From The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay
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.
– Charles Sangster
No gnomes please, we’re Canadian
By D.M.R. Bentley
In the summer of 1853, the Canadian poet Charles Sangster travelled by steamer from his native Kingston down the St. Lawrence and up the Saguenay as far as Trinity Rock.
The long poem that resulted – The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) – interweaves ecstatic avowals of love for a mysterious “Maiden” with vivid descriptions of the landmarks, scenery, and peoples encountered along the rivers that were apparently intended to appeal to the increasing number of tourists who were visiting the area from the United States as well as from Kingston, Toronto, and elsewhere in Canada West.
The lines that I have excerpted from The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay are part of Sangster’s effusive description of the Thousand Islands, which, good Kingstonian that he was, he regarded as the paradisial seat of the “Spirit of Beauty,” and, as the lines show, completely devoid of the supernatural creatures of European mythology.
Sangster was not the first writer to observe the absence of such creatures in Canada. Twenty years earlier, in The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Catharine Parr Traill makes the same point in a passage that may well lie behind Sangster’s description: “As to ghosts and spirits, they appear totally banished from Canada. This is too matter-of-fact [a] country for … supernaturals to visit…. We have neither fay nor fairy, ghost nor bogle, satyr nor wood-nymph; our … forests disdain to shelter dryad or hamadryad. No naiad haunts the rushy margin of our lakes, or hallows with her presence our forest-rills…. I heard a friend exclaim … ‘It is the most unpoetical of all lands; there is no scope for imagination; here all is new’.”
Faced with the absence of “ghosts and spirits,” Traill asserts that she herself can yet be “very happy and contented” in Canada because the natural world that she encounters on her walks “in the forest or by the borders of … lakes” provides a continual source of “amusement and interest.”
With the turn of thought initiated by the “But” at the beginning of the second-to-last line of his description, Sangster implicitly makes the same claim as Traill.
So what if there are no “Nymph[s],” “Nereids,” and “Gnomes” in Canada? More than ample compensation for their absence is provided for the “wild enthusiast” – the ardent lover of the wild – by the natural world. In the two lines that follow, the phrases “endless landscapes” and “softest breezes” use the suffixes of infinitude and superlativeness to convey a sense of the vastness and congeniality of the Canadian environment.
By slowing down and extending the duration of the lines, the long vowel sounds in words such as “through,” “o’er,” and “softest” also contribute to the sense of Canada’s vastness, as do the additive “And” at the beginning of the last line and the expansion of the same line from five to six iambic feet. Suspended, as it were, in space at the edge of the poem, the verb “flow” seems bent on launching the reader out into the immense spaces beyond the page.
Northrop Frye famously claimed that Canadian poetry is pervaded by “a tone of deep terror in regard to nature,” but there is no such feeling in Sangster’s lines. Indeed, quite the opposite is the case: “hideous Gnomes, to fill the breast with fear” are nowhere to be found.
Instead, the tone is one of proud enthusiasm and reverence for Canada’s “wild” nature and vast landscapes that can also be found in the work of the Group of Seven, in some of the Arctic poems of Al Purdy, and in the accounts of people returning with eyes widened and spirits uplifted from trips to the Rockies, Algonquin Park, and, closer to home, the shores of Lake Huron whose stark horizontality and luminous skies Jack Chambers captures so brilliantly in Lake Huron No.1 and Lake Huron No.3 (1970-71 and 1971-72).
The writer teaches Canadian literature and culture and Victorian literature and art in the Department of English.