
evident and important double-valency: on the one hand, a negative--because
blasphemous--suggestion that the lady's "love" is God-like
in its "mysterious power," and, on the other hand, a positive--because reconciliatory--suggestion that the "mysterious
power" of the lady's love partakes of the miraculous, redemptive
and, indeed, "mysterious love of God." It
is the power of love to regenerate and spiritualize, to inspire
intimations of immortality and to counteract the effects of original
sin, that provides the basis for the poet-speaker's appeal to the
beloved in the second stanza to become the inspiratrice of his transcendental journey down the St. Lawrence and
up the Saguenay (roughly equivalent here to "earth" and
"heaven"):
With
a recognition of the similarity of gesture between this stanza and the
invocation of Urania in Paradise Lost,
I, 1-26 comes an awareness of the very un-Miltonic, because
dualistic (and, again, uxorious), quality of the poet-speaker's attitude
to the "Maiden" at this point in the poem: his elevation of her to
the status of an aid to transcendence and his implicit contrast of her purity
and spirituality to the sinfulness and "mortality" of the rest of
creation. Far more Dantean than Miltonic in its approach to both woman and the
world, the stanza reveals the poet-speaker's expectation (which is not
radically modified until the final few stanzas of the poem) that, under the
tutelage of the "Maiden," he will eventually transcend earthly
matters, but that, in the meantime, he will find himself concerned more often
than not "With what is native to mortality." In the event, this
proves to be the case as the pair sails from Kingston through the Thousand
Islands, and the poet-speaker, as yet unchastened by the influence of
the "Maiden," chronicles the progress of their
"love-fraught" (19) boat along the "amorous current"
(23) and under a "passionate sun," noticing as he does so an erotic
cornucopia of things "native to mortality": "The silver-sinewed
arms of the proud Lake, / Love-wild, embrace each islet tenderly, / The
zephyrs kiss the flowers when they wake / At morn . . ." (37-40). Presiding
over the beginning of the Thousand Islands section of the The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay is the "Spirit" (64) or
"Genius" (94) of "Beauty," a figure whose ancestry may
lie, not only in comments on the beauty of the thousand Islands by John
Howison, George Wharburton and William Burr (more of which later, and see
Explanatory Notes, 35), but also in Oliver Goldsmith's allegory concerning
"The preference of grace to beauty" in The
Citizen of the World, the work which, with the Bible (and by Sangster's
own admission), "constituted [his] library for many years."22 The "region
of beauty" (a place of "pleasure without end") and the "valley
of the graces" (a realm of "simplicity and nature") that
comprise the "two landscapes"23 of Goldsmith's allegory correspond
to the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay in Sangster's poem, the former conveying
the speaker and the maiden, initially at least, through a region of sheer
"pleasure" and picturesque beauty, and the latter conveying them
ultimately towards revelation amid the "simplicity" of "sublime
nature."24 It may also be that the structure and movement of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay was influenced by a second allegory in The
Citizen of the World: a treatment of philosophical enquiry in which an
"adventurer" under the guidance of various "angelic
beings" attempts to travel from the "valley
of ignorance" to the "Land
of Certainty"25 (in Sangster's terms, from the limitations of
"mortality" to the revelation of "Truth"). Whatever his
sources (and, needless to say, the Bible with its broad progression from the
Old Testament to the New should not be disregarded as an influence even on the
structure of The St. Lawrence and the
Saguenay), it is clear that Sangster, though he praises "Beauty"
with considerable facility in the "Lyric to the Isles," can no more
be content with mere "Beauty" than with "ignorance"; indeed, he is quick to pair "Truth and
Beauty" in stanza VIII as the objects of "worship . . . in [his]
soul" (95) and, in ensuing stanzas, to describe a distinctly Christian
Book of Nature complete with "psahny waves" (97), "summer
matins" (122), and the "joyous caroling" (127) and "choral
hymn" (129) of bird song, and to praise the "stars" in the
"outspread scroll / Of heaven" as the guardians of his
"Victor-Soul above Earth's prison bars" (98-102). As was
the case with Milton earlier, the echoes of Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth in
the Thousand-Islands section of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (see, for examples, Explanatory Notes, 59,
95 and 102) serve to indicate Sangster's borrowings and
departures from his poetic predecessors, most notable in the latter
category being his characteristically Victorian repudiation of Romantic
heterodoxy and aestheticism in favour of a Christian approach to man and
nature. As the London National Magazine put
it in a review of The St. Lawrence and
the Saguenay, and Other Poems: "there is much of the spirit of
Wordsworth in [Sangster], only the tone is religious instead of being
philosophical . . . ."26 Sangster's
natural theology, his desire to look through nature up to nature's God,
permits his poet-speaker to perceive a violent "Tempest" (174)
as a manifestation of Divine "Power" (217), as a sublime experience
that "fills [his] overburdened brain" with unsurpassable
"joy" (184-187) and prompts him to elicit from the Maiden a
"Hymn to the Lightning" stressing the "Immensity" of God
and the "insignific[ance of] Man" and affirming the eternal life to
come in the "After-Plan" (216-219). Here, very clearly,
the Maiden is fulfilling her role as a chastening guide in the
poet-speaker's quest for revelation. As he himself says after she has
sung her "Hymn to the Lightning": "Thine eyes my grosser
thoughts remove, / . . . thy sweet voice doth give my spirit wings . . ."
(223-224). The conclusion of the storm is marked by the appearance of a
"gorgeous rainbow" (272; an allusion surely to the rainbow that God
placed in the sky after the Flood). It also coincides with the arrival of
twilight and the movement of the boat out of the Lake of the Thousand Islands
(see Explanatory Notes, 37, 148, and 283). As
they move into the St. Lawrence proper, the lovers are smiled upon by Hesper
(Hesperus, Venus), a planet associated here with both transformation and
resurrection ("a chrysalis that has burst its tomb" [286]).
Moreover, they are bathed in "moon-beams" that seem to blend
"earth and sky . . . into one, / Even as [the lovers'] hearts' deep
virtues . . . unite, / Like meeting pilgrims at the set of sun . . ."
(288-291). Almost as strong in these lines as the sense of a unification
of high and low, heavenly and earthly, sacred and profane, is the sense
(particularly in the image of the pilgrims meeting at sunset) that a day and a
human life contain analogous movements towards a "meeting" which is
only fully and finally possible after death, and then only to those who have
led a life of virtue. In the ensuing stanza "Mild Evening" is
likened to a "pensive Vestal Nun" (293) and "True Love" is
paired with "Virtue" (298), and in the "Twilight Hymn"
that follows it, the approach of darkness is the occasion for meditation on
the feelings of "Hope .... Joy, and Love" (314) that are promoted by
the approach of darkness and death. Among God's many gifts, the "Twilight
Hymn" concludes, is the "Peace" that "brings repose / To
the calm Twilight of the Soul," easing the passage from "life's
close" to "heaven's goal" (322-325). Although
the poet-speaker is thus able to face the coming of night as he journeys
down the St. Lawrence with equanimity, the descent of the rapids (XXXV-XXXVII)
which soon follows heralds his movement into a darker realm of personal
experience, a realm characterized by a dread of failing to achieve unity with
the Maiden. Not for the first or last time, the poem at this point raises
large questions about the identity of the Maiden and the nature of the
speaker's relationship with her. Is she a woman whom he has
"worshipped" from afar with a "pure passion"
(454-455) since first encountering her in Montreal during his
"Boyhood" (434) or is she a more recent friend whom he fears will
remain as distant from him as has the Montreal girl (who in this reading is,
of course, someone other than the Maiden)?27
In any case, it is quite clear
that what he desires is to be united with the Maiden ("How long / Will my
lone spirit wander through the throng / Of human hearts until it lives in
thine?" [455-457], he asks) and, concomitantly, that what he fears
is separation from her. To call this portion of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay a journey through the dark night
of the soul would be inflationary; nevertheless, it is evident that in the
night-section of his journey, the poet-speaker's fear of
separation from the Maiden takes up a central position in the narrative,
occasioning assertions of the strength of his affection for her
(458-460, 476-477) and complaints about her failure to return his
love (461-472). As well as prompting allusions to two famous pairs of
unhappy and ill-fated lovers--Hamlet and Ophelia (527) and Romeo
and Juliet (586)--the poet-speaker's turbulent feelings are
reflected in his responses to the passing scenery of the St.
