[In the following essay, originally presented at the fifth Symposium of the University of Ottawa Symposia series in 1978, Ower analyzes Crawford's use of the “piercing weapon” as a phallic symbol in her poetry.]

In his brilliant pioneering study of Crawford's poetry, James Reaney stresses the architectonic quality of her imagination.¹ He indicates how her work exhibits a visionary system that is in turn expressed through a “syntax” of repeated and modulated images. While Reaney has correctly sketched the broad outlines of Crawford's symbolic schema, much still remains, to be done towards filling in its details. For example, the “leitmotiv” of the penetrating weapon, which is one of Crawford's most significant “structural” images, has yet to receive detailed critical attention. Although not pervasive in the artist's production, the piercing weapon is both frequent and fundamental in just those poems where her myth-making is at its most subtle, complex and intense. Because of the importance of our symbol in Crawford's finest poetic expression, an analysis of its employment casts much light upon the writer's vision and her technique.

Crawford's use of the penetrating weapon is bound up with the touchy matter of the poet's phallic and yonic symbolism. In this regard, some preliminary remarks may be in order, lest I be accused of a heavy-handed and inapposite Freudianism. Firstly, Victorian verse in general contains rather more sexual reference than the strictures of critics like Buchanan and Morley would indicate. It goes without saying that most of this adversion is much less physically explicit than is the case with modern erotic writing. Nonetheless, Victorian poetic taste and convention did allow more or less carefully veiled allusions to the corporeal side of passion. For example, in Crawford's “Said the Thistle-Down,” a maiden resists the dream-temptation to float naked to her lover and yield “The lily, Chastity.”² Similarly, the following passage from “Malcolm's Katie” again uses the yonic flower in a fairly suggestive allusion to female erotic arousal:

That sixteen-summered heart of yours may say:
‘I but was budding, and I did not know
My core was crimson and my perfume sweet;
I had not seen the sun, and blind I swayed
To a strong wind, and thought because I swayed
‘Twas to the wooer of the perfect rose—
That strong, wild wind has swept beyond my ken,
The breeze I love sighs thro' my ruddy leaves.’

These lines involve a twofold draping of their physical reference, in which the conventionally coy image of the rose is in turn associated with the higher organ of the heart. However, even the much more obvious genital symbolism in “The Lily Bed” and “Love in a Dairy” does not appear to have troubled Crawford's editors and reviewers. Unless we assume that the Victorian reader was remarkably naive, we must conclude that he was on the average far less prudish than we might imagine.

Moreover, in assessing Crawford's sexual images, we must remember that her verse stems not only from Victorian conventions, but even more from those of Romanticism. There is of course in Romantic poetry a somewhat freer expression of amatory matters than prevailed later in the century. In particular, the work of Shelley, which constitutes an obvious influence upon Crawford, is suffused with a highly-charged erotic imagery:

                              … and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in Passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning sun.
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation.(3)

Shelley's Platonic idealization of sexuality in these lines points to a view of the subject that he shares with Crawford, and that turns conventional Freudianism upon its head. The latter tends to be reductive, treating the higher aspects of man's life as “sublimated” and displaced libido. By way of contrast, Shelley is typically Romantic in seeing the erotic as a symbol and an expression of spiritual forces of vision, creation and love. This elevation of sexuality by Crawford's Romantic mentors accords with the Victorian proclivity to “sacramentalize” the male-female relationship,⁴ to perceive passion in terms of “soul.” Such a religious outlook, in which the joining of the flesh becomes a sacred and symbolic rite, is important in Crawford's poetry. In “The Lily Bed,” for example, a thinly disguised consummation leads the skeptic Ion⁵ to a visionary atonement with God and His creation, to a reconciliation of the conflicting opposites of existence:⁶

His cedar paddle, scented, red,
He thrust down through the lily bed;
Cloaked in a golden pause he lay,
Locked in the arms of the placid bay.
… like a winged and burning soul,
Dropped from the gloom an oriole
On the cool wave, as to the balm
Of the Great Spirit's open palm
The freed soul flies …
The wood, a proud and crested brave;
Bead-bright, a maiden, stood the wave.
And he had spoke his soul of love
With voice of eagle and of dove.
One isle' tween blue and blue did melt,—
A bead of wampum from the belt
Of Manitou—a purple rise
On the far shore heaved to the skies.

