This is my tribute to Canada’s nature poets, who play an important role in helping us understand and celebrate the uniqueness of our natural world. We all want to see the world as wholistic and organic, and we want to see ourselves as a harmonious part of that wholistic world. We look to our poets to help us do that. When I was a new Canadian growing up in the 1950’s, my image of Canada was shaped by the verses I learned in school. For example, this verse by Peter McArthur:
When the maples flame with crimson
And the nights are still with frost,
Ere the summer’s luring beauty
Is in autumn glory lost,
Through the marshes and the forests
An imperious summons flies,
And from all the dreaming northland
The wild birds flock and rise…
In the 1960’s, this idea of Canada as a vast wilderness was reinforced by the singers I saw on TV. For example, Gordon Lightfoot:
Where the long river flows
It flows by my window
Where the tall timber grows
It grows ’round my door
Where the mountain meets the sky
And the white clouds fly
Where the long river flows
By my window
And Joni Mitchell:
I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
And all trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go
In the late 60’s, there was a mass movement of young people traveling west, bringing into reality Jack Kerouac’s earlier prediction of a “great rucksack revolution”, in which he foresaw millions of young people traveling west and going to the mountains to pray, laugh and write down poems “that happen to appear in their heads for no reason”. The 60’s youth movement was an outpouring of psychedelic creativity. The Byrds sang about wandering through a forest “Where the trees have leaves of prisms / That break the light in colours / That no one knows the names of.” A lot of the young people who came west ended up settling down in places like the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island.
Bruce Cockburn stayed back east. His songs celebrated nature in a way that was less psychedelic but equally poetic:
My canoe lies on the water
Evening holds the bones of day
The sun like gold dust
Slips away
One by one, antique stars
Herald the arrival of
Their pale protectress
Moon
Ragged branches vibrate
Strummed by winds from o’er the hills
Singing tales of ancient days
Far and silent lightning
Stirs the cauldron of the leaves
I turn my bow
Towards the shore
Years after writing that, in 1988, Cockburn, too, made his way to Vancouver Island. He went there to visit a camp in the Carmannah Valley, where protesters were trying to save that ancient forest from being cut down. He brought with him a new song, If a Tree Falls in the Forest, in which he referred to the giant clear-cutting machines as “busy monsters that eat dark holes in the spirit world; holes into which wild things go to disappear.”
One of the most mystical of the poets of the 60’s was Gwendolyn MacEwen. She wrote many poems about the uniqueness of Canada’s wilderness. Her poem Dark Pines Under Water depicted Canada’s forests as places where we can take refuge from the evils of the human world. The forests, she wrote, are places with which we can construct an idealistic relationship. And those forests can be reflected in ourselves, as in a furtive lake (a lake that is unknowable to our ordinary consciousness). Just as the world around us stretches outward & upward, the world inside us stretches inward & downward. She wrote that we are explorers in that dark, unknown, internal forest. We bring a largeness, a heavy grace, an anguished dream to our exploring of it. We don’t know what’s hidden deep down in that forest, but whatever it is, we want it to be found; we want its story to be told.
In her book The Shadow-Maker, MacEwen wrote that we humans need to accept our small part in the universe, we need to look inside ourselves and learn that the god that lies within us needs light and shadow to exist. And in her poem about the American moon landing, she wrote that our urge to venture outward to the vast reaches of space comes from our dreamlike yearning to understand our internal selves: “Earthrise is an eye beyond the blinding brim / Past sighing miles of silence.” She published dozens of books and hundreds of poems before her death in 1987 at age 46. She wrote fearlessly about her impending death, seeing it not as an end but as a transcendence, as an expansion of the self beyond the limitations of the ego.
Of all Canada’s nature poets, I believe the greatest was Archibald Lampman. He lived 150 years ago and wrote hundreds of long, enchanting poems about Canada’s forests. Despite his enormous volume of writings, Lampman was only 37 when he died. His poem November reminds me of the poems of Robert Frost (although it was written many years before Frost):
The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor grey
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.
Fortunately, thanks to YouTube, we can experience the beautiful, hypnotic quality of Lampman’s writing through a video entitled “Morning on the Lievre”, which was produced by the NFB:
… Softly as a cloud we go,
Sky above and sky below,
Down the river; and the dip
Of the paddles scarcely breaks,
With the little silvery drip
Of the water as it shakes
From the blades, the crystal deep
Of the silence of the morn,
Of the forest yet asleep;
And the river reaches borne
In a mirror, purple grey,
Sheer away
To the misty line of light,
Where the forest and the stream
In the shadow meet and plight,
Like a dream.
As I said at the beginning, we look to our poets and singers to help us understand what we’re feeling when we are in communion with the natural world. Now, after all this time, I feel we’re closer to that communion than ever – closer to finding extraordinary joy in natural things – like walking in the forest, foraging for berries & mushrooms, tending to our little gardens, buying corn & peaches when they’re in season, and so on.
I am writing this on September 30, Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. So I will end with a poem by Chief Dan George:
The beauty of the trees,
The softness of the air,
The fragrance of the grass
Speak to me.
The strength of fire,
The taste of salmon,
The trail of the sun
And the life that never goes away
They speak to me,
And my heart soars.
(If you have a favourite book or poem about Canada’s forests and mountains, please feel free to share it with us. I would be delighted to hear from you.)