Lawrence--his fear of separation from the Maiden in such lines as
"Here stands a maiden cottage all alone, / There the low church extends
its gleaming spire" (488-489) and his longing for unity with her in such
images as the "bright spires reposing on [the] breast" (500) of an
old building in the Edenic village of Varennes. As if to tease her companion
and assure him of her devotion, the Maiden responds to his request to
"sing [him] one of [her] pleasing madrigals" (530) by telling in
"The Whippoorwill" the story of a betrayal and reconciliation in
love that indicates a certain sophistication and independence on her part in
the realm of relations between the sexes. "'Absent loves are all the
fashion!"' (555) proclaims a jilted yet resilient Jeannie in the third
stanza of "The Whippoorwill," but towards the end of the madrigal
the same Jeannie is described less than flatteringly as "silly" and
"Little" (577-578) when she unquestioningly forgives her
lover's infidelity and holds "her mouth up like a flower, / That her bee
might sip his fill . . ."(579-580). Nevertheless, "The
Whippoorwill" ends on a note of reconciliation and even exorcism as the
"doleful" bird that gives the madrigal its title ceases its
"solitary . . . cry" (523) and, in the stanza that follows, the
poet-speaker observes that the "inconstant moon has passed behind a
cloud" (586). This
allaying of the fear of separation proves to be as temporary as the figure in
which it is embodied implies. Certainly, several expressions and reflections
of the poet-speaker's hoped--for unity and felicity with the Maiden
can be found in the ensuing stanzas, none more audacious, surely, than the
image of the "One graceful column" that commemorates "WOLFE and
MONTCALM" (604-610) in Quebec and none more affective, perhaps,
than the empathetic account of the religious and domestic contentment that
seems to characterize the "cheerful homes" (649) of the habitants on the Île d'Orleans (LV-LVIII). But as the moon
begins to shine more brightly on the scene (663) and the boat moves downriver
from the he d'Orleans (676-678) towards, appropriately, "CAPE
TORMENTE" (709), the poet-speaker's fear of being parted from the
Maiden reappears to find anguished expression in "Parting Song." An
analogy in the opening stanza of this "Song"--"Rivers meet
and mix forever, / Why are we, love, doomed to sever?"
(687-688)--indicates that, at this juncture at least, the two
rivers of the poem's title are emblematic of the individual entities of the
lovers whose eternal union on earth and
in heaven the poet-speaker so earnestly desires. Although the
precise nature of the "fiat" (691) that could separate the lovers is
unclear in "Parting Song" (it could be "spoken" by a
parent, or a priest or anyone who knows a cause, or just impediment, that
could prevent the union, or it could even emanate from the speaker himself),28
the very thought that it might become a reality is utterly darkening
("Not a star is shining o'er us; / . . . the heav'n of love is
clouded" [696-697]) and deeply disturbing ("In my brain a fire
is burning . . . my nerves . . . / Are re-strung to desp'rate
madness!" [701-704]). "Parting Song" ends with the
declaration that "our hearts shall not be broken!" (708) but, of
course, it will take more than a mere assertion to pull the poet-speaker
back from the abyss into which his "anguish" (689) has plunged him. So
it is that well beyond Cape Tormente, as the boat continues to move past
scenes indicative of sanctified human love (the "sacred"
"Homestead" of the "faithful Habitant" [LX-LXI], for
example, and the "heavenly tranquillity" suggested by the he aux
Coudres [LXV]), the poet-speaker once again expresses his hopes and
fears, now in a stanza composed of short, almost antiphonal, statements:
Here
again is Sangster's ideal of a personal love which, if aligned with right and
identified with "Truth," will transcend the separations that are
"native to mortality" in the "fairer land" of
"Eternity." The fact that the stanza just quoted is introduced as an
empathetic explanation of a "sigh" (797) of the Maiden whose
"tears" are remarked at its centre, seems to permit the inference
that she does not, as yet, share the poet-speaker's emerging (though
still otherworldly) vision of eternal love. This conjectured doubt could be
the occasion for the Carlylean tale beginning two stanzas later of an unnamed
"man"--an exemplary figure, and, perhaps, also an
objectification by the poet-speaker of his own spiritual
history--whose loss and recovery of "Faith" (833) prompts
observations about analogous movements from "Darkness" to
"Light" (842-843), "Error" to "Truth"
(838-840), "Evil" to "Good" (840-841),
sickness to "Health" (851-852), and from "Life,"
through "Death," to revelation (835-836). That the discussion
of these positive developments occurs at the point in the poem where night
turns into day and the boat turns from the St. Lawrence into the Saguenay is
one of many indications in the poem of Sangster's allegorical intent and
architectonic skill--his use of temporal cycles and Canadian geography to
give shape and substance to his theme of "Human Love." With
the arrival of morning light comes the "Paean to the Dawn" that
marks the beginning of what may be called the epithalamic movement of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay: the poem's enactment of a wedding
procession and a marriage service in the cathedral of northern nature. With
references to the prelapsarian "Love, that at the primal waking / of the
Dawn in Eden's bowers, / Wandered through the Garden . . ."
(863-865) and--as these lines alone indicate--echoes of
celebrations of such Love by Milton, John Keble and others (see Explanatory
Notes, 853-902 and following), the "Paean to the Dawn" calls
on the "Blessed light of early Morning" (873) to illuminate what is
dark in the lovers by filling them with "the love that comes from heaven,
/ With the hope that soars on high, / That [their] faults may all be shriven,
/ As [the light's] splendors fill the sky" (877-880). To an extent
Romantic in his consecration of human love (Byron comes to mind, as does the
older Catherine's view of love in Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights,29 Sangster is also conventionally Christian in his association of
ordinary light with divine light in the "Paean to the Dawn" and,
subsequently, in his typological interpretation of the "triumphant
Sun" as a "Royal Witness" to the "existence of the Eternal
One!" (912-914). That the heavenly and the earthly, the sacred and
the profane, are moving increasingly towards harmony is perhaps nowhere more
evident than in the figure that immediately follows the "Paean to the
Dawn," an epithalamic likening of the "morn wait[ing] for the sun
with flushed cheek" to a "maid-wife waiting for her wedded
lord" (903-904). It is a comparison that, in concert with "the
songs of birds" (905) accompanying the dawn, appropriately recalls the
Song of Songs. Little wonder that the poet-speaker ascends the Saguenay
in growing confidence that "No rocks can bar the way / Where Love and
Hope lend wings to human clay . . ." (1071-1072) and in growing
certainty that "When human hearts unite" the "trace / Of Eden
that yet lingers in the heart . . ." (1080-1082) is discovered.30 But
despite the poet-speaker's evidently secure conviction that God's
"Presence thrills / All Beauty as all Truth" (960-961), one
thing prevents his happiness from being complete: the Maiden has apparently
not yet committed herself to him. "Oh! give me the love of your woman's
heart" (1086) he asks in the poem's final interspersed "Song,"
That
the Maiden is effectively absent from the narrative between the "Paean to
the Dawn" and the "Song" just quoted (which immediately
precedes the arrival of the boat at "CAPE ETERNITY" [1120]) is
explicable in terms of the epithalamic matrix of this portion of the poem.