However, Crawford's spiritualization of sex does not constitute the whole of her perspective upon the subject. In “The Sword,” “Said the Canoe” and “The Dark Stag,” the poet through the image of the penetrating weapon links male phallic potency with violence and death. Crawford's equation indicates that her view of the erotic takes into account the exigencies of a fallen physical world. Nonetheless, it is essential to stress that this savage aspect of the sexual must not be seen as negating the idealism of “The Lily Bed.” Rather, the two coexist as balanced and complementary opposites within Crawford's visionary system. Their union-in-tension in turn reflects the artist's motion of a dialectical relationship between good and evil, spirit and matter, love and death, Fall and Redemption.⁷ This involves both a clash of paired contraries, and their ultimate reconciliation. It is from such a Romantic philosophy, with its manifold complexities and stresses, that Crawford's poetry derives so much of its richness and power.

The intricate imaginative system underlying Crawford's verse is perhaps articulated most clearly and completely in “Malcolm's Katie,” a piece which at the same time employs the penetrating weapon in nearly its full range of symbolic complexity. It will therefore be convenient to use a discussion of our image in “Malcolm's Katie” as the critical backbone of the present study. We can begin with the axe of Crawford's hero Maxwell Gordon, the centerpiece of one of the songs so important in epitomizing the poet's concerns in her long and somewhat rambling “epic”.⁸ The almost punning “jingle” of “Max” and “axe” suggests the implement is a sort of metonymic extension of Gordon's virility. The phallic connotations of his “tool” are used by Crawford to indicate that, as a pioneer, he is dedicated to a “labor of love.” In this connection, the passion that inspires Max's endeavors is more than simply personal. Not only does he toil in the hope of winning Katie but, “social-souled,” he works to build a new and better community for all. This latter desire is at once patriotic, humanistic and religious, reflecting the dream of creating a Canadian haven for the suffering and the oppressed.⁹ Gordon's wielding of his axe is accordingly an expression, in a manner at once strenuous and joyful, of an idealized sexual love that reaches out to embrace his country, his fellows and his God.

To the cynical nihilist Alfred, Max's labor of love is doomed by time as it is manifested both in the fickleness of woman and in the fall of civilizations. However, the events of Crawford's poem show that the mutual attraction of Max and Katie is in fact a sign of elective affinity, of a passion born of eternity and capable of transcending change, separation and misfortune. To put the matter differently, the sexual desire which is intimated in the swinging of the axe is an outgrowth of a Platonic eros, of the aspiration of the spirit to regain the unearthly paradise of the “golden daffodil.” As Crawford's yonic flower image suggests, to penetrate a woman's body in ecstasy, to lose oneself in the joy of consummation, is for the incarnate psyche to rise temporarily to its heavenly origins. The same equation of erotic and mystical experience is of course made in “The Lily Bed.” Here, the penetrating phallic weapon appears in the form of a “cedar paddle, scented, red,” and the female flower as the water lily. The latter image, with its accompanying ideas of visionary atonement and redemption, is connected with the love of Max and Katie through Gordon's lily-song:

“Mild Soul of the unsalted wave,
White bosom holding golden fire,
Deep as some ocean-hidden cave
Are fixed the roots of thy desire,
Thro' limpid currents stealing up,
And rounding to the pearly cup.
Thou dost desire,
With all thy trembling heart of sinless fire,
But to be filled
With dew distilled
From clear, fond skies that in their gloom
Hold, floating high, thy sister moon.
Pale chalice of a sweet perfume,
Whiter-breasted than a dove,
To thee the dew is—love!”

The yonic lily here suggests a bodily passion which sublimates itself as spiritual aspiration.¹⁰ The eroticism symbolized by the flower indeed has its roots in the instinctive unconscious, but such a desire is distilled onto a mystical purity as it intensifies. Physical love is thus “sacramental,” a “chaste” union which at once effects and signifies the union of the soul with the celestial.¹¹ Crawford's idealization of erotic pleasure is further conveyed in Max's lily-sont by the poet's connexion of the male seed with a baptismal heavenly “dew.” Similarly, a woman's climax is associated with mystical fulfillment through the poetic rendering of the clitoris as the “golden” fire of the lily's pistil and stamens. Intercourse between true lovers is accordingly a foretaste of the beatitude of the “golden daffodil.”

