| Byron on Wordsworth: Light and Occasional
Verse in the Scott/Aylen Papers
by Stan
Dragland
In his "Memoir" of Duncan Campbell Scott, E.K. Brown quotes a "perceptive woman, the wife of one of his most intimate friends," to the effect that Duncan Campbell Scott's habitually fixed and melancholy expression was 'not his real face,' but a mask that had formed upon it" (xviii). The portrait of the mask is a somewhat forbidding frontispiece to the Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (published in 1926, two years after "Bryon on Wordsworth"). A relaxed pose, subtle lighting and the cloud of smoke from Scott's cigarette make the Karsh photo in Selected Poems (1951) much more attractive, but the mask is still in place. One might well interpret the mask as William Arthur Deacon did to Scott himself, writing on December 10, 1935 to encourage his friend to be more aggressive in literary and other ways. "You have always been so shy," says Deacon, "as to appear aloof and haughty — even disdainful. I know you are none of these terrible things." Scott would not have needed reminding of the dead pan disguising his warm human self, but he had been wearing a mask, not exactly by choice, for most of his life. There was something he could do about his impassiveness, though. He was a writer; he could put on another sort of mask. He does this obviously in his fiction, employing narrator/personae, but the "I" of a good poet is never strictly autobiographical either, and Scott's good poetry always involves a speaker more or less detached from himself. When his art is acknowledged as such, poems like "The Height of Land" may be read as something more than versifications of his view of life, as poems, proceedings of a search for something elusive ("Something," capitalized, in "The Height of Land). The voice in Scott's poem is not a fancy version of his everyday voice, then, but that of an "other" whose acquaintance the poems were written to cultivate. The real Scott is invisible in his poems. An autobiographical approach to them is irrelevant. Why not overstate it thus, at least? It might be interesting to see what we find if we regard Scott's work as free-standing, and if we ask a lot of it. At any rate, there is no question that Scott is wearing a mask — that of Lord Byron — in "Byron on Wordsworth." Perhaps it should not seem strange that the solemn conservative puts on the irreverent iconoclast. Masks are for concealing identity, after all. Or revealing it. "Byron on Wordsworth" does not surprise readers of Scott's friendly and witty letters, and probably it should not have been a surprise to find the poem in the Scott/Aylen papers (located by Robert McDougall and deposited in the Public Archives of Canada), among a group of poems and related material, chiefly unpublished typescripts and magazine clippings, headed, in Scott's own hand, "Paradoxes Limericks and Other Nonsense." "Byron on Wordsworth," is probably Scott's most "serious" and sustained piece of light verse, and I want to give it a close look, but not before I summarize the context supplied for it in the Scott/Aylen papers, quoting liberally the best of this fugitive material by way of writing it into the record. Much of it is light verse, some of that being occasional poetry, and some of it is occasional poetry of a more formal sort. Since the published Scott is not a poet one picks up for amusement, the existence of a streak of light verse changes somewhat the picture we have of his work. But Scott did write and publish important occasional poems, and it is interesting that this kind should be linked with the light verse by Scott's conflating the two categories in his papers.I "Paradoxes Limericks and Other Nonsense" is a rather misleading title. Besides the material just mentioned, the section contains clippings of serious non-occasional poems published in various magazines and newspapers: "In Snow Time," "The Twentieth of December," "A Song," "To My Friend Leonard W. Brockington" (dated Christmas 1942), "At William MacLennan's Grave," "The Wise Men From the East, A Christmas Carol" (a presentation card, "specially written for the Robert Simpson Co."). A sonnet, a wistful lament for the loss of summer, appeared in The Kamloops Standard for September 15, 1922, bearing the title "Cats!" That Scott was unamused by the incongruity created by the supplied title is suggested by his having circled "Cats!" on the clipping," and attached a large X to it, replacing it with a handwritten "September," the title under which it appears in Poems. Why The Kamloops Standard? Scott was in British Columbia with Charles Stewart, his minister, on Indian Affairs business. A note to that effect accompanies the poem. There are few limericks in the collection; only a single one about "an old man of Khartoum" and a series of "Nantucket Limericks," each playing laboriously (and with none of the zest of the best known Nantucket limerick) on humourous New England names like Maddequet and Quidnet. (Not all of Scott's light verse succeeds in being