Arriving in the body of the church (the upper reaches of the Saguenay) as it
were by separate ways, the bride and groom do not (re-)encounter one
another until they are at the chancel rail (Cape Eternity), where they give
their troth to each other in the sight of God and at a little remove from the
altar (Trinity Rock), towards which they will later ascend with the priest.
Although this doubtless puts the equivalencies between the Saguenay landscape
and the marriage ceremony too boldly, it may help to explain, not merely the
virtual absence of the Maiden from the penultimate stage of the poem's
epithalamic movement (LXXVI-XCIV; and the corresponding feeling of
meditative anticipation in these stanzas), but also the definite sense in the
final portion of the poem that there is an intentionally ecclesiological
dimension to Cape Eternity ("Like a God . . . / Holding communion with
the distant cope . . ." (1121-1122) and Trinity Rock ("Its
anatomic form, and triple crown / . . . far above the earth's unrest.. ."
[1206-1207]). The
final test of any reading of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay must be its success in explaining the events of
the poem's conclusion--stanzas C-CX--set in the vicinity of
Capes Eternity and Trinity. Preceding these climactic stanzas are crisp
statements which, to an extent, summarize the dilemmas experienced by the
poet-speaker from the beginning of the poem. On the one hand, these
statements are about the Divine origin (and, therefore, integrity) of all
creation ("He . . . who flushed the daisy built the world. / All things
come perfect from His Master-hand" [1137-1138]) and about the
power of sublime nature to draw the mind of Man--the "supremest of
the works He planned" (1143)--towards his Creator (1137-1146).
On the other hand, the statements are about the insignificance of Man in
relation to sublime nature ("How . . . [puny] he seems, when thrown / In
. . . contrast to a work like this"[1144-1146]) and about the
ability of earthly pleasure to bring about the destruction of virtue
("unsuspecting Innocence, beguiled / By Pleasures . . . that pierce the
enamel of its dreams" [1161-1163]). With his mind thus pulled by
external nature towards God and by human nature towards sin, the
poet-speaker engages in Stanza C in a process of ratiocination akin to
that of Adam at the Fall but premised on the same Victorian dualism and
natural theology that have been with him from the outset:
Very
obviously, the solution to the poet-speaker's dilemma, the way out of the trap
of either/or, lies in a reconciliation of the conflict in his mind between
profane love--the "Love" that "lures [him] . . . to Woman's
arms--and sacred love--the "Love" of "God" through
external "Nature." In the remainder of the stanza and in the ensuing
one, a concordia discors emerges
when the poet-speaker, by affirming a bond of human nature (literally,
"Nature" writ small), succeeds in harmonizing attractions that now
appear to him, not as opposite, but as related and comparable:
What
enables the poet-speaker ("this dreamy bay") to love both God
("the sun's light") and "Woman" ("the cool
shade") is a recognition that human love when "pure [and] deep"
is divinely inspired:
The
"heavenly repose" of Trinity Bay, the "unutterable grace"
of Nature (perhaps specifically Trinity Rock), and the "heavenly
inspiration" of a "pure deep Love"--all these phrases
speak of an interfusion of nature by grace which, as the poet-speaker
now fully realizes, places in sanctified harmony the attractions towards God,
"Nature" and the Maiden that he had earlier perceived as being in
conflict. 31 With
an achieved understanding in the cathedral of northern nature of the sanctity
of a human "Love" that is "pure," the poet-speaker
experiences a rush of verbal icons ("Strong, eager thoughts," he
says, "come crowding to [his] eyes . . ." [1182]), and envisages
Trinity Rock, the "Monarch of the Bluffs" (1185), as "the great
Samson of the Saguenay" (1187), a figure which, the context suggests, is
Samson restored by God's grace and, like the poet-speaker himself,
stronger than ever before. What follows now is a dumbfounding. Confessing that
his "lips are mute," that he "cannot speak" his thoughts,
the poet-speaker--consistent with the body of Eastern and Western
mystical thinking that sees silence as the most effective expression of
awe--acknowledges that "'T'were best [his thoughts] should not break
/ The Silence, which itself is ecstacy / And Godlike Eloquence . . ."
(1196-1198). Yet for Sangster, as for Carlyle, silence is not an end but
a means: it is "the element in which great things fashion themselves
together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into
the daylight of Life, which they are thence-forth to rule."32 It is
to this emergence--to the bringing into life of a love that is at once
inclusive and multifaceted (a love of God, and of the "Godlike" in
Nature, and Woman)--that the final few stanzas of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay are given over. After
a stanza devoted to Cape Trinity in which he likens the streams cascading down
the Rock's surface to "tears of Gladness [on] a giant's face" and
its "triple crown / Of granite" to "Truth made manifest"
(1200-1208), two similes that are clearly expressive of an overflowing
of joy at the completion of his quest for revelation, the poet-speaker
breaks the silence to deliver what is surely a central speech and a major crux
of the poem:
The
poet-speaker's surprising assertion in these cryptic lines that he and the
Maiden must "part forever" seems to stem from a conviction on his
part that, since his love has been expanded to include God, Nature, and Woman,
it can no longer be directed--as it was in the opening stanza of the poem
("There is but one to whom my hopes are clinging . .
.")--exclusively towards one person. Once the "glorious
Sun" of a comprehensive "Love" has shone for the
poet-speaker he sees his earlier perceptions of his
"love"--both the emotion and the beloved--as narrow and
delusive, as a "Dream" to be punctured and a ghost to be exorcised
by the light of a new dawn ("young Phoebus"):
Here,
as in much Victorian poetry and fiction (including Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus, which looms quite large in the background of Sangster's poem),
33 a love founded on youthful, Romantic assumptions and conceived as too
merely precious, frivolous, and intoxicating (and notice the lower-case
"nature," "divine," and "love" in the preceding
quotation) is shown as insufficient to rule "the daylight of Life."