However, Crawford's spiritualization of sexuality is by no means a symptom of an easy or naive idealism. As the events of “Malcolm's Katie” show, the attainment of paradise on earth is much more difficult than its hero initially believes. Thus, to prove himself worthy of Katie's hand, Max must first undergo a painful initiation by which he encounters and surmounts the forces of evil and negation in himself and his world.¹² This subject can be approached in terms of the penetrating weapon through the observation that Gordon's work with his axe is at once creative and destructive.¹³ To put the matter a bit differently, Max in cutting down the giant forest trees is not simply clearing the way for the ultimate achievement of his desires. He is also unwittingly releasing a titanic primal power of destruction that will nearly be the death of himself, Katie and Alfred.¹⁴ Crawford's representation of this enormous dark force by the magnified phallic symbol of the log indicates an unconscious ambiguity in Max's own manhood. Such an ambivalence, like that of the axe as the instrument of both love and desolation, suggests how the “knowledge” of the Fall links good and evil as “inseparable but irreconcilable”¹⁵ contraries. In a world lapsed from the primal unity of the “golden daffodil,” the positive aspects of life are joined to their antinomies in a cross upon which man and nature must suffer.¹⁶

Thus, in his initial period of untroubled striving, Max is an innocent in both the positive and negative senses of the term. As the exultant axe song of Part IV indicates, Gordon is Lewis's “American Adam,” a heroic ingenue of god-like power and potential.¹⁷ However, in his Eden of untested faith, hope and charity, Max is ironically unaware of the evil lurking within and around him. He does not yet realize that he can be sorely tempted to use the axe with which he does “immortal tasks” as a murder weapon. Gordon is therefore at once spiritually superior and spiritually deficient, both above and below the tragic experience of fallen man. In order for him to cope with reality, and to fulfill his potential for creativity and love, he must grow beyond his naivete through a “fortunate Fall.”

The linked antitheses of the Fall which must be experienced by Max are presented in “Malcolm's Katie” and several other poems through the penetrating weapon. In “The Dark Stag,” for example, the clash of opposites within nature's cycles is conveyed by the metaphor of sunrise as an Indian hunter, whose arrows slay the stag of night and his “white doe” the moon. Through this complex conceit, light and darkness, love and death, creation and destruction, are revealed as “inseparable but irreconcilable” contraries in the natural world. Another form of the piercing weapon that is used in “The Dark Stag” to suggest opposites in union and conflict is the horned or fanged animal. The image, which appears most prominently in the antlered stag, and in Crawford's representation of the dawn winds as a pack of hounds,¹⁸ embodies the paradox that natural creatures must fight and kill in order to live and love. An intimately related notion, which is treated in “Said the Canoe,” is the basic identity of the erotic and the killer instincts.¹⁹ This tragic conjunction is again rendered by the penetrating weapon through the motifs of the savage animal and the savage hunter. Thus, the hounds of the “masters twain” have “sweet” dreams of pitting their teeth against the “sharp splendour” of the “lusty” stag. Such a “phallic” combat, in which blood-lust and sexual desire are indistinguishable, is related by the love song of the masters to a parallel association of libido and thanatos in human instinct. The love lyric emphasizes the sinister link between man and beast by employing arrow and gaff as obvious symbolic equivalents of fang and antler:

My masters twain sang songs that wove—
As they burnished hunting-blade and rifle—
A golden thread with a cobweb trifle,
Loud of the chase and low of love:
“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?”

