Read an Excerpt
Imperial Eden
Victoria BC in Verse c. 1858-1920
By ROBERT RATCLIFFE TAYLOR Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Robert Ratcliffe Taylor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-5003-3
CHAPTER 1
Victoria in Verse
WHY VERSE?
When many twenty-first century people hear the word "poetry", their eyes glaze over and their brains freeze. And why not? Much "modern" verse is highly intellectual and deeply abstruse. Moreover, many of us recall dreary "English Lit" classes in high school taught by teachers who never felt the sensual rush provided by a truly fine poem. Yet, in the 19th century, many Victoria writers, editors and readers loved poetry and, by extension, the English language itself — and its idiosyncrasies. In 1860, for example, the Victoria British Colonist delighted in "An English Orthograph Puzzle", by an anonymous poet:
Wife, make me some dumplings of dough,
They're better than meat for my cough;
Pray let them be boiled 'til hot through,
But not 'til they're heavy or tough.
Now I must be off to the plough,
And the boys (when they've had enough)
Must keep the flies off with a bough,
While the old mare drinks at the trough.
(The British Colonist, 3 January 1860)
Other poets reveled in creating vivid word-pictures. On the front page of its weekend supplement for 29 March 1908, for example, the Victoria Daily Colonist printed a poem by the English immigrant and sportsman Clive Phillips-Wolley (1854 - 1918):
The Salmon Run
Vague space, and in the hush Dawn's pencil drew
On the damp clouds of darkness, line by line,
Peaks and vast headlands, and a fresh wind blew
Sharp with the stinging kisses of the brine,
Pungent with perfume of the sunburnt pine.
Through drifting veils of filmy forest smoke,
Filtered the rose-pink sunrise of the day.
The sea plains heaved; the tide-rip laughing woke;
Beyond the sun-limned circle of the bay
Ocean, a palpitating opal, lay,
Milk-white mysterious. Throbbing faery fire
Coursed through its veins and all the madcap
throng
Which cradles in the tide-rip, oceans choir,
In stoles of roughened silver, deep-voiced, strong,
Danced as it sang the young tide's meeting song,
Working the sea to madness. Sudden waves
Roared by the cliffs, fretted the canopies
Written with runes, and echoed in the caves.
There was no wind to swing the slender trees
And yet through fields of calm ran racing seas.
Strange eddies came and went. The blacktoothed rocks
Were whelmed in waters piled upon an heap [sic].
Louder and louder grew the thunder-shocks
Of the tempestous rip. Beyond, the Deep
Lay calm and smiling, mother-like, asleep.
Then fell a miracle. The waters knew
Some deep sea-call, and their swift tides became
Incarnate, and sudden incarnate grew
Their shifting light. Argent and azure flame
Drave through the Deep. The salmon pilgrims came.
A foredoomed pilgrimage from depths profound
To grey Alaskan waters, turgid, pent
In mildewed pines, where neither sun nor sound
Of oceans' song can reach — the last event
To rot on glacial mud, frayed, leprous, spent.
Not every poem published by Victoria's newspapers a century ago was so extravagant in its imagery. Some were painfully precise. When "A Local Poet" viewed the "James Bay Mud Flats" in the Victoria Daily Colonist for 17 June 1904, he wrote simply,
When I survey the wondrous flats
I always stop and think,
And put my fingers to my nose
To guard away the stink.
But very soon it will be gone,
No more offensive smell,
And what will be the city's pride
The C.P.R. Hotel.
The hotel would be the Empress, opened in 1908. (See also the "Suspect's" poem below.)
This book is full of poems, both effulgent or concise. None of them, of course, will ever appear in the Oxford Book of English Verse. The fact that someone felt strongly enough to write them, however, and someone else believed that their poems were important enough to publish gives them significance as a kind of historical evidence. Some would argue that they convey feelings and ideas more intensely and more clearly than do prose works.
Before we consider why such verse is useful to students of Victoria's past, we should ask: what exactly is a poem? Poetry is a response in words to a vivid experience or an encounter with a striking idea or emotion. When I exclaim, "What a beautiful sunset!", I'm speaking poetically because I have identified a vivid experience and described it in a subjective way. However, my lovely sunset may be your cloudy horizon at dusk! There's a subjective element in our definition of a poem. More is required and it seems that a poem must be expressed in language that is memorable and structured in some way. The poet, whether a teenaged lover or a mature poet laureate, puts his or her profound experience into measured and ordered form in the hope of making sense of it and preserving it. (The equivalent, for most of us ungifted people, is taking photographs of a family vacation, wedding, or graduation.)
Poetry can appear in Shakespearean blank verse, in 20th century free verse, in rhyming couplets, in seventeen syllables (as in Japanese haiku), in limericks, etc. etc. etc. Prose itself can often sound like poetry. In fact, there may be as many forms of poetry as there are poems in any language! What is important about the structure of a poem is that it makes the poem more striking to the reader or listener and may also aid in remembering it. The kind of verse found in this book usually employs metre and rhyme, which made it easy for our great-grandparents to remember, memorize or even recite it.