(It should also be noticed that in "The Name of Mary," Sangster
admits to despising "The sighing of a certain varlet, / Werther," an
epitome for Carlyle of mis-spent youth.)34 Once the poet-speaker's
romantic "love" has been displaced, dream-and ghost-like, by the light of common day and comprehensive
"Love," it / she can be replaced by a "love" that is
mature, "earnest" (like his own "heart" in stanza CV), and
eminently Victorian:
The
first line of this passage can be taken literally to mean that a hitherto
unmentioned woman--one of two or more on the boat 35--has now
appeared on the scene to take the place of the Maiden. A less jarring and more
plausible approach to the line is to see it as a description of a
transformation either (or both) within the Maiden herself (she has become
"Another . . . being," a different person, as a result of a
spiritual conversion) or in the poet-speaker's perception of her (he now
sees her as "Another" like-minded "being "whose
new-found earnestness echoes his own). In both cases, the implication is
that the Maiden has, after all, shared the poet-speaker's revelation at
Cape Trinity, and that, in their common outlook and new maturity, they are
fully compatible with one another. The
bright ideal of Love that is articulated and celebrated in the four remaining
stanzas of The St. Lawrence and the
Saguenay is unmistakably Victorian in its humanistic emphasis on utility,
action, faith, and the perfectibility of man:
The "words" that the poet-speaker hears spoken by the "voice within" may well be those of the marriage ceremony, a possibility that accords well with the epithalamic aspect of this portion of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and, indeed, with the poem's concluding stanzas where Sangster, perhaps remembering Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion wishes that his "willing voice [could] find words" to "free the sleeping echoes" from the Saguenay landscape so that "Silence" itself would "utter vow for vow" and animate the "resounding woods" (1238-1239, 1245, 1249). The poem's final stanza, which follows an affirmation of the inseparability of "Truth," "Love" and "lofty purpose" (1249-1253) in the lovers' relationship, may now be quoted in full:
As
Sangster doubtless knew, the phrase "new life" occurs in the bidding
prayer of the Anglican service of Holy Communion, which newly-married
couples are enjoined to receive either at or shortly after their marriage. It
is to be found elsewhere in the St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay volume in "Love's Morning Lark" (the
poem that follows "Mary's Twentieth Birthday"), where the speaker,
after informing his "Maiden" that she will play lark to his morning,
asks that his "being . . . find rest" in her "soul" and
his "new life be Music-born."36 It may also lie behind the
title of another love poem in the volume, "Love's New Era," which
celebrates the joyful advent of a personal love.37 Such echoes within
Sangster's first volume seem to give credence to the identification of the monna innominata of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay with Mary Kilborn. But the circumstantial
evidence for this biographical connection, however convincing, should not
obscure the literary ancestry of Sangster's inspirational "Maiden"
in figures such as the Beatrice of Dante's Vita
Nuova (The New Life) and the Pilgrim of Byron's Childe Harold, figures whose allegorical function and fictive
dimension ensure that they can never fully be "class'd / With forms which
live and suffer . . . ."38 Since these words come from the conclusion of Childe
Harold's Pilgimage, the work that provided the primary poetic model for The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, the logic of the discussion seems to
indicate a redirection of attention from the theme of "Human Love"
in Sangster's poem to its literary background and formalistic components. II In
addition to the major features of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay that quite evidently derive from Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage--its pilgrimage motif, its touristic component,
and its Spenserian stanza form39--there are several less conspicuous
aspects of Sangster's poem that are indebted to its principal English model.
For example, the stanzas describing the storm on the Lake of the Thousand
Islands and the descent of the rapids on the St. Lawrence in the early
portions of The St. Lawrence and the
Saguenay probably owe part of their inspiration to parallel passages in Childe
Harold (with contributions also from Shelley's Alastor),40
and Sangster's descriptions of the barrenness and sublimity of the
Saguenay fjord also seem partly to derive from Byron's poem 41 Moreover, it is
as difficult to doubt the indebtedness of Sangster's conception of the sublime
Saguenay to Byron's famous description of the mountain-like
"Vastness" of St. Peter's in Rome (where the "mind / Expanded
by the genius of the spot . . ." finds "enshrined [Man's] hopes for
immortality . . .")42 as it is to deny the strong verbal echo of Byron's
"My Pilgrim's shrine is won, / And he and I must part"43 in the
crucial stanza (CV) that initiates the conclusion of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. But Sangster is not unselective
in his borrowings from Childe Harold; he
chooses a female rather than a male as a travelling-companion on his
spiritual journey and, like Byron in his final canto,44 he rejects the option
of allotting large portions of his narrative to his fellow
"Pilgrim." Nor does he import Byron's pervasive theme of political
liberty, preferring instead--and in 'a dutifully Canadian
fashion--merely to emphasize in passing the element of harmony between
the two founding races of British North America: "WOLFE and MONTCALM . .
. One graceful column to the noble twain / Speaks of a nation's gratitude . .
." (604-611) 45 In the same way that individual and local concerns
are apparent in the themes of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay, Sangster's decision to intersperse songs and
lyrics at intervals throughout his poem in a manner reminiscent less of Childe
Harold than of such poems as Bailey's Festus
and Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of
the Lake
46 could well reflect a recognition on his part of one of his
personal strengths as a poet: the facility with song forms and musical rhythms
that prompts Pacey to observe that he "might have had his greatest
success as a librettist of light operas."47 But
while Sangster's gifts might conceivably have found fulfilment in light opera,
the evidence of the songs and hymns in The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and elsewhere suggests that they were
nourished in rather different ground--in a soil composed of a variety of
secular and religious sources, from the nature lyrics and "Melodies"
of Byron, Thomas Moore and other Romantic poets ("Lyric to the
Isles," "Vanished Hopes") to the sacred hymns and children's
verses of Isaac Watts, John Keble and other nineteenth-century Christian
writers ("Hymn to the Lightning," "Whippoorwill") whose
sources, in turn, are the sacred texts and poems known directly by Sangster:
the King James version of the Bible, the Anglican Book
of Common Prayer and Psalter, Paradise
Lost.48 On one occasion at least--Sangster's rendition of profound
loneliness and despair in a rollicking anapestic rhythm reminiscent of Byron's
"The Destruction of Sennacherib"--his special combination of
musical rhythms, religious terminology, personal feeling, and secular love
courts bathetic disaster:
On
other occasions, however, Sangster's musical propensities combine with his
religious romanticism to produce complex and aesthetically satisfying results,
a case in point being "Twilight Hymn," which treats of themes
commonly found in Romantic poetry and Victorian hymns in a stanza form (ababcdcd)
that admirably draws together its religious and personal components (see
Explanatory Notes, 302-325). To
read and re-read The St. Lawrence and
the Saguenay with an awareness of the verbal universe from which the poem
derives is to become increasingly aware of the understandable and intriguing
unevenness of Sangster's assimilation of his literary influences in his first
published volume. An economical way of illustrating the Canadian poet's by
turns creative and less creative use of his literary models is briefly to
examine instances of the very different presences in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay of Wordsworth and Shelley (whose
longest poem, The Revolt of Islam, is also,
as it happens, written in Spenserian stanzas). When Sangster writes, in stanza
XXXIX, "Beneath me, the vast city lay at rest; / Its great heart
throbbing gently, like the close / Of Day" (429-431) and asks, in
stanza C, "Is there a soul so dead to Nature's charms, / That thrills not
here in this divine retreat?" (1164-1165), the reader hears clear
echoes of Wordsworth's sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802" (see Explanatory Notes, 429-430 and
1164-1168) without being convinced either that the sonnet is being
echoed for the purposes of allusion or that its attitudes, ideas, and tropes
are being reworked in a creative manner. In this instance, Sangster's use of