Crawford's use of the piercing weapon in “The Dark Stag” and “Said the Canoe” casts light upon the mythic evocations of the wilderness that open Parts II, IV and V of “Malcolm's Katie.” These passages are not merely ornate description, but rather provide a thematic framework for the action which is to follow.²⁰ Thus, in the introduction to Part II, Crawford's richly imaginative rendering of autumn and Indian summer places Max's optimism in the context of the linked opposites of the Fall. To communicate this paradoxical vision, the poet once again employs the penetrating weapon through her two motifs of the Indian hunter and the savage horned animal. The former appears in the representation of the first cold winds of autumn as “scouts of Winter,” who discharge “whistling shafts” that turn the leaves to their fall colors. Crawford's characteristically elaborate conceit suggests through the contrasting sensory images of frost and fire, of green and crimson, a tension of life and love with cruelty and death. These same pairs of thematic contraries are also conveyed in the prelude to Part II by the horned animal, which appears in a description of deer roaming the primeval forest.²¹ “Warrior stags,” unacquainted with the deadly arrows of the Indian hunter, boldly lead their does and “tripping” fawns. Here the fierce brute that is armed to fight for mates and survival is incorporated into a scene of domestic tenderness and harmony. While this idyll may indicate a redemptive transcendence of opposites, it is also juxtaposed with the absent yet vividly depicted figure of the savage hunter.²² Moreover, as the “imagined” Indian draws his bow, its string vibrates to his heartbeat in a way that implies the discordia concors of the sex and death instincts:

His dusky eyes two fixed, unwinking fires,
His bow-string tightened, till it subtly sang
To the long throbs and leaping pulse that rolled
And beat within his knotted, naked breast.

The conjunction and clash of life and death is rendered in the introduction to Part II not only through the Indian hunter and the savage animal, but also by a pair of contrasting female figures. These are the “mother of the flowers” who personifies summer, and the “Moon of Evil Witches” who presides over the falling of the leaves. The antithesis that Crawford develops between woman as earth-mother and as devouring hag is once again furthered by the penetrating weapon. Thus, the horns of the “cold Moon of Terror” are represented as “twin silver blades” which are linked to her “pale, sharp fingers” of killing frost.

In Part II of “Malcolm's Katie,” the piercing weapon accordingly qualifies Max's innocence by relating the wilderness and primitive man to the linked opposites of the Fall. The same symbolic strategy appears again in the mythic evocation of the onset of winter that opens Part IV. Here, the arctic blast becomes an Indian warrior who shoots “his whistling arrows o'er the plains.” Crawford's conceit of course echoes the “scouts of Winter” in the second section, thereby emphasizing the close thematic connection between the opening descriptions of Parts II and IV. In particular, both passages bear the same basic relationship to the two parallel lyrics that occur in their respective divisions. Just as the initial lines of the second section ironically counterbalance its concluding hymn to the power of love, so the arrows of the north wind in Part IV stand in immediate proximity to Max's idealistic axe-song. The effect of the latter juxtaposition is to foreshadow Gordon's near-murder of Alfred with the very implement celebrated by his lyric.²³ Such a harsh irony underlines Max's involvement in the Fall. Both within and around him lurks a terrible potential for evil and destruction, a darkness both stimulated by and projected in Gordon's Jungian shadow Alfred.

In the introduction to Part V of “Malcolm's Katie,” the piercing weapon is connected not only with the Fall, but also with a possible redemption. This ambivalent association is made through the images of a “mild dove” and an eagle that is about to attack her with his “piercing beak” and “iron talons.” By foreshadowing Alfred's attempt to destroy Katie's faith in Max,²⁴ the bird of prey and his victim most obviously imply the tragic conjunction of opposites in a fallen world. Male and female, innocence and evil, gentleness and savagery, are joined in a tragic marriage consummated by a blood sacrifice. However, such horror is only one aspect of the linking of contraries in our experience, which can also suggest regeneration. Thus, the eagle is moved to destroy the dove not simply by killer lust, but also by love for his hungry brood. The weaker indeed perishes, but only so that something equally helpless may survive. In this way, Crawford is indicating the creative function of the apparently negative aspects of existence. More specifically, the poet is implying that Alfred acts as a tester as well as a tempter for Max and Katie. The suffering which he inflicts upon them is necessary to try their love, and to bring them to maturity. Alfred's constructive role in relation to Crawford's hero and heroine is of course suggested by the naming after him of their first-born child.²⁵

The positive connotations of the eagle as a symbol of Alfred's redemptive office are reinforced in Part V by the connection of the bird with sunrise. Conversely, this association implies that the rhythms of nature manifest not only the linked antitheses of the Fall, but also the reconciliation of such contraries in God's plan of salvation. The same ambivalent use of the natural cycles is already apparent in Part II, where the coming of Indian summer after the first frost anticipates the rebirth of spring. Crawford's juxtaposition of a union-in-tension of opposites with their marriage in a Jungian quaternio implies that creation is not simply lapsed, but also potentially redeemed. Moreover, these two spiritual states themselves form one of the pairs of contraries that clash only to be finally harmonized. This is the case because, as we have seen, evil and suffering are assigned an essential role in the dialectical working of providence and grace.²⁶ The subtle relationship that exists between fall and regeneration is conveyed in Part II through the penetrating weapon in the form of the bow and arrows of Manitou:

