When Miriam Waddington writes of the exhaustion of language, that inevitable subject for poets, she speaks first of the lost language of nature…. But for Waddington the sense of a lost language is only momentary. She turns again and again to writing of the ineffable wind, and of whatever grows, in a language "light / and quick" through which she makes it possible, in the words of another poem, for "trees [to] yield up their wordless therapy."

Waddington declared this direction for her poetry in her first book, Green World (1945). Its title poem, later called "Green world one," is a good place to begin because it focusses on a subject—the green world—which defines Waddington's outlook, because it uses a metaphor—the growth of a plant—central to her vision, and because, more generally, it shows her ability to build a poem both rhythmically and aurally beautiful, and rich with meaning…. (pp. 144-45)

"Green world one" is an intense and subtle consideration of the process of becoming and growing, of transforming energy, of turning dream into vision, of finding meaning in image. The poem is not anecdotal, but slightly elusive in its playing with correspondences; it is not colloquial, but charged with alliterative rhythms; its images are relatively general, and do not serve to locate a specific experience or landscape; it begins with "I" and ends with "me," emphasizing the contours of the personal response. It is not difficult to find Waddington poems which do not fit this description, but I find that the characteristics of "Green world one" mark the fundamental direction of her poetry, and its fundamental strength. (p. 146)

A poem like "Runners" gives a more relaxed and casual expression of the fusion of man's spirit with the rhythms of the natural world…. Back of the poem there seems to lie an image of children romping through fields at dawn. The poem expresses a receptiveness both to the small rhythms of nature ("the closing flower") and the large ("the sun"). With childlike energy and randomness the flower, sun, wind and rainbow combine to create a generalized landscape which is the very happiest fantasy world: "the enchanted land / of ourselves."

A poet becoming the enchanted land of herself. Such lyrical terms, resonant but perhaps vague, seem more suited to describing the poetry of Miriam Waddington than pseudo-precise critical terminology. Not willing to be aligned closely with particular movements or schools, Waddington places herself in these general terms: "In poetry I disliked rhetoric, intellectual word play, and T. S. Eliot, which made me native rather than cosmopolitan (according to A.J.M. Smith's famous classification), and realist-physical rather than metaphysical." Suitable as this description is it seems to need immediate qualification: "Green world one" seems to derive much of its effectiveness from metaphysical word-play, and the extensive influence of Yiddish and European poetry … adds a strong cosmopolitan note.

The difficulty of placing Waddington is compounded by her casual indifference to poetic form. My remarks should not be misinterpreted: I don't mean that Waddington isn't attentive to her craft …, but I do mean that she is unconcerned with poetic theory as something which might govern her own verse. The "bridging of the inner and outer," she writes, "the artist expresses through form." Thus, form in the artistic work is the attainment of psychic unity and equilibrium between the individual artist and a collective ideology. This concept of form as a sort of psychological ordering, of form as a selection of elements from the outer world neither conscious nor voluntary, is primarily an emphasis on the naturalness of poetry and the inevitability of form. There is no literary dogma here about rhyme being essential to expressing a certain world view, or the short line being apt only to a particular kind of content.

Insofar as Miriam Waddington has a theory of poetry, it is expressed in one of her favourite books, Stanley Burnshaw's The Seamless Web. Burnshaw's book, for all its scholarship, is convincing for making a theory of having no theory of poetry. Burnshaw argues for the biological necessity of poetry—"Poetry begins with the body and ends with the body"—an approach especially congenial to a poet interested in the interconnections of body, spirit and green world. (pp. 147-48)

The Seamless Web celebrates the unique enlargement of the mind possible through poetry…. I simplify and risk trivializing an intricate and fascinating argument when I say that Burnshaw sees metaphor and condensation as keys to the pluralistic totality of poetry; he apologizes for his "inevitably static term 'metaphoric totality,'" which he uses to describe a poem as that "all-enclosing metaphor that produces a new relationship out of elements hitherto existing apart, one that is memorable and meaningful in the way that individual poetic metaphors are meaningful: by 'saying one thing and meaning another.'" (pp. 148-49)