funny.) There is nothing that obviously fits the category of paradox. Scott probably meant parody. There are three parodies, each of them quite irreverent. "To Irene" (glossed in Scott's hand as "Mrs. [Madge] Macbeth's cook"), "with apologies to EAP," imitates the shorter of Poe's two invocations "To Helen." Comparing a short passage from each poem, we see that an apology was called for:To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome. * To hail the peerless Chicken-Stew And the gentle Apple-Sauce. Scott's poem does not mock Poe's, either in form or content, but "In Shropshire," dated March 19, 1923, undercuts the pastoralism and the simple verse forms of A.E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad. Here are three of the ten stanzas:
The best of the parodies, untitled, makes an alcoholic mash of William Morris' symbolic ballad, "Two Red Roses Across the Moon" (from The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems), a typescript of which was saved along with the parody. This bacchanalian lowlife piece, narrated by an apparently reluctant participant, has a wonderful first line; in fact the whole thing stands pretty well on its own. That is to say, it does not satirize and thus depend on the form, as G.S. Calverly's parodies of latter-day balladeers did (see The Defence 245), though it would probably be difficult to pass from noses back to roses keeping a straight face: I— His mother-in-law, and the bride and the groom: Three red noses across the room. II III IV V VI VII
This poem occasionally nudges into nonsense (the unexpected "sucking flume" and "sheepskin broom") reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's. Another poem, "Alice Mary" ("She lives at wild Elora/ Her father's name is Whistlepipe"), is of this sort though less accomplished and not very funny. But most of what Scott calls nonsense, lacking Carroll's weird non sequitur and generally mad leaps of association, would really be more accurately termed light verse. Only one of these light poems was published. The others appear in typescript, except for "The German Apple Cake," which is in Scott's hand. The published poem is "First Class Car," by "Oliver Gascoigne." This is the only pseudonymous Scott poem I know of, other than the odd one written for contests. Scott was "In Ardua Tendit" as author of "The Home Comers" (also included in the Nonsense section of the Scott/Aylen papers), first prize winner of a Globe and Empire competition "for the best poems on the Old Home sentiment." Probably "First Class Car" would have been impossible to trace to Scott if his own clipping did not bear both the annotation "Toronto Saturday Night May 8 '37" and "DCS," with an arrow pointing to Gascoigne's name. Here is Gascoigne/Scott's account of rail travel in the thirties, a fast-paced lyrical free verse meditation periodically thumped to earth by interspersed mundanities:O the rapture of rushing along Through the springtime world, The right-of-way catkined With tangle of alder thickets; (tickets, pkase, tickets), Caught on a wing of the wind The shout of a robin, As if he would break his heart With a hammer of sound. (Fresh fruit, shokiets and shewing gum). Gem sparkles of topaz light From glaucous buds; (Tickets, please, tickets), Last year's buirushes — ruined — And the young rush-blades Spearing up sharp and cool Sure of their place in the pool; (No, son — we get to Bumpuille At six-fifty-nine, not seven); A section-man's house Fresh paint, red blankets in the sun; (Mugg Corners — second stop, Sure sister, I'll let you off); Flash — a red-winged blackbird (Fresh fruit, shocklets, and shewing gum) There by the osiers, red as blood, (Albert, where's that gum?) Dragon's blood — flash, gone (I spit it out). A meadow — promise of yellow eyes, (Albert, I lent it you), Buttercups, dandelions, (You give it to me, the pep was all gone), A vista of pasture Where a ewe mothers a lamb; (Albert, I'd have liked a chew, Why don't you ever think of others?) The engine shrieks with delight! Beyond those pines on the rise The lake-blue skies, So dark the serene profound; If one could only adventure beyond, Well, beyond only beyond — ! (Tickets, please, tickets). Besides the light verse already mentioned, there are two fish poems, "Ode to the Gold Eye," commemorating a meal caught in Lake Winnipeg and addressed "to a rival poet;" and "The Fish Story: With Advice to all Fisher Maidens," subtitled "triolets for Jane [Edgar]." The lighthearted tone of two other poems is indicated by their titles: "To Miss Betty Henderson Who Gave Me a Pocket Pencil" and "Valentine to an Ottawa Girl." Marian Osborne's name can be deciphered from a Scott scrawl on this poem. Her name is also written, with a question mark, on an anonymous four stanza poem called "Duncan Campbell Scott" and dated at the Ottawa Little Theatre, January 7, 1928. This is the only poem in the collection, other than "Two Red Roses," that is not Scott's own, and its author sounds like "a perceptive woman" who knows about Scott's mask. She describes him as "a tall man,/ courteous, calm, austere . . . ," goes on to mention some of his verse, and concludes with a suggestion not unlike that of Deacon:
