[In the following essay, originally presented at the fifth Symposium of the University of Ottawa Symposia series in 1978, Cogswell offers an analysis of “Said the Canoe,” which he argues is a feminist response to Tennyson's The Princess.]

The thesis which I put forward below is highly speculative. It is, however, speculative in the light of certain demonstrable factors which, taken together, make the speculation more than idle exercise. These factors are, firstly, my assumption that Isabella Valancy Crawford was an intelligent, responsive, and sensitive woman; secondly, the notion that she was capable of independent thought and feeling; thirdly, that she was markedly influenced in her poems by the style and thinking of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; fourthly, that she lived during an age in frontier North America in which the disparity of roles between those assigned to men and those assigned to women was even greater than that which had existed in Victorian England; finally, that this thesis is supported by the construction and imagery of the poem itself.

I do not think I shall require much evidence to support Miss Crawford's sensitivity, responsiveness, and intelligence to an audience which is familiar with such poems as “Old Spookses' Pass”, “Malcolm's Katie”, and “The Helot”. Whether responding to the Canadian landscape, a newly nascent Canadian nationalism, or a burning sense of injustice, Miss Crawford illustrated in these poems that she could write firmly, out of conviction, and with an imagination that transfigured but did not do violence to the truth of her surroundings.

That Miss Crawford possessed a mind of her own capable of arriving at notions that to the orthodox other time might be considered heretical is explicit in the “Epilogue” to “Gisli, the Chieftain”, and implicit in the imagery, incidents, and construction of that poem, one of the most original and daring to be found in nineteenth century Canadian poetry.

It is not difficult, either, to link the name of Isabella Valancy Crawford to that of Alfred Lord Tennyson. The blank verse idyll interspersed with lyrics, of which Tennyson's “The Brook” is an exemplum, is the form chosen by Isabella Valancy Crawford for her “Malcolm's Katie”. In both poems, there is a love plot involving an old farmer, a farmer's daughter, and two men; in both poems, the daughter's name is Katie. Furthermore, the arguments used in “Malcolm's Katie” by Miss Crawford's English “villain” are very similar to the arguments used by Tennyson in “In Memoriam” to exhibit the pointlessness of progress. In fact, I believe Miss Crawford is guilty of malicious irony in naming her villain Alfred, and in having the happy couple in the idyll name their first child in turn, Alfred. The implications are that an elitist traditional Englishman is bested by an uneducated colonial who believes in the New World gospel of hard work and progress, but that the next generation of Canadians will presumably produce elitist and doubting Alfreds.

That the lot of women in North America vis à vis that of men was more disparate even than the existing in the more settled parts of the Western world was noted by Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams. There, in his chapter. “The Virgin and the Dynamo”, Adams notes that the female principle of creativity on which European art and culture depended and which was powered by human energy and enshrined by a long procession of female goddesses culminating in the Virgin Mary had never taken root in America. It was, in fact, to escape the domination of Mary that the Pilgrim Fathers came to the New World. The same phenomenon was further noted by D. H. Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature. In this book, Lawrence suggests that America was a man's world, that the true friendships to be found in it were those between men, and that an American male's view of women was incredibly limited and stereotyped. In fact, America began as a society of explorers, priests, trappers, hunters, soldiers—there words connote fraternities and the ties of man to man—ways of life in which women exist basically for the satisfaction, brief and sharp, of animal lust. By the time settlement and agriculture became established, the fraternal attitude among men had become a way of life too strong to be disloged. Women, as wives, on the frontier were not able to shift the balance; the need to bear children to become in their turn labourers and mothers, and the back-breaking constant attention to chores, often too soon after childbirth, sapped their vitality and wore them to early graves. Moreover, in New England, where the frontier did not become so dominant, the role of women was circumscribed to the Protestants' obsession with the Old Testament, which, except for the Koran, is probably the most male-oriented document ever created by a so-called “higher” religion. Finally, men were men, and they worked, hunted, and fished in community. Women were few, and they worked with children, or alone, and in isolation. Even in the New Brunswick in which I was raised during the 1920's and 1930's, men consorted with men and women with women. For men to break ranks and to cultivate the company of women or to show openly their regard for them was to be regarded as being “soft” or “sissy”. To call a boy a girl was the worst insult possible; to call a girl a tomboy was often a mark of grudging respect. As a result, then, of its male nomad origins and the nature of its agricultural make-up and the value placed upon brute strength, North Americans established what was in all probability the most one-sided male hegemony to be found anywhere in the non-Mohammedan world during the nineteenth century.

Any woman who, like Isabella Valancy Crawford, was forced by circumstances to struggle for a living under such conditions could not but be conscious of the disparity of opportunity between the sexes, the prevailing male chauvinistic attitude held toward women, and the inequity involved. It was not, indeed, to be long before women like Nellie McClung were to be so stung by the situation as to take positive action against it. Miss Crawford was no Nellie McClung, but, as her poem “The Helot” indicates, she possessed an almost uncontrollable response to social inequity at times and was capable of that kind of righteous indignation which William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell calls the voice of God.