his model is relatively uncreative: perhaps because his own approach to the
external world is too similar to that of Wordsworth (especially the
topographical Wordsworth of The River
Duddon49 and the anglican Wordsworth of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets), the Canadian poet does not always reshape
the materials that he appropriates from his English predecessor, but simply
re-uses or re-applies them in a different environment. By
contrast, and perhaps because Sangster shared with many Victorians a hostility
to Shelley's neo-Platonism, xstheticism, and `effeminacy,'50 the
Canadian poet uses Adonais in a relatively creative manner, as the following stanza
(XII) illustrates. Many aspects of the stanza recall Shelley in general and Adonais
in particular: its form is, of course, Spenserian; its mood is elegiac;
its flower--the "violet"--is a favourite of the English
poet's; and even the punctuation of its opening line is reminiscent of stanzas
in Adonais. But on the whole, the
stanza shows that Sangster has learned lessons from his model and then applied
them to subject--matter which, though conventional enough, becomes
increasingly his own as the stanza proceeds:
In addition to revealing a Sangster capable of creative acts of importation and adaptation, this creditable stanza indicates that Byron's Childe Harold did not provide the sole model for the Spenserian stanzas of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay but, rather, represents one source--albeit the centrally important one--from among the many that Sangster, at his best, approached with discerning intelligence and energetic creativity. Nowhere is Sangster's discerning and energetic, intelligent and creative, use of his sources and resources more evident than in several of the stanzas that describe the Saguenay estuary and its surroundings in the latter part of the poem. One such stanza, number XC, is worth quoting in full and discussing in detail if only because it shows Sangster placing a figure borrowed on a lesson learned, not from a romantic, but from Shakespeare at the service of an attitude and a landscape that are very much of his own. The stanza describes an isolated "dwelling" seen at a distance during the journey up the Saguenay:
The first of the comparisons in this
stanza derives from a description of Olivia in Twelfth Night, IV,
iv, 117-118--"She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at
grief . . . "--but with a significant twist: whereas Olivia in her
triumph over "grief" resembles a personification of Patience on a
funeral monument, the human "dwelling" on the Saguenay sits at the
feet of an ecological "Death" that it appears to have caused through
pollution. In its very complexity and awkwardness, this first comparison /
allusion intimates what the immediate introduction of an alternative
("Or, fancy it . . . ") confirms: that Sangster is seeking the
ways and means of articulating his perception of man's destructive effect on
the Canadian environment. What he then brings forward are a couple of
death-related puns ("grave," "wreath"), an allusion to
Pandora (whose "box," of course, let forth a plague of disease and
evil on the world), and a reference to alchemy ("subtlest essence"),
a deeply suspect science and philosophy from Sangster's Christian
perspective. (Interestingly, enough, Duncan Campbell Scott, Lawren
Harris and
other heterodox writers and artists would in due course reverse this field by
perceiving the Canadian North as a site of occult spirituality.) While the
tactic
of advancing more than one comparison or simile to describe a single
phenomenon
here and elsewhere in The St. Lawrence
and the Saguenay may Much of the same
can be said of stanza LXXIX, a portion of the poem that is often mentioned as
an illustration of what Donald Stephens calls the "more precise"
descriptions and "less stodgy" rhythms that characterize the poem
after the poet-speaker "leaves the St. Lawrence . . . and begins to
sail up the Saguenay."53 After an initial image of the "blessed
light" rolling "Along the sterile mountains," the stanza
employs the syntax and imagery of repetition and monotony to surround and
set-off lines that vividly evoke the starkness and harshness of the
North:
The
central lines in this passage are surely among the most descriptively accurate
and technically appropriate in The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay. The accent on the second syallable of
"parched," the word that Sangster wants because it means shrivelled
either by heat or by cold (and in this environment by both), could almost be
said to emphasize the inability of the
One more stanza from the Saguenay portion of the poem may be quoted to illustrate further Sangster's subtle adaptation to the Spenserian stanza to reflect the characteristic of the Northern landscape. It is a stanza (LXXXII) in which the poet-speaker shows clearly his allegiance to the aesthetic of the sublime55 in allowing the "unimaginable wildness" of the Saguenay region to direct his thoughts towards God:
For Sangster, a pre-Darwinian
Christian, nature's "profusion" is not extravagance for the purposes
of survival and her forms are not manifestations of the gradual evolution of
the cosmos. In his eyes, the external world is a constant reminder of
God's power and generosity--the visible evidence of an all-pervasive and
"Omnipotent Design" (929). Formalistically, Sangster's
expression of his Christian beliefs in Stanza LXXXII becomes most interesting
at the alexandrine, when the usual six feet of the final line of the
Spenserian stanza are extended to seven éáó ("In sólitude etérnal, rápt in cóntemplátion
dréar") in a
mimetic response to the enormous length of time being described, and where the
impetus generated by the elision of `they are' at the comma carries the reader
centrifugally forward to the next stanza and the next, which are given over
almost entirely to one long sentence treating of the immense past of the hills
whose dreams of the "old years" (966) and "long ages"
(975) the poet-speaker can only dimly imagine. As even the phrases just
quoted indicate, much of the effectiveness of stanzas LXXXII-LXXXIV
derives from Sangster's effective use of long vowels (especially o and a) both
to emphasize the seriousness of his theme and to reflect the extensive nature
of the geographical and temporal realities that he is attempting to describe. Before
proceeding to some general and final comments about the form and genre of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, two more stanzas, this time from the
opening section of the poem, may detain us for a moment as instances of
Sangster's strengths and weaknesses of expression. The enjambement
between the two stanzas (a device used here and elsewhere in the poem to
reinforce a sense of movement) effectively obviates the possibility of quoting
them individually. Red walls of granite rise on either hand, Rugged and smooth; a proud young eagle soars Above the stately evergreens, that stand Like watchful sentinels on these God-built towers; And near yon beds of many-colored flowers Browse two majestic deer, and at their side A spotted fawn all innocently cowers; In the rank brushwood it attempts to hide, While
the strong-antlered stag steps forth with lordly stride, And slakes his thirst, undaunted, at the stream. Isles of o'erwhelming beauty! surely here The wild enthusiast might live, and dream His life away. No Nymphic trains appear, To charm the pale Ideal Worshipper Of Beauty; nor Nereids from the deeps below; Nor hideous Gnomes, to fill the breast with fear: But crystal streams through endless landscapes flow, And
o'er the clustering Isles the softest breezes blow.
Although the first of these two stanzas is by no means Sangster at his worst, it does contain a number of weaknesses that plague The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay as a whole: adjective-noun combinations that are dismayingly uninspired ("proud . . . eagle," "stately evergreens," "many-colored flowers," "majestic deer") and, in one case, even tautological ("watchful sentinels"); adjectives and adverbs that are clearly present merely to fill out the metre ("a proud young eagle," "A spotted fawn all innocently cowers"); and rhymes that sacrifice imaginative reason and perceptual accuracy on the altar of poetic form (the "cowers" that follows on "towers" and "flowers"). At many points in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay such shortcomings bring the poem to the brink of parodying the tradition of nature poetry that it so obviously seeks to continue and `ground' in Canada, suggesting that all-too-often (and the earlier instance of Wordsworth is another case in point) Sangster simply took words and phrases from the type of poetry that he sought to emulate and reassembled them within the borders of his Spenserian stanzas. This is a harsh judgement, of course, and one whose inapplicability across the full length of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay is evident even in the second of the two stanzas just quoted, which, as A.J.M. Smith has said, belongs among "Sangster's best verses."56 Stephens
argues of this second stanza that in it Sangster "regretfully . .