I would like to quote one other poem in full at this point, the only one of the lot left in Scott's handwriting. This is "The German Apple Cake," a recipe combining culinary and versifying expertise and somewhat unexpectedly situating the poet in the kitchen:
it is done. — You must acknowledge long before you're thru with it That Adolph Hitler had No thing to do with it. I have no idea why the apples should be arranged to spell Gooderich, if indeed I have deciphered the word accurately. Perhaps it is Marian's family name. The last stanza comment is an odd one. A reader might honour Scott's distinction between "old Germany" and Nazi Germany and still wonder what happened to the holocaust. "Expulsion of the Jews" certainly doesn't cover it. Two observations might be made about the heterogeneous group of poems mentioned so far. One is that many of them, especially poems about eating and addresses to women, sound like a shy man's social gestures. These are occasional poems expressing a poet's thank you for hospitality or generosity, or else extending some generosity of his own. There would be no thought of publishing such off-hand pieces. The other point worth making is that, though the man who writes them is, as it were, on holiday, he shows signs of the real poet he was. The matter is light, but the formal variety is quite wide, and the technical proficiency often considerable, especially given the probable quickness of composition.II In the same catch-all category with the poems just discussed, there are occasional poems of a more formal sort: "Ode on the Centenary of Florence Nightingale," "Lines on the Peace Arch," "Hymn For those in the Air," "A Farewell to their Majesties," "Ode on the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of James Russell Lowell," and an untitled one headed "Read by Duncan Campbell Scott at Dr. Thomas Gibson's Birthday Dinner October twenty-seventh Nineteen hundred and twenty-two." The last two poems are represented in Scott's collection by typescripts, and all but the Florence Nightingale poem by newspaper clippings. There is also a copy of the pamphlet entitled "Prologue," "Spoken by Dorothy White at the Opening of The Little Theatre, Ottawa, Fourth of February, 1928." The Gibson poem is the only one to have much in common with "Byron on Wordsworth," though the "Prologue" has some amusing moments. Most of the others, though their titles will remind Scott readers of the elegiac memorials ("Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris," "Ode for the Keats Centenary" and "On the Death of Claude Debussy") are really part of the strand of Scott's poetic career that seems most easily reconcilable with his public persona as civil servant, or with Doctor Scott, Man of Letters. This strand is woven of poems written out of patriotic motives by an unofficial poet laureate. Scott is called "the equivalent of a Poet Laureate" in a note heading the newspaper clipping of the CBC-commissioned "A Farewell to Their Majesties." "The idea," as Gladstone Murray put it to Scott on May 5, 1939, "would be to switch over from the final commentary on the departure from the Maritimes, to the Halifax studios, where your poem would be broadcast with the National Anthem as postscript." The CBC also published a broadside of the poem, with an explanatory note about its honouring "the occasion of the departure of Their Majesties the King and Queen from Canada on June 15, 1939." The poem did its work, to judge from the congratulatory mail Scott received about it, though it does nothing to disprove the theory that poet and laureate are mutually exclusive terms. (Nor does a poem written almost forty years earlier for a similar occasion, not one of those found in Scott's papers, entitled "Canada to the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, representing King Edward VII on their Visit to the Canadian People, Sept. 1901," Scott's poem was a fancy broadside inserted into copies of The Montreal Star. The reverse side bears a message from Edward himself: gratitude for the sympathy extended by his "Great Dominions" over his recent bereavement, and determination to continue according to the "great example" of his mother.) It is a short step from reinforcing royalist and imperial sentiment to versifying support of the National War Effort. "Hymn for Those in the Air" did not appear in Scott's 1917 pamphlet, "To the Canadian Mothers, and Three Other Poems," which was "sold for the benefit of the Prisoners of War Fund," but it might have, since it was written about aviators in the First War. "To the Canadian Mothers", by the way, is not a companion piece to Scott's Little Theatre "Prologue," though the same Henri Fabien cover design (an attractive floral border) which was donated for the earlier cause also serves the latter, as proceeds from the sale of the pamphlet went to the Little Theatre. Scott's "poet laureate" work continued into the next war. There is among his papers a May 10, 1945 letter from John Grierson saying how moved he was by a poem of Scott's "read by Leonard Brockington, in the closing passage of his commentary on our film 'Salute to a Victory.'" Two typescript versions of the Florence Nightingale ode appear in the Scott/Aylen papers, one with stanzas numbered and one without, together with a page torn from the March 1, 1920 number of the Bulletin of the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada in which the poem appeared. (Eventually it was collected in The Circle of Affection.) It is a fitting if unremarkable tribute to "the frail, lovely lady with the lamp" whose "steady light" now "Floods the whole world." "Lines on the Peace Arch" was probably written on the trip that lodged "Cats!/September" in the Kamloops paper, or on a similar one taken in 1923, though Scott's clipping is not annotated with date or place of publication. The item, illustrated by a picture of the monument to international cooperation at Blame, Washington, has an editorial note about Scott and party visiting the Arch, to be "shown the advantage of the creation of a park area there." Scott saluted the monument, the note continues, because he was "so impressed with its beauty and its meaning. . . ." Impressed but not inspired, I have to say, after reading the poem's three "generic" stanzas. The Lowell ode is also interesting more for the occasion than for the verse itself. A letter from Scott to Pelham Edgar, dated January 21, 1919, encloses the ode for Edgar's comment and reveals that the two friends had been invited to the celebration of Lowell's birthday. "I am not much given to public appearances, Scott writes, "but I really think that if these lines are worthy, I ought to offer them as a contribution to the general festival of good feeling." I hope that Edgar counselled the substitution of a few premeditated off-the-cuff remarks, because Scott's poem is pedestrian. Two poems among the group under scrutiny are occasional poems of a mainly light-hearted character which yet acknowledge the nearness of laughter and tears. These are the Little Theatre "Prologue" and the poem for Thomas Gibson. Both show a little of the carnival spirit of "Byron on Wordsworth." "Prologue" comprises five pages of couplets written to announce, though not in this order, a St. John Ervine play, a new season in the refurbished theatre, and a credo: "As you all know 'tis our confirmed intent/ To foster native plays and actors. . . ." Scott also pleads for a critical audience for serious drama, one that understands why not all plays can be comedies:Life on this earth Is a rough turmoil tempered with small mirth, Laughter comes dancing in, a gypsy elf, Seeming all joy, sufficient to herself; But as a rainbow gets her beauty from rain And the purple rain-cloud, laughter's debt to pain Is a dark background wet with tears. But the idea is to offer all kinds of plays, "plays as various as life / Is various.— ! That is the part was played by Molly Steeve. Everyone says, my dear, it's an awful show, If that's the truth we'll simply have to go." Of course I only say this just to tease . . . . You might throw out a subversive suggestion, in the Ottawa of 1928, but you had to haul it back. The subtext of the "Prologue" is the provinciality of the capital city in 1928. The Gibson poem has more variety than "Prologue." Over three typed pages it mixes seriousness and fun, rhymed sections and sections of rhymed free verse. The form, then, is the fairly typical Scott medley. ("In musical terms, the basic Scott structure is a set of variations," according to Gordon Johnston, in Duncan Campbell Scott n.p.). One of the poem's movements is a lyrical flight into a vision of life redeemed from "the sordid and inconsequent world," "the strange maze/ That we call Life" by a "transfiguring touch" in Gibson, a "charm that wins the soul and heals the heart." The charm seems at first to be language, "pictures on the screen of sense" with resources for healing "beyond the leeches art," but other indications in the poem suggest that Scott has music in mind. Just before the poem ends with an invitation to toast the guest of honour Scott praises "the kind fates who mixed his being," who "gave him so much and then gave music too." And when Scott published this section of the poem in Poems, he replaced Gibson with the abstract "Music," and called the piece "At the Piano (A Fragment)." This might have been detachable from the birthday salute because it had been stitched in for the occasion, but the "fragment" does not feel fragmentary. The subtitle would seem to be, though cryptic, a signal that there had once been more to the poem. At any rate, the passage demonstrates that articulated pain is cleansing, and it makes one feel that Scott cared enough for Gibson to hazard some wistful yearning imagery not normally associated with convivial occasions. The expected note is struck in the poem's 26-line opening section, though, and in a way that feels like a preparation for "Byron on Wordsworth." In fact one "stanza" lifted out of the first section, is not far from Don Juan's ottava nina, and is self-referential like "Byron on Wordsworth." Everyone, including Gibson, "must pay a rising rent" to Time,