                                        … the quiver
Of great Manitou, where all the arrows
He has shot from His great bow of Power,
With its clear, bright singing cord of Wisdom,
Are re-gathered, plumed again and brightened,
And shot out, re-barbed with Love and Wisdom;
Always shot, and evermore returning.

That the arrows consistently associated with cruelty and destruction should here be shot from God's own bow implies that He sometimes manifests His goodness and care through the apparent negativity of a fallen world. To approach the matter from another angle, the bow as a weapon that works through the co-ordination of opposing forces suggests Crawford's answer to the problem of Job. God's power may seem to be exercised with an arbitrary harshness that is contrary to His wisdom and love. However, the pain inflicted by the Divine Omnipotence is always really the instrument of His providence and grace.²⁷ In particular, the suffering that God administers or allows is necessary to mature the human soul so that it may be fit for Heaven:

Who curseth Sorrow knows her not at all.
Dark matrix she, from which the human soul
Has its last birth; whence it, with misty thews
Close knitted in her blackness, issues out
Strong for immortal toil up such great heights
As crown o'er crown rise through Eternity.
Without the loud, deep clamour of her wail,
The iron of her hands, the biting brine
Of her black tears, the soul, but lightly built
Of indeterminate spirit, like a mist
Would lapse to chaos in soft, gilded dreams,
As mists fade in the gazing of the sun.
                                                  … thou instrument
Close clasped with the great Creative Hand!

The bow of Manitou in “Malcolm's Katie” helps to explain the well-known song of the arrow from “Gisli, the Chieftain.” Crawford's brilliant lyric once again suggests a redemption in which evil and suffering are essential elements, in which salvation comes through a synthesis of the conflicting opposites of the Fall.²⁸ The poet's paradoxical view of regeneration is prepared for at the beginning of “Gisli …” by another form of the piercing weapon. This is the flower-tipped spear offered by the chieftain to Lada, goddess of springtime and love. On one level, the spear implies the union-in-tension of eros and thanatos, a meaning that comments ironically upon Gisli's prayer for a merely fleshly bride. Insensitive to the spiritual aspects of sexuality, the fierce chieftain understands only a “fallen” animal appetite in which erotic desire and blood-lust are one. The Norseman's instinctual outlook is suggested in Parts II and III of “Gisli …” by several “inanimate” forms of the penetrating weapon, including the spear, the knife, the arrow and the sharp-prowed Viking ship. However, the connection of Gisli's carnal desire with predatory nature is rendered far more obviously by the chieftain's “fanged” hound Gylfag. “Lank and red as a blood-rusted spear,” Gylfag clearly links his master's sexually charged enjoyment of war and the chase with the feral passions of the savage beast. The association through hunting of love and the killer instinct recurs in the song of the arrow, where the shafts of Gisli and Brynhild appropriately meet in the breast of an eagle searching for prey:

What know I,
As I bite the blue veins of the throbbing sky,
To the quarry's breast,
Hot from the sides of the sleek, smooth nest?
What know I
Of the will of the tense bow from which I fly?
What the need or jest
That feathers my flight to its bloody rest?
What know I
Of the will of the bow that speeds me on high?
What doth the shrill bow
Of the hand on its singing soul-string know?
Flame-swift speed I,
And the dove and the eagle shriek out and die.
Whence comes my sharp zest
For the heart of the quarry? The gods know best.
Deep pierced the red gaze of the eagle
The breast of a cygnet below him.
Beneath his dun wing from the eastward
Shrill chanted the long shaft of Gisli;
Beneath his dun wing from the westward
A shaft shook that laughed in its biting—
Met in the fierce breast of the eagle
The arrows of Gisli and Brynhild.

