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"Spring on Mattagami": a Reconsideration
- University of Ottawa Press
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"SPRING ON MATTAGAMI": A RECONSIDERATION STAN DRAGLAND and MARTIN WARE The following composite study issues from a collaboration of Professors Dragland and Ware over "Spring on Mattagami." Their four complementary approaches to the poem were read at the Symposium in the order given here. (Ed.) DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTTS "SPRING ON MATTAGAMI" AND SOME CONTEXTS STAN DRAGLAND The setting is a rather bleak Northern Ontario landscape — low scrub and the odd scruffy evergreen. In the foreground at the left is a muddy stream. Duncan Campbell Scott and Samuel Stewart, Commissioners of the 1905 Treaty No. 9 negotiating party, stand looking at the camera, beside a pile of baggage and supplies that have been unloaded from canoes and await portage. The most striking aspect of Scott's apparel is a mosquito-netting hat, the net falling over his shoulders. He wears a dark sweater with a jacket over it. His camera hangs from his neck. He has on lightcoloured gloves, gauntlets almost, that reach halfway to his elbows. His trousers appear to be breeches, because his dark knee stockings fit the shape of his lower legs. Around the upper calves the stockings feature a light-coloured band with dark diamond shapes in it. The low shoes are white, with long tongues that reach a little way up the instep. The total effect is odd. With the possible exception of the shoes, Scott seems both dressed for the wilderness and at odds with it.1 "Spring on Mattagami" was written on the 1906 leg of the Treaty No. 9, or James Bay Treaty, negotiations, during which we may likely assume that Scott cut much the same figure in the North as he had in 1905. The fact that the poem, like several others which were published in Via Borealis (1906), took its origin partly from Scott's experience in Northern Ontario, is one of the most interesting of the contexts in 55 which we may read it. Perhaps one might say that "Spring on Mattagami" is as Northern in feel as Scott himself is in the picture I have described. The same might be said of the other Via Borealis poems, those which immediately issued from the Treaty trips. In more ways than one, Scott's activities in the summers of 1905 and 1906 leave the impression of the archetypal Canadian experience of culture and civilization uneasily meeting primitive environment. The subjects of the Via Borealis poems are mainly Northern, but the verse forms come out of English literary tradition, and "Spring on Mattagami" probably owes its existence more to its model, George Meredith's "Love in the Valley," than it does to Scott's experience in the North. As Pelham Edgar tells it, he and Scott helped pass the travelling hours with the aid of The Oxford Book of English Verse, which contains eleven of the twenty-six stanzas of Meridith's poem.2 One factor we have to consider, then, as we place "Spring on Mattagami" in some of its major contexts, is the relationship of the poem to English and Victorian literary tradition. Canadian Confederation poetry, Scott's included, sometimes suffers by comparison with English models. At least it should be admitted that the writing of Keatsian or Tennysonian or Meredithian poems, however accomplished , is a partial though important response to the problem of making a Canadian literature. Still, the difficulty of generalizing about the relationship between Canadian poems and their English literary influences is illustrated by reading "Spring on Mattagami" in the light of "Love in the Valley." In fact the comparison with "Love in the Valley" is flattering to Scott. Meredith's lyric poem supplied him with a sort of tune which he learned and then adapted to suit his own narrative. The basic stanza form, metre and rhyme scheme are Meredith's3 but Scott makes them sound more natural by varying the location and combination of stressed and unstressed syllables, by reducing the incidence of caesura to be found in the middle of most of Meredith's lines and by endstopping fewer of his. Scott allows himself more metrical latitude than Meredith, then, with one result that metre in his poem calls less attention to itself. In "Love in the Valley" the metre lilts along in a way that sounds rather artificial to my ear, while Scott's poem is more gravely measured, as is appropriate to the melancholy subject. It should be allowed that a lilting rhythm fits "Love in the Valley" well enough, since the...