Yet, the many poems rising out of [Waddington's] career and sensibility as a social worker seem, perhaps because of their subject matter, more likely to ignore the new relationships which can be established within Burnshaw's 'metaphoric totality.' "The bond," for example, is an early poem in which Waddington expresses her discovery of the situation which is ultimately shared by "the Jewish me on Adelaide," and "the Jewish whore" on Jarvis Street. There is little metaphorical resonance in this poem: when she states "woman you are kin to me" she says one thing and means the same thing. No matter what the variety of metaphor brought to bear on the kinship—the sleep of the whore and the sleep of death, the evil of the noonday sun, "the slippered creep / of famine through the surplus grain"—the result is not further "extensions into infinity," but more strainings toward the same point, that they are "joint heirs to varied low estate." Again, at the end of the poem, with night "closing in," the poet promises to "recognize your face." What this "salute" means is unclear: it seems to be a final expression of sisterhood, but the promise must be cold comfort indeed either to poet or whore. (pp. 151-52)

Though many of Waddington's poems on social themes tend to declaim, she is seldom specifically political. The legacy of her father's socialism, and her own education in a "socialist Yiddish school" is rarely made explicit in the poetry. One well-known poem that does take up this particular background is "The nineteen-thirties are over." The three sections of the poem discuss her memories of childhood, her memories of adolescence, and her present reality as a middle-aged professor living in Don Mills…. [The] memories here are of connections with the international workers' movement. She says "we survived / the depression" though there is nothing else in the poem to describe personal hardship. The preoccupation of that era, she remembers, was "keeping / one eye on the revolution"; her heroes were Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, Eugene Debs, all celebrated figures regarded as martyrs to socialist, labour principles and as victims of unjustified persecution…. The poem is Waddington's exploration of the Depression and a statement of her personal relationship to it. She feels the deep pain of the revolutions that have been crushed, but the pain is coloured by green-gold memories of a happy childhood. Consistent with this sense of the nineteen-thirties it does not seem clear at the end of the poem whether she is making a renewed dedication to the war of revolution, or she is guiltily thinking how easy it was, and is, for her to live enjoying the benefits gained through her "father's old war."

Most of Waddington's better social poems move in the direction of "The nineteen-thirties are over"—toward a personal meaning, toward a statement about the "I," rather than to a political statement or a call to social action. (pp. 153-54)

Green World, Waddington's first book, is itself defiantly titled to declare her rejection of the wasteland, the fragmentation, and the greyness in modern poetry. The title of her most recent collection, The Price of Gold, suggests the green finding fruition, ripening into gold. The titles point to central motifs whose associations place Waddington in the lineage of Dylan Thomas, deeply nourished by the world of "children green and golden," yet never completely forgetting that "time held me green and dying."

Echoes of Dylan Thomas, things green and golden, the voice of the awestruck provincial, the fanciful dream—these have led to a commonplace among reviewers that Waddington has a particular liking for the perspective of the child, that she sees things with the simple clarity of youth…. Yet her frequent inclination toward childhood makes Waddington neither hopelessly nostalgic, nor resolutely naïve. The typical spirit is caught in one of her own phrases, "blazing innocence," a quality she attained, she writes in "Things of the world," during her Winnipeg childhood. This is an innocence neither flimsy nor unconsidered, but a passionate, convinced, robust, determined innocence which pervades her strongest poetry. (p. 156)

Even the infamous Canadian winter is readily absorbed in the green world…. The reader, abroad in Waddington's green world, shares [her] spirit of imaginative playfulness in a world filled with light. It is a spirit so central to Waddington's poetry that a poem in which she expresses her amusement with the poet and the repetitiveness of his subject matter, also can be read as a bemused comment on her own green world. The poem is irreverently titled "Poets are still writing poems about spring and here is mine: Spring." In it Waddington dances light-heartedly with the possible analogies for spring…. The second half of the poem leaps to the more distant possibilities of the metaphors, so that eventually the poet and reader, all men, become the essence of spring in a buoyant conclusion typical of Waddington's cavorting through the green world:

                     and we'll be
                 dyed green by the
                 crowds of wildly
                 cheering fern fans
                 sitting in the packed
                 high galleries of summer.

Some comparisons with modern American poetry provide a way to summarize the distinctive place of this dyed-green poet in Canadian poetry. Clearly she is no Whitman (or, in the Canadian context, Pratt) with sprawling lines and epic visions; just as certainly she is no Sylvia Plath (or Margaret Atwood) with brittle language and nervous intensity; nor is she a determined innovator of language and syntax like e.e. cummings (or bill bissett, or joe rosenblatt). No, the American poet whom she most resembles is Theodore Roethke. There is much of the same love of nature and greenhouse/garden, the same use of nature as a psychic landscape which can expand consciousness, the same tendency to "think by feeling," the same continual persona of the naif, the child, whatever the personal tortures or social commitment, the same linking of a spiritual self with the green world, with water and light, the same love, in sum, of leaf-language. (pp. 159-60)