Instinctively, we are drawn to rhyme and rhythm — as children, and as adults, too. We remember songs, not only because of their tunes but because of their words, which may be alliterative or rhyming. Even the most un-literary of us may have in the back of our mind the words of a raunchy limerick or two. As children, we naturally make up or recite rhymes to skip by or to taunt others with. As high school students, we may have been lucky enough — although we may not have thought so at the time —to have been compelled to memorize a passage from Shakespeare or an ode by John Keats. As college students, some of us even tried to express our late adolescent Sturm und Drang in midnight-scribbled verse. This seemed natural at the time, although we may have destroyed our efforts long ago.
When Theodor Adorno wrote that, "To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric", his despair was all too understandable. But he may have been excessively pessimistic, because the popularity of poetry waxes and wanes. In some eras it is all around us. In others, no one reads it (although people may still write it, if only privately, not for publication or recitation). In the early 21st century, poetry seems to have enjoyed a feeble renaissance, with, for example, the creation of the position of a Canadian national "poet laureate". Certain groups, such as the Canadian Authors Association, keep poetry alive in annual anthologies or chapbooks. The Ontario Poetry Society and Poets Podium, for example, have encouraged the writing and publishing of members' poetry — in blank verse, free verse, rhyme — even in forms such as the sonnet or villanelle. We can read poetry on the walls of busses and subway cars. Academic and literary journals, such as Fiddlehead or The Malahat Review, serve more abstruse interests. On the other hand, just as the ability (or desire) to write melody seems extinct in both our classical and popular composers, so too the interest in rhyme and rhythm seems defunct today. Some scholars refer to "a great divide" which developed after World War One when romanticism in literature declined, followed by rational intellectualizing, especially in poetry.
Consequently, what is considered "good" poetry today is often unintelligible even to the sensitive, educated person.
Often it's too personal or intellectual to make sense to readers or listeners, other than to a select coterie. Such "post-modern" or "deconstructionist" works rarely make it into popular journals or magazines. In fact, poetry of any kind rarely appears today in local newspapers, even in weekend supplements.
It was not always so. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, poems were published on the front pages of newspapers, such as Victoria's Daily Colonist or the Victoria Daily Times. Of course, such dailies, like their counterparts in other communities which served a particular city and its hinterland — in this case Victoria and southern Vancouver Island — printed news about that area and reflected the interests of its citizens as well as poetry. It was significant, however, that the ability to conjure up a verse for a social occasion was considered a normal accomplishment civilized ladies or gentlemen, who did not hesitate to offer their verses for publication and were sometimes successful. In fact, Victoria newspapers even published poems which were identified as the works of children.
Some poems were by well-known local poets; others, by writers famous in the English-speaking world. But some occasionally came from what may seem to be unexpected sources. For example, James L. Dunn (d. 1890), captain of the HBC clipper ship TITANIA, was known as a "popular and good-hearted master" (Colonist, 17 October 1890, 5). When his ship was moored in Esquimalt on 22 September 1889, he wrote,
Farewell to Victoria, 1889
Kind friends in Victoria, the time is now nigh
When, sailing for England, I must bid you good bye;
But shall carry this feeling, you must not think me vain,
Next year you'll be pleased to see me again.
The beautiful clipper that I'm proud to command
Four times has returned to this much favored land;
The "Titania" is now a true household word,
For she's tight, staunch and strong, and fleet as a bird.
Yet oft I'll remember the bright, happy hours
I have spent in your homes all embosomed with flowers;
For this is your rule, and it is no vain boast,
"To welcome the stranger who visits your coast."
In grandeur sublime, majestic and high,
Mount Baker uplifts its proud peak to the sky;
Whilst the mounts of Olympus, from Heaven's blue
dome,
Keep watch o'er the Straits that front your sweet home.
Victoria, fair city! I predict that kind fate
Your childhood will change to a prime that is great;
Here's success to all those that in you now dwell,
Accept my best wishes, God speed you, farewell.
Two days later, the Colonist saw fit to publish these verses on its editorial page. The TITANIA was a Hudson's Bay Company cargo clipper, engaged in the Far Eastern tea trade. Obviously, Victoria and its environs had made a positive impression on the captain, especially the beautiful geographical setting of the city, which many were already describing as "paradise". He had probably also spent some happy social hours among the city's commercial and business elite. The poem reminds us that in the nineteenth century, ships and seafarers (long before cruise liners and tourists) played a vital role in the economic and social life of the city. Moreover, the captain himself — probably a down-to–earth practical seafarer — felt no embarrassment in putting his feelings into verse for publication. He is a good example of the sort of person who tried to put powerful sensations into structured, metered, and rhyming form and wanted to share them with readers. His poem is not great art, but it gives us a sense of social and literary life in Victoria over a century ago.
