When [Frank] Scott issued his Selected Poems in 1966, "Lakeshore" was placed at the beginning, as if to constitute a signal itself, a definition of the poet's vision and a statement of his art which provides a necessary prelude to confrontation with the whole man.

What kind of signal does "Lakeshore" constitute? What event does it record, and to what observer is the message sent? We need to know, in order to resolve the problem … of the meaning of the poem's ending. Is the figure of the poet musing alone on Ararat an image of contemporary disillusion, or is the fact that he has survived his Flood the expression of some kind of blessing? One route to an answer is through an exploration of the richness of the poem itself, not merely the complex interweaving of its biological and Biblical themes, but its intricate and beautiful texture. Such an exploration leads us not only to a new view of the poem, but to several other perceptions as well: a sense of "Lakeshore"'s original literary context, its meaning for Scott's art, and particularly a recognition of the extent to which it articulates a solution to the problem of man in nature which has been tested out by other Canadian poets before and since, though rarely with such mastery. (p. 42)

"Lakeshore" began with the poet observing the natural world of the lake at his feet: active, organic, and shimmering with prismatic visions. It ends with him looking upon another scene, the crowded urban world of the city street, at once the demonic opposite of the pastoral vision, and the consequence of our historic growth through and past that vision. (p. 47)

[Though] the poet in solitude may be watching the death of the world he knows around him, he is, by virtue of three things, watching its re-creation as well. The first is the richness of implication which the image of water has born for us as a building, connecting, creating medium since the beginning of the poem. The second is Ararat, the sudden but extraordinarily fruitful Biblical allusion that appears covenant-like at the end, to confirm our sense of the value of at least part of our historical experience, and suggest that it will not be swept away. The third is the process of growth that goes on in the poet himself as the poem proceeds from the staring wonder of his first vision of the lake, to a return to his own original being, to the loosing of satiric language that seems to take place as the result of this, to the crowning experience of thought that visits him when, in the presence of the tragedy of historical time, he is able to generate an image of a nature whose processes return to recreate the world again and again, and within which he can meditate on the possibility of new beginnings.

The contexts of "Lakeshore," which we can consider only briefly here, seem to me of two sorts. The first comes to Scott from Wordsworth, I believe. In "Tintern Abbey," as in "Lakeshore," the poet gazes upon nature, and in so doing takes possession of the "beauteous forms" of being, in an experience strikingly like that of Scott's naked swimmers…. And like Wordsworth standing on the bank of the sylvan Wye, Scott at the end of "Lakeshore" dares

                            to hope,
   Though changed no doubt, from what I was when first
   I came among these hills.

What distinguishes Scott's poem as a genuine achievement, and not merely the working out in a modernist vein of the important Romantic theme of a crisis in the development of imaginative power, is the intervening history of the motif in English Canadian poetry, where the question of how to penetrate nature's world has assumed the urgency of a major preoccupation. (pp. 48-9)

["Lakeshore"] sends between event and observer a signal of a special sort, for more than any of his contemporaries he opens up the possibility that to go underwater, beneath the surface of time and experience, is to generate new possibilities in the naked swimmer who seeks for light in the water's deepest colonnades. What is generated in "Lakeshore," however, is not only vision, but also the speech in which that vision can be uttered. Not frozen in fear …, or locked in exploration of his own solitude …, Scott's poet, as the result of his descent and return, is able to confront the world that exists around him with the power of a renovated, truth-speaking language, and in so doing, earns the right to rest, however much alone, on Ararat, as nature renews the world yet again. (p. 50)