. admits the absence" of the various figures of European
mythology--the "Nymphic trains," "Nereids,"
and "Gnomes"--in the Canadian landscape.57 Yet such a
view ignores the clear emphasis and preference given by temporal
sequence, poetic form, and emotional force to the stanza's final
couplet. "But crystal streams through endless landscapes flow, /
And o'er the clustering Isles the softest breezes blow" derives
much of its effectiveness and affectiveness, not merely from a
resemblance "to the graceful neo-classicism of Pope's Pastorals"
(as Smith argues),58 but also from the words "endless"
and "softest," where the suffixes of infinitude and
superlativeness make plain Sangster's local pride and, in conjunction
with other aspects of the lines (most notably, their trochaic rhythms
and long or open vowels), invite the reader to contemplate the
limitless expanses and freedom that are available to the poet of
Canadian nature. To an extent, it is precisely because Canada is not
inhabited by Nymphs, Gnomes, and other light militia of the European
air that Sangster is free later in his poem to liken a bluff on the
Saguenay to a "Magi" (997), a
"Prophet-Scald" (1062) and "the great
Samson" (1187). A world but sparsely populated is also a world waiting
for the nth Adam to seed his illusions, to take his green inventory, and,
in so doing, to bring into poetry and consciousness what had not been
there before. That Sangster quite often merely borrowed other poets'
words to map his Canadian physical and mental terrain is one of his
great weaknesses; that he attempted to map that terrain at all and
succeeded as often as he did is what makes him enduringly readable and
important. Two broad
questions that have largely been begged so far in the discussion of
Sangster's literary models and achievements in The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay are those of the genre of the poem
and the appropriateness of the Spenserian stanza as a vehicle for its
various themes and subject-matter. To take the second of these
questions first, the most obvious way in which the Spenserian stanza
is appropriate to the content of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay is that it functions well, and has
done so traditionally, from The
Færie Queene, through The
Castle of Indolence and Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage to the opening section of The
Lotos-Eaters, as a narrative vehicle for the adventures,
stages, and scenes encountered during a journey or a quest.59 As the
original example of The Færie Queene indicates, Spenserian stanzas in narrative
sequence generate what Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls an
"expectation of continuation"60--a forward thrust that
makes them a particularly suitable medium for an account of a
river-journey through the "endless landscapes" of
Canada. Although intolerantly regular in rhythm and rhyme (a fact
that, as has already been seen, forces Sangster at times to employ
filler and contrived rhymes), the Spenserian stanza allows for
considerable leeway in line division, a quality deftly exploited by
the poem's travelling narrator to reinforce moments of movement (the enjambement between VI and VII has already been mentioned, and
further examples can be found in stanzas III-IV and LXII-LXIII)
or, as the case may be, stasis or completion (see, for example, the
middle and end-stopped lines of stanzas LXX and LXXIV).
Moreover, since the individual Spenserian stanza exhibits what
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker see as a paratactic quality61--which is to say, a capacity to present images as if
spatially within its framing contours--it is well suited to the
picturesque scenes and tableaux that
the poet-speaker encounters during his panoramic journey down
the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay--to vignettes such as those
of "Little St. Paul's Bay" ("one of the most delightful
pictures on the route" [772n.]) and Les Eboulements ("A most
delightful little village . . . looking like a vision of Romance or
Fairy-tale [781n.]). Like the picturesque convention with which
it is eminently compatible, the Spenserian stanza serves at many
points in The St. Lawrence and
the Saguenay to set the activities and creations of
man-fishing (XXXII), a "picnic party" (XXXIV) and numerous cottages, churches
and villages (XLIV-XLV, XLVII)--in formal configurations
that reflect and enhance the sense, particularly in the St. Lawrence
portions of the poem, of a pastoral harmony between the human and the
natural disorders. Byron's
observation, in the Preface to the first and second cantos of Childe
Harold, that "the stanza of Spenser . . . admits of every
variety"62 might seem like a comment on its affinities with the
picturesque aesthetic of "Order in Variety"63 but, in fact,
refers to the suitability of the form, not merely for descriptions of
external reality, but for expressions of various authorial states and
tones. A similar point about the Spenserian stanza is made by James
Beattie in his Preface to The
Minstrel, a poem that appears to have influenced Sangster64 as
much as it earlier had Byron and Wordsworth. Confessing that he has
attempted "to imitate Spenser" both "in the measure of
his verse, and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety of his
composition," Beattie defends his formal choice by arguing that
the Spenserian stanza "admits both simplicity and magnificence of
sound and language, beyond any other . . . that . . . [he is]
acquainted with."65 These are points that should be
well-taken, for they indicate the wisdom of Sangster's choice of
the Spenserian stanza (rather than, say, ottava
rima, which has a structural and associative predisposition to
facetiousness and satire) as the vehicle for a poem that moves through
a broad range of subjects and landscapes, and across the full spectrum
of feeling between joy and dejection that is the province of the
post-Romantic poet. As has been seen, one of these feelings,
especially in the Saguenay portion of the poem, is the nearly
inexpressible awe generated by sublime scenery. That the Spenserian
stanza is as suitable for the rendition of sublimity as it is to the
reflection of the picturesque is made clear by two perceptive comments
on the form by different critics: the observation by Northrop Frye
that, particularly in its final alexandrine, it is capable of
arresting narrative and forcing the reader "to concentrate on
something else"66 and the remark by Paul Fussell, dpropos Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" (which is echoed at
least once towards the end of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay)67
that the Spenserian stanza is
capable of reinforcing a shift from "noise to absolute
silence."68 A certain amount has already been said about the
movement to and from silence in the concluding section of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and there have also been occasions
to observe the way in which the alexandrines of some of its
stanzas--like the overall movement of the narrative towards an
affirmation of sanctified "Human Love"--work
centrifugally to direct the reader beyond the poem, beyond the words
on the page, to "something else." The comments of Frye and
Fussell, together with those of Byron, Beattie and Smith, thus point
to the Spenserian stanza as an ideal vehicle for the themes and thrust
of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, as a stanza form which, if used
for the same purposes by a poet less uneven than Sangster, would have
resulted in a poem as formalistically satisfying as any in Canadian
literature. The
short answer to the second of the two broad questions raised
earlier--the question of the genre of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay--is that Sangster's poem
belongs, as its very title suggests, to the sub-species of
topographical poetry that Robert Arnold Aubin has identified as the
"river-poem."69 As famously described by Dr. Johnson,
topographical or "local" poetry contains three component
parts, each of which is amply represented in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay: "[1] some particular
landscape . . . poetically described [in this case, the landscapes of
the St. Lawrence and Saguenay regions], with the addition of such
embellishments as may be supplied by [2] historical retrospection [Sangster's
stanzas on Kate Johnston (IX-X), the siege of Quebec
(L-LI) and so on] and [3] incidental meditation [his thoughts on
such subjects as the `power of Song' (IXX-XXII)
and the atmosphere of the Moon (XXVIII-XXIX)]."70 In
using the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay Rivers as a thread along which
to string the embellishments of "historical retrospection"
and "incidental meditation," The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay not only falls into Aubin's
category of the "river-poem" but it also announces its
already-mentioned debt to Wordsworth's River
Duddon sequence of sonnets and, indeed, its affinity with several
other poems in the Canadian continuity that use the country's most
important river in a similar manner, from Thomas Cary's Abram's
Plains to Susie Frances Harrison's "Down the River"
poems in Pine, Rose and Fleur de
Lis. Although Sangster recalls Cary and others of the baseland
mentality71 in following the St. Lawrence downriver into the historied
landscapes of Quebec and, in essence, towards the mother-country
and parent-traditions of Britain and Europe, he aligns himself
with something more elemental, and, many would say, more distinctly
Canadian,72 when he turns up the Saguenay and travels into one part of
what in our own century would become the physical emblem of a
politically and artistically independent Canada: the North--the
lone and lonely land of The Group of Seven and their literary
counterparts from Duncan Campbell Scott through Smith to Purdy. As
attractive as it may be, however, such a nationalistic interpretation
of The St. Lawrence and the
Saguenay risks obscuring from view a crucially important aspect of
Sangster's poem that was examined at length in the opening stages of
the present discussion: its use of landscape elements and the river
journey, not primarily for political or patriotic purposes (though
these do figure in the poem, as has been seen), but as metaphors for
the stages in a quest for "Truth," a revelation of the
sanctity of "Human Love." But while "Love," God,
and the reconciliation of the two unquestionably lie at the heart of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, shaping all aspects of it into a
complex and purposeful allegory, the evidence now to be placed on view
indicates that Sangster's poem has touristic sources and dimensions
that he seems to have sought to enhance in the early
eighteen-sixties by expanding it to nearly twice its original
length and into an essentially new work that does not appear to have
survived except in the form of excerpts published in Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow's Poems of Places and
elsewhere (see Appendix 11 in the present edition). III If
the origins of The St. Lawrence
and the Saguenay could be traced to one event in the realm of
tourism, that event would be the maiden voyage on July 8, 1851 of the Rowland
Hill, the first steamboat to make regular sight-seeing trips
from Quebec down the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay. The article in The Weekly British Whig (Kingston) for July 11, 1851 announcing the
commencement of the Rowland
Hill's weekly "Excursions to the Saguenay" may well have
been written by Sangster, who had been working with the British
Whig since the spring of 1850. On the strength of this
possibility, which its literary components certainly do not gainsay,
the article is worth quoting at some length:
The
question of whether Sangster wrote this or not is less important than
the certainty that, as "bookkeeper and proofreader"74 (and
perhaps already in July, 1851 sub-editor)75 of The
British Whig, he read it, and thus knew five years before the
publication of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay of at least one account of the
sublimity of the Saguenay region, an account, moreover, which seems to
have affected the poet to the extent that, in 1853 (see Appendix I,
"Etchings by the Way," X, 260-265) he himself quotes
the lines about Mont Blanc in a "Letter" from Ha! Ha! Bay. Unfortunately,
the name of the author whose "journal" is excerpted in
"Excursions to the Saguenay" is not given in the article.