As I have already indicated, Isabella Valancy Crawford was capable of reading and responding creatively to the work of her fellow nineteenth century poets in England. The two most obvious sources of feminism in poetry during her lifetime were Elizabeth Barrett Browning's long verse novel, Aurora Leigh, and Tennyson's medley poem, The Princess. I have read both and come to the conclusion that there is no, or little trace of Aurora Leigh in the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford, but that one poem, “Said the Canoe”, is an ironic reconstruction of the core arguments of The Princess, omitting, of course, the betrayal of the feminist which Tennyson felt obliged to perpetrate. (That betrayal, however, as we shall see below, may have furnished the germ for at least one image in the poem).

The Princess deals with a hypothetical situation in a mythical kingdom in which a princess, Ida, indulged by her doting father and indoctrinated by two feminist women friends, establishes an academy for women which might well be entitled Amazonia. The arguments of the princess in support of her academy and against male injustice are presented with such force and perspicacity that they must have thrilled thousands of female readers. Likewise, Tennyson's descriptions of the attitudes and achievements of these Amazons must have gratified the feelings of these same readers. Tennyson is, moreover, too clever to attempt to present counter-arguments other than token ones, too extreme to obtain credence. The female academy and the princess are overthrown not by men but by the weakness of women themselves. The women are less emancipated from their past than they had believed, and in moments of crises old loyalties to family and old attitudes that predated their feminism tended to emerge. Moreover, to Tennyson women were bound to betray feminism by their very humanity. Women need children, and children need fathers. The mother-child-father syndrome is provided by a chorus of lyrics of which the most important are “Home they brought her warrior dead” and “Sweet and Low” with its haunting lines: “Rest, rest on mother's breast, / Father will come to thee soon; / Father will come to his babe in the nest, / Silver sails all out of the west / under the silver moon”.

Women, moreover, are unable to resist weakness in men, the desire to nurse, to love and surrender to that power masked in weakness which needs them. After nursing the prince through a dangerous illness and listening to his judicious mixture of flattery and sophistry, the princess near the close of the poem is reading love poems to the prince in such a way as to suggest that she is willing to lose her identity and become a sex object:

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake;
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

This conclusion, however satisfactory to Tennyson, could hardly have suited Miss Crawford. Hence, I maintain, came her poem “Said the Canoe”.

Before turning to “Said the Canoe” directly, I should like to quote two passages from The Princess. The first is spoken by that extreme chauvinist, the old king, the prince's father:

Man is the hunter; woman is his game:
The sleek and shining creatures of the chase,
We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;
They love us for it, and we ride them down.

The second is a statement by Princess Ida herself:

                                        Knaves are men
That flute and lute fantastic tenderness,
And dress the victims of the offering up,
And paint the gates of hell with Paradise,
And play the slave to gain the tyranny.

The structure and imagery of “Said the Canoe” are designed to fulfill three basic purposes. Firstly, the words of the hunters in praise of the canoe; their assiduity in tending to it, to the deer, and to the fish; the songs of their leisure moments identifying love with hunting; and their inability to notice the landscape as it exists on its own—all these factors indicate the narrow limits of consciousness and the innate selfishness that are disguised by the sentimentality of their songs. Secondly, the descriptions of the dead deer and the dead fish are the canoe's implicit ironic comment on songs in which the murder of life and beauty is equated with love. Finally, the canoe's acute perception of the beauty and mystery of the fire-lit world of its vision is a veiled reproach to men who, obsessed with capturing and killing, are blind to the wonders of a universe that is open to any one open enough to receive it. In actuality, the songs with which the “masters” regale each other are about as meaningful psychologically as the reactions of the sleeping hounds who dream “of the dead stag strong and lusty”.

At the beginning of the poem, the canoe, as an object of use and beauty to the “masters”, is equated with “queens” and “brides”, given concern and a few words of praise before being abandoned for what are the real concerns of men. Here on land, the men are “fluting and luting” with a “fantastic tenderness”, dressing “the victims of the offering up”, and playing the slave momentarily; whereas in the canoe's native element the men are the “masters” and she is their slave.

Not only do the hunters' songs “paint the gates of Hell with Paradise”; they also echo in part of the old king's observation in The Princess:

Man is the hunter; woman is his game:
The sleek and shiny creatures of the chase,
We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;
They love us for it, and we ride them down.

Here are the “masters” lines in “Said the Canoe”:

“O Love! art thou a silver fish,
Shy of the line and shy of gaffing,
Which we do follow, fierce, yet laughing,
Casting at thee the light-winged wish?
And at the last shall we bring thee up
From the crystal darkness, under the cup
                              Of lily folden
                              On broad leaves golden?
“O Love! art thou a silver deer
With feet as swift as wing of swallow,
While we with rushing arrows follow?
And at the last shall we draw near
And o'er thy velvet neck cast thongs
Woven of roses, stars and songs—
                              New chains all moulden
                              Of rare gems olden?”