The 23rd of December 1918 saw a brief entry in the Times of that day, punning on the use of gas for lighting and cooking in Victoria households:
The Editor — My dear sir, we can't publish nonsense like this — it's not poetry at all. It's an escape of gas."
Poet — "Ah, I see. Something wrong with the meter".
If this joke seems forced, nevertheless editors, poets and readers alike were concerned with what they thought was good verse. In many of these poems, therefore, the language is often Biblical in inspiration ("thee", "thou", etc.) or Shakespearean (contractions such as "o'er" and "'neath"). Of course, c. 1900 Victoria people did not speak this way but writers believed that use of this archaic language gave weight to their expression. As well, they had been taught in school the importance of rhyme schemes, metre (the rhythmic structure of a poem), and feet (stressed or unstressed syllables).
Even in amateur literary circles at that time, strict rules prevailed as to what was acceptable in verse. On 23 December 1918, the Victoria Daily Times, published a poem by one "GLESK", who would identify himself only as a member of the Great War Veterans' Association. He had been offended by some verses which had earlier appeared in the Times and fired off this salvo:
O "Dawn", who wrote that little verse
I read in Thursday's Times,
'Twas to the point, pithy and terse,
But — who could say it rhymes?
For one with a musician's ear
'Tis nothing short of pain
To make "meet" rhyme with "peace". Your gear
Was out of work what time, I fear,
You wrote your sweet refrain.
Poetic license might endorse
Your rhyming "board" with "word",
But never "thought" with "not". Of course,
It may not have occurred
To you that "us" and "wireless"
Rhyme not, although your scan
Is pretty good, but what a mess
You made of rhyme, O Man!
Of course, editors chose which poems (whether in traditional or unusual form) to print. Much earlier (7 May 1859), the Victoria Weekly Gazette had noted, "There are two kinds of poetry which it is very difficult to refuse to publish. One is exceedingly good, the other execrably bad ...". Admittedly, by any standards, some of the published poetry was not very good. Yet some awkward rhymes were deliberately funny. In 1892, the Colonist noted wryly that "Mr. W.H. Snider of Spring Ridge, received a large pumpkin yesterday as a present from his friend and neighbour, Barrister S. Perry Mills. The pumpkin was grown by Mr. M. at his residence on Fernwood Road ... 4 feet 6 inches in circumference and weighed nearly ... 100 pounds," which moved the poetry editor to write,
The Lay of the Last Pumpkin
Mr. Mills, he had a pumpkin
And it grew and it grew,
And it grew upon a vine.
Its size was six by nine,
And he said "It is mine",
And it grew.
"Oh what with my big pumpkin
Shall I do? Shall I do?"
And so stood beside her,
Often tried he to decide her.
Then said to Mr. Snider,
"It's for you".
(Colonist, 6 November 1892)
The poet probably knew how awkward his "verse" was — and that was just the joke. Was this a parody of free verse (which tried to follow the natural speech rhythm) and which was becoming popular with some writers at the time? At all events, giant pumpkins still command space in the Times/Colonist and other newspapers, although not usually accompanied by poetry, rhyming or not.
In the early twentieth century, one form of verse was especially popular: the limerick. Local journals used this type of poetry in contests, presumably to increase their circulation. On one occasion, the Times celebrated the opening of the annual fall fair at the Willows with such a contest, asking their readers to complete the following:
Be sure you attend the Fall Fair.
For the women's new building is there,
Art, music, you'll find,
Food for body and mind.
(Fifth line should be rhyming with fair).
(Times, 13 October 1909) On this occasion, to the consternation of entrants, the box containing the entries went missing. The periodical, The Week, on 11 November 1911, also announced a limerick contest. Entrants had to complete the following:
If you wish to be happy and wise
You must first win a Limerick prize.
For dollars are things
That seem to have wings,
Contestants had to submit fifty cents with each completed limerick. The prize was a monetary one, but a portion of the total sum collected would be donated to the Public Library for book purchases; in a contest of December 1911, that portion would be given to the Jubilee Hospital.
Given the use of pseudonyms, initials, and "anonymous", I have sometimes found it impossible to identify some writers. But occasionally the editor will note that the writer was a Victoria resident. Then, using censuses and directories, I have often been able to learn biographical details about certain local poets and have inserted the data here. Very possibly some "anonymous" poets or those identified only by initials were the editors of the publications. For example, the editor of the Victoria Home Journal confessed on 25 February 1893, "I occasionally lapse into a poetic vein". He may have used the pseudonyms "Guff" or "Pere Grinator" which were appended to some verses in the Journal.
The preceding examples of verse should give the impression that poetry was very popular in Victoria a century ago, as indeed it was, but ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Imperial Eden by ROBERT RATCLIFFE TAYLOR. Copyright © 2014 Robert Ratcliffe Taylor. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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