III "Byron on Wordsworth" was dedicated to one of Scott's best friends, Col. Henry Osborne, a member of the dining club that Scott belonged to "during the last quarter century of his life," according to E .K. Brown, who recounts the pleasure Scott took in
"Not much is known about the dinner club," according to Robert McDougall. It "seems to have had no other purpose than to provide congenial occasions for the meeting of good minds. The setting was usually the Country Club, across the river, on the Aylmer Road" (The Poet and the Critic 242). "Byron on Wordsworth" must have confirmed Scott's standing as valuable member of a club dedicated to fairly highbrow fun. Something of the appreciative response Scott likely enjoyed when he first read the poem aloud is caught in this reaction, dated twenty years later (November 19, 1944), in a letter from Sir Patrick Duff, Deputy High Commissioner for the United Kingdom:
Some others, outside the club, were sent copies of the printed poem. The first copy I saw was a typescript in the Lorne Pierce Collection at Queen's University. It bears this annotation: "Copied from C.G.D. Roberts' own — on which he had written 'Charles G.D. Roberts His copy of these immortal verses of D.C.S.' LP 7: IX: 25" If Scott had a printed copy left to give Sir Patrick in 1944, he could have sent Lorne Pierce one in 1925. Possibly Scott considered Pierce a touch too Methodist to be the poem's ideal reader. The poem which follows was printed on both sides of a single sheet of cover-weight paper which was then folded in folio. The dedication, the occasion, the title, subtitle, and author's name, with three stanzas, occupy the first page; four stanzas appear on each of the other three. Scott has had to correct in longhand a misprint ("By" for "But") in the last line of stanza eight.BYRON ON WORDSWORTH
That he could pose and smirk and safely do it, 'Twas quite all right so long as no one knew it. No I don't blame him, that is not
the point, No I don't blame him, but the
effect on me "The child is father of the man"; — that was his plaint, But some men do not linger in society Quite long enough — I might have been a Saint; My famed concupiscence and inebriety Might have developed into something quaint, If I'd matured the seeds of "natural piety", But they were burnt up and destroyed, Fate harsh is, By fever in the Missolonghi marshes. Thus far I wrote when I was
called to Heaven The prettiest female angels and eleven Apostles waiting for me at the bar! St. Peter said, "I really hope, dear Byron, "That you won't find it damp here, we've no fire on." Heaven was a
disappointment from the first, Who looked me up the moment that I landed. He keeps alive his bright and bitter zest; He scorns to do whatever is commanded. "To put us here was but a sorry jest, "A verdict fair", he said, "to be quite candid, "Would send us down to Hell with our own set, "Described in Aucassin and Nicolette". I've seen the
Laureat of eighteen-fifty He told me how
this early escapade She seemed to walk with him in wild delight, Most at the dewy hour when twilight clears For the young stars the threshold of the night, When the dark southern swallow dips and veers, — The stranger birds seemed laden in their flight, With all high thought of her serene and holy, Without a touch of dread or melancholy. "I'm far", he often
said, "from weak contritions, "Byron on Wordsworth" is a fragmentary fictional addition to the poem of a man 100 years dead but envisioned as paying attention to the literary affairs of earth from a vantage point in Purgatory. Byron is represented, that is, as having read the "tale" he refers to in the first line: Emile Legouis' William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon. (An asterisk following the line, in the printed poem, sends one to the bottom of the page and the citation of Legouis' book.) Scott uses a convenient conventional afterlife to disguise the anachronism which collapses Byron and himself, so that there are always at least two voices speaking dialogically in the poem — Byron is ventriloquized by Scott. In fact there is really a triangular relationship of sorts here, because the two poets are sharing the one persona. This is just to say that the apparently autobiographical "I" of Don Juan is a persona too, quite a different one from the brooding Byronic hero of earlier poems on whom (to mention the two poets from "the rich Fatherland of Song & Rhyme" who come into Scott's stanzas) the second part of Goethe's Faust is based, and on whom Heine for a time modelled his own persona. Don Juan invites extra stanzas, being both digressive and unfinished. In fact the editors of the Variorum Byron cite almost twenty "imitations and continuations" of the poem between 1832 and 1908 (312-313). Byron