These two stanzas, it seems to me, are deliberately sentimental, producing the kind of superficial prettiness of Tennyson's “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white”, the lyric from The Princess from which the line “Now folds the lily all her sweetness up” is deliberately echoed in the lines “Under the cup / Of lily folden / On broad leaves golden?” Their meretriciousness is immediately made apparent in the poem by the realism of the following lines:

They hung the slaughtered fish like swords
On saplings slender; like scimitars,
Bright, and ruddied for new-dead wars,
Blazed in the light the scaly hordes.

There is one other metaphor in “Said the Canoe” whose origin might conceivably lie either in lines from Tennyson's The Princess, Tennyson's Maud, or both. In this instance, I concede that my interpretation may be considered somewhat far-fetched. The lines in question make an extended metaphor:

Thin golden nerves of sly light curled
Round the dun camp, and rose faint zones
Half way about each grim bole prest,
Like a shy child that would bedeck
With its soft clasp a Brave's red neck,
Yet sees the rough shield on his breast,
The awful plumes shake on his crest,
And, fearful, drops his timid face,
Nor dares complete the sweet embrace.

This metaphor, which occupies nine lines, a disproportionate length in comparison to other images in the poem, is elaborated with such attention to detail that the reader is forced to conclude that it represents an important key to the emotional and/or logical understanding of the poem as a whole or that, in this instance, the architectonics of the poetess are at fault.

The notion of the flame creeping around the tree-trunk as a babe clasping an Indian warrior may have been suggested by the following lines from Maud:

Pass the happy news,
Blush it through the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red-cedar tree,
And the red man's babe
Leap beyond the sea.

Mood and cadence are here very different, but a connection is made in this stanza between an Indian brave and his child “in lands beyond the sea”.

More important, however, I feel, are Tennyson's lines from “Sweet and Low” in The Princess:

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon,
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west,
Under a silver moon.

In considering its importance, one has to place this stanza in relation to the over-all theme of The Princess. “Sweet and Low”, from which it is taken, is one of several key lyrics that prepare the reader psychologically to accept the inevitability and justice of the defeat of feminism. It makes the assumption that the family unit is never perfect until the father is included as well as the mother and child. In fact, the assumption is that it is all very well for a babe to “sleep and rest / on mother's breast”, but the crowning treat to him will be to have the father “return to his babe in the nest”.

Miss Crawford's metaphor is important in this context, and it may be taken as a wry comment upon Tennyson's thesis in The Princess. In her image, the “shy child” is so frightened by the strong, stern, unfamiliar father that it cannot maintain its clasp.

Although I believe that “Said the Canoe” was originally conceived as a feminist rejoinder to Tennyson's The Princess, the poem is very much more than that. It is a statement of Miss Crawford's own personal relationship to life, a relationship that transcended polemics.

The voice of the canoe, the sole representative of the female principle in the poem, may be taken as the voice of Isabella Valancy Crawford herself. It recognizes that the two men are “masters”. It recognizes, too, their obsessions, which limit their perceptions of life to objects for either capture or use. It recognizes their powers of self-deception. It recognizes that these obsessions and these deceptions make them kin to the hounds and that both they and the hounds are servants not of life but of death. This does not disconcert the canoe in the least, for, freed alike of obsessions and responsibility, it can indulge its vision of the richness and the mystery of the world. It can joy in finding images for the kaleidoscopic movement of the fire, now “thin olden nerves of sly light”, now “a shy child”, now “copper-snakes, / Sharpheaded serpents, made of light”, and, finally, a ghostly being who touches compassionately the antlers of the slaughtered deer. The canoe, too, can look at darkness as the builder of a home for light:

The darkness built its wigwam walls
Close round the camp, and at its curtain
Pressed shapes, thin, woven, and uncertain
As white locks of tall waterfalls.

Whether the darkness that “builds its wigwam walls / Close round the camp” be the unconscious pressures that underlie circumstance, the eternity which surrounds time and space as we know it, or sheer chaos does not matter in this final statement, nor do the “Pressed shapes, woven and uncertain / As white locks of tall waterfalls” matter either. What does matter is the camp and the opportunity for the sole sentient being in it not possessed of the lust of ownership and conquest, the canoe, to exercise the divine poetic gifts of feeling, imagination, and vision uninhibited by responsibility, anxiety, and power-drives. The canoe, then, is the poet surrounded by a world which to her is “God's plenty” and free to act in it according to the uninhibited range of her creative power. “Said the Canoe”, in the last analysis, is Isabella Valancy Crawford's way of saying that as a creative artist she is glad and thankful that she is a woman.