The meeting of the shafts of Gisli and Brynhild in the breast of a ravenous eagle implies that the chieftain's carnal bride is a reflection of his own animal ferocity. Brynhild is in other words the hag-facet of the female, a horror already intimated by the role of Lada as weaver of destiny.²⁹ Gisli's mate thus unites in tension the opposites of savagery and love, of desirable woman and terrible witch. Moreover, her deadly skill with the bow characterizes her as an Amazon, who incongruously combines male and female qualities. In all of these ways, Brynhild reflects the discordia concors of the Fall. The terrible potential for evil inherent in this situation is expressed through the penetrating weapon in the treacherous murder of Brynhild's first husband:

“Look, father! doth my heart bleed yet?
His arrow Brynhild's arrow met—
My galleys anchored in their net.
“Again their arrows meet—swift lies
That pierced me from their smiling eyes.
How fiercely hard a man's heart dies!
“She false—he false! There came a day
Pierced by the fierce chief's spear I lay—
My ghost rose shrieking from its clay.

However, in keeping with Crawford's paradoxical view of salvation, the flower-tipped spear and the arrow-song also imply the reconciliation of opposites in Redemption. Such a transcendence may be approached through the fact that the eagle killed by Gisli and Brynhild is more than a savage predator. Not only does he hunt to provide for his brood, but he is himself tormented by the “knife-pangs” of hunger:

At his sides the darts of his hunger;
At his ears the shrieks of his eaglets;
In his breast the love of the quarry.

The order of priorities in these lines indicates that the eagle is at least as much a suffering victim as he is a ruthless killer. He therefore suggests not only a tension between love and death, but also their reconciliation in a Christ-like “passion.” The idea that the eagle's hard and dangerous life is a “crucifixion” is implied by Crawford's association of both his hunger and his death with the Savior's wounded side. The poet of course makes the same symbolic use of the piercing weapon in connection with the murder of Brynhild's first husband:

“I loved—this is my tale—and died.
The fierce chief hungered for my bride:
The spear of Gisli pierced my side.

Through his Christ-like suffering the husband is rescued from the “Hell Way” and atoned with the power of divine love as it is embodied in his father. The crime of Gisli and Brynhild has accordingly led to the salvation of its victim, thereby suggesting that in the blackest evil there is a redemptive potential. The same idea may be applied to Gisli's love for his bride through the ambivalent image of the flower-tipped spear, which unites the tragic conjunction of sex and death with suggestions of innocence and rebirth. Crawford's symbolism here could be reinforced by a complex of meanings implicit in the arrow-song. On the one hand, the meeting of the shafts of Gisli and Brynhild in the breast of the eagle is an obvious if grotesque image of the physical union of the two lovers. On the other, the association of the bow with some mysterious purpose links the weapon with its use in “Malcolm's Katie” as a symbol of God's wisdom and grace. Superimposing the erotic and the theological connotations of the arrow-song, we are led to the conclusion that even in the feral passion of Gisli and Brynhild there is a regenerative virtue. If such is the case, then the winged arrows may on one level represent a spiritual ecstasy distilled from the pleasures of the flesh.

To sum up, the arrow-song from “Gisli …” seems to epitomize how the poem combines in both tension and synthesis the apparently discordant states of Fall and Regeneration. In this regard, Crawford's intricate vision is centered upon the contraries of love and suffering, love and savagery. These paired opposites appear to co-exist not only in conflict, but also in a redemptive “marriage.” Crawford conveys such a paradoxical outlook in “Gisli …” through her ambivalent use of the piercing weapon. Spear, eagle and arrow indeed suggest the terrible power of evil, but the three images also imply that pain and violence are ultimately the vehicles of grace.

The paradoxical treatment of redemption in “Gisli …” casts light upon the eventual salvation of Max Gordon in “Malcolm's Katie.” Once more, a clash and reconciliation of love and suffering, love and violence, is conveyed by an ambiguous employment of the penetrating weapon. This symbolic complex appears in Part IV, where it is connected with Gordon's two opposing reactions to Alfred's temptation. On the one hand, Max responds to the villain's “proof” of Katie's infidelity by threatening to slay Alfred with his axe. On the other, Gordon's anger and hurt become a “sharp spear” in his heart. While axe and spear most obviously join love with savagery and pain in a tragic antithesis,³⁰ the second image also implies a redemptive agony contrary to Max's murderous rage. His Christ-like “passion” is of course completed by the falling tree that pierces him with its branches.³¹ Not only does this stroke of providence forestall a homicide, but it eventually transforms all of Max's negative emotions into a self-sacrificing love. In Biblical terms, the tree of a rending knowledge of good and evil as clashing contraries becomes the cross in which Fall subserves Regeneration.³² This process of redemptive transcendence is completed in Part VI when Max risks his own life to rescue his enemy. He is now “as a god,” at once strong enough to do his part in saving a fallen world, and capable of a mature devotion truly worthy of his epipysche.