boasts, in Canto XV, stanza 19 of Don Juan, thatnever straining hard to versify I rattle on exactly as I'd talk With anybody in a ride or walk. Easy for him to rattle on, stanza after stanza, as though the English language naturally fell into ottava rima. By and large, Sir Patrick Duff is right: Byron would be pleased with what Scott has done with the form. A few of the rhymes do seem paused over and not quite outrageous enough to enjoy the true Byron touch (though "harsh is" and "marshes" deserve mention), and the odd line pads out the metre, but the versifying is more than just competent, and several of the concluding couplets are every bit as witty as those of Byron. In fact one of those couplets is Byron's, taken out of its context in Don Juan XII, 63 so Scott can work a different sense out of the lines for his own first stanza. Scott also shows a Byronic versatility with ottava nina when, in stanzas 13 and 14 of his poem, he slides into a serious celebratory tone. This move is intertextually impressive too. It folds in Wordsworth's voice, his diction and imagery, along with allusions to some of his poems, so that not two but three poets are suddenly and comfortably occupying the same lines and persona. The couplet that ends the poem is a generalization based on Wordsworth's posthumous realization that "his early passion" became "the solace of a dull life after." In a kind of ironic recantation, sins and transgressions are transferred to the position in Wordsworth's myth of mental return once held by other sorts of splendour in the grass like the Wye Valley and a host of daffodils. And the Wordsworth whose poetry is frequently mocked in prefaces and stanzas of Don Juan actually wins Byron's respect and support by the end of "Byron on Wordsworth." It seems that Wordsworth has drawn Byron's satiric teeth by making no bones about the Byronic episode in his past. "The character shown by the beginning of this story was a real young man," says Legouis, "not a premature sage" (xiii). Byron and Wordsworth, once (at least to Byron) poles apart, are not in Scott's poem so readily distinguishable. There is a Byronically original shift of another sort in the transitional stanza 9 which alters the setting from Purgatory to Heaven. The reader has been led to expect a "promotion" for Byron — it is foreshadowed in stanza 6 — but not prepared for the way it is expressed, in a self-reflexive pause to mention the stanzas we have just been reading: "Thus far I wrote when I was called to Heaven." Sometimes self reflexivity, that touchstone of postmodernism, seems old hat. Byron has about paid his dues (100 years of purgatory for choosing a life of "strings, pipes and tabors" over the dull, the straight and narrow? Not a bad price.) but the news of his seven new stanzas to Don Juan — make it eight ("I went to par") — seems to break the final seal between Purgatory and Heaven. So "Byron on Wordsworth" falls into two parts, with the division coming at stanza nine. The final six stanzas are set in Heaven. Alternatively, the poem might be divided into the stanzas which have to do with Wordsworth and the revision to his reputation (the first eight stanzas and the last four), with a transition between them that introduces Byron into Heaven — one stanza for the trip and two to report on the place. The structure of a fragment is unlikely to be its strength, but "Byron on Wordsworth" is quite cleanly laid out. Scott's poem is very curious in the way it plays with and blurs the traditional categories of Heaven and Hell, just as it resolves differences between Byron and Wordsworth. In stanzas five and six, Byron talks of his desire to make it to Heaven, where he could tread the presumably greener grass "with Wordsworth, Coleridge and their crew" — his former butts. He is on the point of retracting Don Juan, in fact of declaring his whole career an adolescent pose of subversion, when the news of Wordsworth's youthful slip reaches him, threatens to spoil his reformation, and inspires the new stanzas of the poem. These are less than penitent, because Byron can now read Wordsworth's life "unexpurgated" and thus can see a parallel between Wordsworth's youthful indiscretions and his own. This helps him to deconstruct the paradigm of "My Heart Leaps Up": the child is the father of the man, Wordsworth "began" in transgression and ended up "A Saint." So the only difference between the elder poet and the younger is that the latter died young. Perishing at Missolonghi, Byron was prevented from maturing into his own child and was, moreover, penalized a century in Purgatory. Milton's Satan would have loved this logic. When Byron vaults out of Purgatory into Heaven merely for a change of scene and society, with womanizing instincts intact and tongue still in cheek, reversing the path of Lucifer in Paradise Lost ("thro' ether like a rebel star"), you have to feel that his penitence was for show, and moreover that the gate is not as strait as once it was. There are a number of angelic slackers and apostate