To
Charles G.D. Roberts
BREEZY
BRAE, JANUARY 12, 1908
* * *
enjoyed
your wheelbarrow game! But it is nowhere written that
we must always be the wheelbarrows, you the wheelbarrowers.
What oafs men—yes, even you, my dear—can
be! “The truth is a precious ore—too rich
a pearl for carnal boar!”1
Breezy Brae is now nearly
buried in snow, and the barns and fields around the
house all wrapped up and tucked away under a napkin,
as it were. Mr. Scott2
was to have made me a visit, and I had promised myself
much pleasure in cooking him up a big meal as I did
for you, and discussing the Universe over a leg of
pork, parsnips, and perhaps a few potatoes. I have
recently read his Via Boarialis [sic] and
I think they far exceed The Magic Horse [sic]—they
are, I fancy, a later produce from his stockyard.
Some of these new poems are wonderfully tasty morsels.
Their subtleties are worthy of a Toronto chef! Still,
there is something absent—a good deal absent—from
the sinewy boniness of the man. What is that, you
ask?
He doesn’t patronize
the butcher—his muse needs roast pork, cooked
to a crackle. Nevertheless, I regard Mr. Scott as
possessing a quality of genius as lofty and profound
as almost any other Canadian singer has hereto shown
in the printed form. Mr. Lampman3—though
I should not speak ill of the dead—is a bullfrog
to his cicada, and Mr. Carman—4though
I should not speak ill of your cousin—a mere
grasshopper. How great was Canada’s loss with
the death of dear James last year!5
Will we ever hear the likes again of his stirring
“Ode on the Mammoth Cheese”? What nourishment
there is in such lines as
| We
have seen thee, queen of cheese
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
All
gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto. |
Oh
to do for the pig what the master has done for the
cheese!
But what is the use—this
country gives not a whit (I almost said more!) for
its poets. As I told Jim and Nora years ago, Canada
is an old sow that eats her farrow.6
No more talke
of barrows—or I'll make you into one, with
no wheel.7
- Cf.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras, II, 257-58: “For
truth is precious and divine,— / Too rich a
pearl for carnal swine.” Together with the preceding
comments, Buchanan’s substitution of “boar”—a
male pig—for “swine”—a male
or female pig—suggests a disenchantment with
Roberts and, perhaps, a growing feminist consciousness.
[back]
- Duncan
Campbell Scott (1862-1947), an Ottawa civil servant
and versifier, who in 1907 had published four books
of verse, two of which are subsequently mentioned
by Buchanan: The Magic House and Other Poems
(1893) and Via Borealis (1906). [back]
- Archibald
Lampman (b. 1861), another Ottawa civil servant and
versifier, died on February 10, 1899. [back]
- Bliss
Carman (1861-1929), Roberts’s cousin and fellow
poet. [back]
- James
McIntyre (b. 1827), a poet and long-time resident
of Ingersoll, Ontario, died on March 5, 1906. His
first volume of poetry, Musings on the Banks of
the Canadian Thames was published in 1884 and
his Poems, from which Buchanan quotes the
opening stanzas of his most celebrated “Ode,”
in 1889. [back]
- This
is the only hint in Buchanan’s extant correspondence
of an acquaintanceship with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle
that may date from her years in Ireland (see Séamus
O’Toole “MMB: the Galway Years”
p. 151). Cf. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, ed. Chester Anderson (New York:
Penguin, 1977), p. 203: “Ireland is the old
sow that eats her farrow.” [back]
- Buchanan
appears to be punning on “barrow,” a castrated
young boar. [back]
|