Whoever he was, his account of the Saguenay takes its place beside two
others that lie very centrally in the background of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, providing the poem with many of its
scenic details and descriptive phrases: George Lanman's A Tour to the River Saguenay in Lower Canada, first published in the
United States and (under another title) in Britain in 1848 and William
Burr's Pictorial Voyage to
Canada, American Frontier, and the Saguenay . . . , first published
in Boston in 1850 to accompany one of the biggest and most influential
tourist attractions in the eastern United States and Canada between
1849 and 1854: Burr's "Moving Panorama" or "Seven Mile
Mirror" of the waterways between Niagara Falls and the upper
reaches of the Saguenay. The story of Burr's
Moving Mirror (as he himself called it) has been told in detail
and at some length by Joseph Earl Arrington in an article that is
certain to appeal to anyone who is interested in the historical
surroundings of The St. Lawrence
and the Saguenay.76 Executed in 1848 and 1849 after a sketching
trip by Burr and fellow artists along the Niagara-Lake
Ontario-St. Lawrence-Saguenay route, the Moving
Mirror was painted on "rolls of canvas of enormous
size"77 which, when unrolled in front of audiences first in New
York City (between September, 1849 and January, 1850), then in Boston
(between February, 1850 and July, 1851), and subsequently elsewhere in
the eastern United States, gave viewers what contemporaries described
as "`a continuous representation of all the interesting . . .
rivers,"' "`grand objects of nature,"'
"`stupendous resources,"' "`beautiful cities,"'
"`beauty and sublimity"'78 on the route from Buffalo to
Niagara Falls and thence down the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay.
Whether one of those viewers was Sangster will probably never be
known,79 but what is certain from internal evidence in The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay itself is that the Canadian poet had
knowledge of the "lecture" or guidebook80 that Burr wrote to
accompany his panorama, drawing for this purpose on two of the other
prose works that furnished materials for Sangster's poem: John
Howison's Sketches of Upper
Canada (see, for example, Explanatory Notes, 37) and the Tour
to the River Saguenay by Charles Lanman, which was mentioned a few
moments ago (see Explanatory Notes, 912f. and ff.). Not least of
the influences of Burr's Moving
Mirror in the late 'fifties and 'sixties was in "encouraging
imitative pictorial records of the St. Lawrence waterway system "81--and,
it must be added, narrative accounts in both prose and poetry of the
same region. That The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay was to some extent written and published
with the hope of exploiting the vogue generated by Burr for the
scenery along the two rivers of its title seems more than likely.
Certainly, the poem was recommended to tourists by one reviewer,82
and, more important, it had been expanded and revised by Sangster by
as early as 1862 83 along lines that suggest his desire to make it more
appealing to travellers. "The leading Poem [in the St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay volume] does not amount to much--all the rapids are Embraced in one Stanza," he told
W.D. Lighthall in November, 1888, adding that, in the expanded and
revised version, the rapids "are . . . written out at length,
giving each a character of its own, historical touches have been
thrown in, as well as stanzas in a diversity of subjects . . . with
here and there a legend, giving more diversity, and making the thing a
little more worthy of the Subject, in Every way."84 (As The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay became more touristic, so,
evidently, did it become generically more topographical through the
inclusion of greater proportions of landscape description,
"historical retrospection," and "incidental
meditation.") In 1888 Sangster's ambition for the new version of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay was to reissue it as an illustrated
book that would capitalize on the still strong interest in Canadian
scenery and history that is typified by the Picturesque
Canada volumes of the 'eighties and later; 85 as he told Lighthall
in July of that year: "the Poem would make a goodly sized book,
with the descriptive notes, as it is more than twice as long as the
first draft, and is to form the letter press of an illustrated work on
the Thousand Islands and the downward route generally as far as Ha!
Ha! Bay this year or the next. My nephew Amos W. Sangster of Buffalo,
who is now issuing the last number of an illustrated work on the
Niagara intends to take the St. Lawrence River for his next venture,
following the route I have mentioned. He is a painter and
Engraver."86 Between November, 1888 and July, 1891 Sangster and
his nephew repeatedly made and cancelled plans to undertake a
sketching trip towards their proposed book: "We will go down
together," Sangster told Lighthall, "calling at Montreal,
Quebec, and other places, taking in the Saguenay as far as Ha! Ha!
Bay."87 If
this planned trip had taken place, it would not have been the first
time that Sangster had travelled down the St. Lawrence and up the
Saguenay. As sub-editor of The
British Whig, and in the peripatetic tradition of the paper's
owner and editor, Dr. Edward John Barker,88 Sangster embarked in the
early summer of 1853 on an assignment that would take him by the end
of the season and, as it happens, on the steamboat Rowland
Hill, to the upper reaches of the Saguenay and back to Kingston.
Fortunately, all but part of one of the "Letters" that
Sangster wrote to The British
Whig under the title "Etchings by the Way" during his
travels between May and September, 1853 have survived (all were
published, most under or over the initials "C.S.," in the
Daily and the Weekly British
Whig), and the pertinent ones are reprinted as Appendix I in the
present edition. A juxtaposition of the descriptions in Letter XI of
"Etchings by the Way," 142-160 and stanza LXVIII of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay of the picturesque village of Les
Eboulements (on the north shore of the St. Lawrence below Quebec)
confirms the authorship of the "Letters" and provides a
striking instance of the sometimes very close relationship between
Sangster's poetry and prose:
In
his note to the following stanza in The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, Sangster describes Les Eboulements
as "A most delightful little village . . . , looking like a
vision of Romance or Fairy-tale": EBOULEMENTS sleeps serenely in the arms Of the Maternal hill, upon whose breast It lies, like a sweet, infant soul, whose charms Fill some fond mother's bosom with that rest Caused by the presence of a heavenly guest. How coyly-close-it nestles! how retired, Half conscious of its charms, and half oppress'd As with a blushing sense of being admired; As
modest as a gem, with gem-like beauty fired. (781-789) The
fact that none of Sangster's principal touristic sources--neither
Burr nor Lanman--so much as mentions Les eboulements can only
emphasize the authenticity of the Canadian poet's response to a
village that would later function like a "lodestone" for
Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott.89 Perhaps the
preceding descriptions of Les eboulements will convince some readers
that Sangster's real talent lay less in poetry (let alone Pacey's
light opera) than in descriptive prose. Be this as it may, the shape
of Sangster's account of his sight-seeing trip in the summer of
1853--the mere fact, for example, that in his "Etchings by
the Way" he describes in detail both his outward and his return journeys--throws into relief
the structural and teleological dimensions of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, emphasizing once again in doing so
that, in the published version of the poem at least, the touristic
sources and elements of many of Sangster's descriptions are
subordinated to his central theme of sanctified "Human
Love." In
the March 28, 1836 issue of the The
Weekly British Whig, there appeared the following advertisement: PROSPECTUS.