apostles waiting there apparently (like the members of Scott's club?) to hear the new stanzas of Byron's poem. The gatekeeper himself is a bit of a wag (see his quip in stanza 9) and has had his fill of immortality. In various ways Heaven does not meet expectations. There is all that boredom, and there is the change in Wordsworth, who may not have explicitly renounced The Excursion, but he now has Byron's opinion of it: full of cant. And now he has broken out of the "dull code" in which he was "encased;" now he cherishes his sins and transgressions. In Heaven? And what is the rebellious Heine, who "scorns to do whatever is commanded," doing here? Heine comes closest to articulating what appears to have happened. People like himself and Byron, and possibly Wordsworth, now that he has seen the dark, are misfits in Heaven. They belong with their own set, in Hell, where they might live the wild life euphemistically signified by those pastoral pipes and tabors, as in "Aucassin and Nicolette." Heaven and Hell are not theological categories, then, but social ones, and what has happened to the displaced iconoclasts (joined by Saint Peter and Saint William) is "a sorry jest," a bitter irony. Admission to Heaven creates sinners out saints; confinement to Heaven bores the rebels silly. Heaven is Hell in the poem, and the identification is supported by certain curious inversions of the heavenly and the hellish. Is it the seeds of "natural piety" (the allusion is to the Intimations Ode) that have matured in Saint Peter? His "frank impiety" as he tends the gate suggests that the achievement of sainthood is not necessarily terminal. In contrast, the sharer of Wordsworth's sin is "serene and holy" in recall. More predictably, perhaps, but still part of this flip-flop of moral categories, is Byron's claim in Stanza 4 that tripping some sort of fantastic through life is preferable to (notice the adjectives) the "damned cant and most infernal trimmin'" of the upright ones who condemned him. The harder one looks at this poem, the more subversive it seems.IV "Subversive" is a word that springs to the lips no more readily than "humorous" when one thinks of Scott's poetry. The word does not stick, either, even if the pose in "Byron on Wordsworth" is not mere pose, and there turns out to be a radical component to Scott's thought. In the present context it is interesting to find Scott again praising Heine, the self-described "mad harlequin" (Sammons 47), in the typescript of an address on the drama of another iconoclast, George Bernard Shaw, that Scott delivered to the membership of the Ottawa Little Theatre. The address underlines a theme of the Little Theatre "Prologue," that theatre should be more than entertainment. Scott's talk is a sometimes hectoring defence of Shaw as a bracing satirist of progressive, if not always original, ideas important to modern thought. In the present context it is fascinating that Scott identifies Shaw's "essential creed" in the words of Don Juan in Act III of Man and Superman. In some respects," Scott says, . . . (38) In fact Scott values Heine more highly than Shaw, he goes on to say, for the "humour and reverence for the right things" which "softened his brilliant satire by touches that gave it shadow and depth" (38). Scott's respect for the man who was called "the German Byron" is high enough to spoil the conclusion of his talk on Shaw, but it is no blanket endorsement of satire — the jaundiced but clarifying view from outside. Scott was not "born for opposition" (Don Juan Canto 15) like Byron or Shaw or Heine. Think of the difference between "Ode for the Keats Centenary, February 23, 1921" and "Byron on Wordsworth," The latter was "Printed for Private Circulation," according to the words that follow the printed version of the poem; the Keats ode was "Read at Hart House Theatre before the University of Toronto." Both poems are dedicated to Romantic poets who died prematurely, but whose work is very different. Scott's commemoratives are appropriately dissimilar. In the Keats ode he is not as derivative, so to speak. He does not put on Keats's form and style, as he does Byron's. His homage to the aesthetic spirit of Keats, invoking especially the tribute to beauty in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," shows that in Canada beauty actually tends to go into hiding. The poem advances a negative view of culture in Canada, but in (slightly whining) lament rather than satire. It gets published while the playful, irreverent, multivocal Byron ode is kept private. Only the most serious part of Dr. Gibson's birthday poem is collected. The 1928 Little Theatre "Prologue" does not appear in a volume at all, though Scott published, in Poems, a more decorous 1923 "Prologue," an allegorical dialogue between the wandering "Spirit of the Drama" and the welcoming "Spirit of the House." Such reservations are eloquent comment on the sense of decorum — even timidity — characteristic of a still-fledgling culture, as eloquent as anything Scott explicitly says on the subject. As