Just as Crawford presents the redemption of Max through the penetrating weapon, so she uses the same image in connection with the regeneration of Alfred. As we see in Part IV of “Malcolm's Katie,” Gordon's rival is not simply a cold, cruel nihilist. Rather, he is a soul torn between affirmation and the death-wish, self-interest and love, evil and grace. Alfred in other words suffers the discordia concors of the Fall, an agony suggested through the piercing weapon in the form of the serpent's fang. This image symbolizes a guilt which, although stemming from pity and love, is at first basically negative in its results. Thus, Alfred is prevented from rescuing the fallen Max only by the reflection that such sympathy would involve a “Fire-fanged Remorse” for his past misdeeds. Similarly, in Part VI, Crawford's villain is moved by the “hot fangs” of his bad conscience to try to drown both himself and Katie.

Alfred is rescued by the fortuitous appearance of Max from his plunge into negation. That the physical salvation of Gordon's enemy works a corresponding change in his spirit is indicated by “the blood red on his temple.” Crawford's wound-image is of course a “cognate” of the penetrating weapon. It is moreover specifically connected with the serpent's tooth by Alfred's observation that remorse has sunk its “hot fangs” into the “brow” of his growing love for Katie. The association of Alfred's injury with the bite of the snake links it most obviously with Cain's marked forehead, a standard Romantic symbol of a torturing remorse. However, the cut also calls to mind the thorn-wounds upon Christ's brow. The ambivalence of Alfred's “blood red … temple” implies that, just as Gordon's “crucifixion” has converted his jealousy and anger to an all-embracing love, so his rival is about to feel a constructive “sorrow” for his sins. By honestly facing his painful guilt, Alfred can transform it into a redemptive suffering. The mark of Cain that recalls the bite of the serpent of evil will then become the “seal” of God's pardon.

Thus, in “Malcolm's Katie,” as in others of Crawford's finest poems, the penetrating weapon is fundamental to the communication of the artist's mythic vision. This complex outlook is based upon a Biblical schema of innocence, Fall and Redemption, a spiritual movement that is conceived of as a “dialectic” of linked opposites. Both the clash and the reconciliation of these contraries in the rhythm of Fall and Regeneration are consistently rendered by Crawford through the piercing weapon. In this way, the image at once gathers considerable richness of implication, and helps to tie the poet's work together into a unified imaginative whole. Such a subtle and intricate use of symbolism may be less evident than the more obvious flaws of Crawford's work. However, the skill with which the poet manipulates the piercing weapon should help to establish her claim to a distinguished place in Canadian literary tradition.

Notes

1. James Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” in Robert L. McDougall, ed., Our Living Tradition, Second and Third Series (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1959), pp. 268-288. For some other useful studies of Crawford's work, see Frank Bessai, “The Ambivalence of Love in the Poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford,” Queen's Quarterly, 77 (Winter 1970), pp. 404-418; Ann Yeoman, “Towards a Native Mythology …,” Canadian Literature, 52 (Spring 1972), pp. 39-47; Dorothy Livesay, “The Hunters Twain,” Canadian Literature, 55 (Winter 1973), pp. 75-98; Kenneth J. Hughes and Birk Sproxton, “Malcolm's Katie: Images and Songs,” Canadian Literature, 65 (Summer 1975), pp. 55-64; and Robin Mathews, “‘Malcolm's Katie’: Love, Wealth, and Nation Building,” Studies in Canadian Literature, 2 no. 1 (Winter 1977), pp. 49-60.

2. All quotations from Crawford's work are uniform with the texts in James Reaney, ed., Collected Poems: Isabella Valancy Crawford (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1972). The sexual reference in “Said the Thistle Down” is all the more striking because, as Reaney indicates (Collected Poems, p. xix), the piece is of the sort of work that appeared in “Victorian gift book collections.” Reaney in his introduction to the Collected Poems (p. xx) mentions the erotic imagery in “Said the Thistle Down” and other pieces.