A
New Canadian Volume.
A
second Prospectus, published in The
Weekly British Whig between April 4 and May 9, 1956,90 repeats the
information given on March 28, supplementing it with the locations of
subscription lists: SUBSCRIPTION
LISTS
The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems itself, together with materials in the Department of Rare Books at
McGill University (the Sangster-Lighthall letters and the poet's
list of "Subscriptions to `The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and
Other Poems,' dated "March 1856"), supply further details of
the publication and sale of the book, a bibliographical description of
which is given in a note.91 "My
1st Vol. published in 1856 was copyrighted by Miller Orton &
Mulligan ["Stereotypers and Printers" of Auburn, New York],
but was done as a job--I was really the Publisher."92 The
first part of Sangster's statement to Lighthall is borne out by the
copyright statement in The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems,93 and the second
accords, of course, with Sangster's financing of the book through the
sale of subscriptions. According to his list of
"Subscriptions," Sangster raised £185. 18. 3d. from over
three hundred subscribers (many of whom bought more than one book),
first at seven shillings and six pence each and then at five
shillings, for a combined total (with a few "Casual Sales"
at less than three shillings) of about seven hundred and fifty books. 94 Notations in the "Subscriptions" list indicate that a
thousand copies of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems were printed, and
Sangster's comment to Lighthall in July, 1888 that he owns none but
"imperfect copies"95 of his two published volumes (the other
being Hesperus, and Other Poems
and Lyrics [1860]) indicates that eventually all of these were
disposed of. The twenty-odd excerpts from reviews of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems that are appended
to the Hesperus volume
suggest that a considerable number of copies of Sangster's first book
were sent for review to newspapers in Canada, England, and the United
States.96 In the May 9,
1856 issue of the Toronto Daily
Colonist a review of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay that is clearly based on information
provided by the poet as well as on the "first sheets of [the]
poem" asserts that the book will be "in the hands of
booksellers for distribution before the close of the month."97
Evidently, this did not occur, however, for the "Dedication"
to The St. Lawrence and the
Saguenay, and Other Poems is dated "June, 1856" and the volume was not reviewed in The
Weekly British Whig until July 4, about a month behind schedule
but still only some three months after the first appearance of its
"Prospectus" on March 28.98 By and large, The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems was well received
by the reviewers, many of whom had special praise for the title poem
of the volume.99 Although confessedly biased in favour of the poet who
"has been for some years engaged in the British Whig
Office," the author of "Our Table" in The Weekly British Whig is not atypical in his positive yet tempered
assessment of Sangster's poems, which seem to him to envince
"much careful study, great taste, and very tolerable poetic
powers."100 Finding "much sweetness and true poesy" in
the opening lines of The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay, he also quotes two stanzas describing
"the mountains of the Saguenay" (LXXXVII and LXXXVIII) as
evidence that Sangster, "though given to the melting mood,"
can also "sing both loud and nobly." Before 1856 had come to
an end, The British Whig also
published "The Poets of Canada," an article by Thomas
MacQueen which concludes with a very astute and balanced assessment of
Sangster and The St. Lawrence
and the Saguenay: Charles Sangster is a poet of a different order [than
Alexander McLachlan]. He has adopted far loftier models and struck the
Lyre on a much higher key. His whole soul seems steeped in love and
poesy, and finds utterance in expression generally eloquent, bold and
musical. He is thoroughly sentimental, teeming with ideas of the
sublime and beautiful, which though somewhat diffuse at times, bear
evident marks of enthusiastic poetical conception. Mr. Sangster's muse
loves to revel in scenery, sentiment and simile--She is
essentially etherial, and the common reader who attempts to follow
her, will be in some danger of getting wandered in the clouds. Still
Mr. S[angster] is a poet of no mean order, and his volume is far the
most respectable contribution of poetry that has yet been made to the
infant literature of Canada: but he is not Canadian enough in his
subjects. This is the chief objection, and it is a serious
one.--The first Earl of Chatham we think, said, "Give me the
making of a country's ballads and I care not who make her Laws,"
and there is much meaning and much truth in the saying. But the
ballads would require to be well made--made to the
point--made in the country and on the country, and embodying such
tales, legends, scenes, feats, customs and occurrences as would truly
represent the country and secure the prejudices, feelings and
sympathies of her people. Surely there is sufficient variety in Canada
and Canadian life, to afford material for national poetry, and had Mr.
Sangster woven a simple narrative into the profusion of imagery and
sentiment of his "St. Lawrence and the Saguenay," the poem
might not have been more poetical or more meritorious, but it would
have been more popular.--Many of Mr. Sangster's smaller pieces
are really full of life and feeling, of which we will likely give our
reader some specimens in future.101 As
astute and balanced as this assessment is in its opening sentences, it
finally judges wine (the lofty models and etherial muse of Sangster)
against beer (the more popular, down-to-earth quality of
"the people's poet," MacQueen's phrase earlier in the
article, for Alexander McLachlan). In so doing, however, it raises the
important issue of the audience and appeal of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems, particularly of
the volume's decidedly not "simple" title poem. Sangster was
evidently proud that "The subscription list [for his first
volume] include[d] the names of the principal member of government,
and the most eminent statesmen from both Houses of Parliament," 102
and it
must be conceded that many aspects of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay--its
elevated diction, its
touristic element, its philosophical component, its
"diffuse" and "sentimental" treatment of love and
landscape--would appeal especially, if not exclusively, to an
educated middle- and upper-class audience--the
audience which, as the very existence of the present edition suggests,
continues to find much in the poem that appeals and intrigues. Although
excerpts from The St. Lawrence
and the Saguenay have appeared in numerous anthologies, from
Longfellow's Poems of Places (1879; see Appendix II) to Margaret Atwood's New
Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, the poem has hitherto been
reproduced in its entirety only three times: once in facsimile in the
University of Toronto Press's Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose
in Reprint series (The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay and Other Poems, Hesperus and Other Poems
and Lyrics, with an Introduction by Gordon Johnston [1972]);
once in an anthology in the New Canadian Library Series (Nineteenth-Century
Narrative Poems, edited by David Sinclair [1972]);
and, more recently, in a "Revised Edition" from the
Tecumseh Press (St. Lawrence and
The Saguenay and Other Poems, edited by Frank M. Tierney [1984]).
Basing itself, inevitably, on the first edition of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, the present text has benefitted
from an awareness of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the
versions of the text produced by Johnston, Sinclair, and Tierney.
Neither a mere reproduction of the first edition (Johnston) nor a
hybrid of the first edition and the extant new and revised stanzas of
the poem (Tierney), the present text of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay most resembles Sinclair's in being
emended but to a minimal degree and principally in the areas of
spelling and punctuation. All departures from the first edition of The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay in the present text are recorded in
the list of Editorial Emendations that follows the poem.
An
earlier version of portions of this Introduction was published as
"Through Endless Landscapes: Notes on Charles Sangster's The
St. Lawrence and the Saguenay" in Essays
on Canadian Writing, 27 (Winter, 1983-84), pp. 1-34.
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