in, for instance, "Fragment of an Ode to Canada," the introductory poem in The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott. This is naturally brought to mind by the fragmentary "Byron on Wordsworth," though the "Fragment" in the title of the ode to Canada is only rhetorical, meant to represent the unfinished nature of the nation of the time — 1925, the year after "Byron" — part of an implicit call for singers of heroic songs to celebrate the "Titanic and ebullient heart" of the country. Scott was one of our earliest true voices of the wild, even if not in the "heroic" song the "Fragment" calls for to complement the already achieved domestic pastorals. Some of Scott's work exults in the untamed (like the "splendid hollows of booming thunder" of the storm in "Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon"); some of it faces the dreadful fear that the untamed can cause: the nightmare vision of "Powassan's Drum," or the "ancient disturber of solitude" section of "The Height of Land." "The beauty of terror" is the oxymoronic summation of the storm in "At Gull Lake, August, 1810." Together with the ensuing complementary "beauty of peace" it is probably Scott's most inclusive version of what, according to Dennis Lee, "theologians call the experience of mysterium tremendum — the encounter with holy otherness, to which an appropriate response is awe, joy, terror, gratitude" (The Collected Poems of Al Purdy 383). As civil servant, of course, Scott was himself a tamer, a domesticator of Indians in the name of a grand domesticating programme or assault on otherness known as progress, and his readers have long wondered how such a man could write those wilderness poems. Is it similarly hard to reconcile the Scott of the published poetry and the Scott of "Byron on Wordsworth" and other irreverent verse? Perhaps there is a way of reconciling the public poet and the private poet that bears on the enigma of contradiction between poet and civil servant. The man was an establishmentarian, yes, a man of standing who stood not at the margin but near the centre of the culture and the institutions of his time and place. But, as I have said, he had a knack — he developed a discipline — of masking. He was a writer. To shift the terms, he found a way (not uncommon to artists) to attend to things he could not understand. He could sometimes send intuition where reason would not reach, into the "inappellable." His best poems, like all good poems, give a voice to matters that cannot be named, givethe inarticulate part Of our strange being one moment of release. . . . This reaching into otherness, whether it be the land and its native peoples or the stance of the ironist, biter of the feeding hand, is at once an abdication and a recovery of selfhood, a mask that both conceals and reveals. "Man," says Bakhtin, "has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other. . . ." (Todorov 96) Writing, then, like living, is a process of exotopy, "finding oneself outside" (Todorov 99), finding by losing, by relaxing the centralist controls to allow "contamination" (as Borges might put it) by other identities, other voices. Where in his writing has Scott given over more to the other than in "Byron on Wordsworth?" The "Paradoxes Limericks and other Nonsense" do somewhat change the picture we have of Scott's poetry, but the word is "somewhat." Scott thought enough of these pieces to preserve and categorize them, but they formed nothing of the face he wanted his writing to show the reading world. What would Scott's work have come to had the dialogic or carnival spirit been allowed more scope in it? A fruitless question. But had a flag of the genuine Byronic been publically waved by a major Confederation poet, it might have shortened the long process of naturalizing the subversive spirit in this country. Canadian writers have had little choice but to respond to the powerful otherness of the land. Since the beginning of white occupation it has been teaching humility to reluctant students. We have been slower to adopt the stance of unholy otherness, to act the fool. We eventually developed some dandies in that line, though, like the notorious shapechanger Robert Kroetsch. He knows that the subversive spirit has teeth in this country, and is sometimes called Coyote.Works Cited Brown, Russell, ed. The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. Afterwordby Dennis Lee. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. Johnston, Gordon. Duncan Campbell Scott. n.p., n.p., n.d., Legouis, Emile. William
Wordsworth and Annette Vallon. Lourie, Margaret A., ed. William
Morris. The Defence of McDougall, Robert L. The Poet
and the Critic. Ottawa: Carleton Sammons, Jeffrey L. Heinrich
Heine, a Modern Biography. Scott, Duncan Campbell. The
Scott/Aylen Papers. Ottawa: _____. The Poems of Duncan
Campbell Scott. Toronto: _____. Selected Poems of
Duncan Campbell Scott. With a _____. The Circle of Affection
and Other Pieces in Prose Steffan, Guy and Willis W. Pratt.
Byron's Don Juan. Vol III |