3. Shelley, “Epipsychidion,” 11.566-587.

4. For a discussion of such tendencies in Victorian poetry, see Wendell Stacy Johnson, Sex and Marriage in Victorian Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975).

5. For the place of “The Lily Bed” in “The Hunters Twain,” see Livesay op. cit. pp. 87-88. For the sexual connotations of the poem's imagery, see Bessai, op. cit., pp. 409-410.

6. Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” pp. 282-283; Collected Poems, p. xxi and Yeoman, op. cit., pp. 41-42.

7. I am of course using the term “dialectical” in a Hegelian sense. For previous discussions of the clash and reconciliation of opposites in Crawford's poetry, see Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” pp. 276-278; Bessai, op. cit., pp. 408 and 412; Yeoman, op. cit., pp. 41-46 and Mathews, op. cit., p. 51.

8. For previous mention of the importance of the axe, see Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” p. 286; Dorothy Livesay, “Tennyson's Daughter or Wilderness Child?,” Journal of Canadian Fiction, 2, no. 3 (Summer 1973), p. 165; Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., p. 61 and Mathews, op. cit., pp. 51, 56, 57 and 58. For the importance of the songs in “Malcolm's Katie” see Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., pp. 62-63.

9. Bessai, op. cit., pp. 415-416; and Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., p. 55. For a more extended discussion of the theme of nation building in “Malcolm's Katie,” see Mathews, op. cit.

10. For the spiritual connotations of the lily in Crawford's poetry, see Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” p. 279 and Yeoman, op. cit., p. 41. For the traditional connotations of the image, including sexual and spiritual meanings, see Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, Part II (New York: Scarecrow, 1961), pp. 1014-1015.

11. Crawford is presumably thinking of sex in its “proper” context of married love.

12. Mathews, op. cit., pp. 54 and 59. For Crawford's sense of the necessity of facing the dark side of existence, see Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” pp. 276-277 and 280-281.

13. For this duality, see Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., p. 64.

14. Bessai, op. cit., pp. 415-416.

15. M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Major Authors Edition, Revised (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 1671.

16. Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” p. 276.

17. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955).

18. The image also occurs in “The Dark Stag” as a “red-eyed eagle” and “the strong, fierce muskallunge.”

19. See J. B. Ower, “Isabella Valancy Crawford: ‘The Canoe’,” Canadian Literature, 34 (Autumn 1967), pp. 56-58; Bessai, op. cit., pp. 411-413; and Karl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Second Edition, vol. 1 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 423.

20. Bessai, op. cit., pp. 416-417 and Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., pp. 57-58.

21. The savage animal that is armed with horns, teeth or claws also appears in the introduction to Part II in the form of the “panther”, the bison and the eagle.

22. The image of the Indian hunter also appears in the introduction to Part II in the form of the sunset that “hunter-wise” shoots arrows of red and gold light at the eyes of buffalo.

23. Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., p. 57.

24. Ibid., p. 61 and Mathews, op. cit., p. 58.

25. Mathews, op. cit., p. 58, notes that “implicit in the destructive activity of Alfred is the regeneration upon which the poem closes.” Jung of course emphasizes the necessary role of the “shadow” in the psychic totality of the “self.” See C. G. Jung, Aion, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, Pt. II (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 41-64.

26. Yeoman, op. cit., p. 45.

27. For a discussion of this matter, see Reaney, “Isabella Valancy Crawford,” pp. 280-281.

28. Ibid., pp. 279-280, and Yeoman, p. 45. The role of evil in redemption is of course explicitly stated in the “lyric” that concludes “Gisli …”.

29. The idea that Lada as weaver of destiny is a hag could have been suggested to Crawford by Thomas Gray's poem “The Fatal Sisters.”

30. Mathews, op. cit., p. 58 stresses this negative side of Max's temptation.

31. For Max as a Christ-figure, see Hughes and Sproxton, op. cit., pp. 57-58.

32. Yeoman, op. cit., p. 46. This complex of ideas is suggested symbolically by Katie's song at the end of Part V. The rose of love bears the “thorn” of pain, but this is accompanied by pity.