Poetry
Labor and the Angel
Duncan Campbell Scott · 1898
Opening lines
The wind plunges—then stops;
And a column of leaves in a whirl,
Like a dervish that spins—drops,
With a delicate rustle,
Falls into a circle that thins;
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Thirty-eight poems, including a sequence of thirteen songs. In the title poem, an old blind man gathers roots in a waterlogged field, guided by a golden-haired girl who becomes the angel watching over labour, even in the workshops. Two Iroquois sonnets show an Onondaga mother and her child, then an old woman remembering a time of vengeance. A shepherd playing the pipe sees a foreign ship anchor in his cove; elsewhere the seasons pass, the Saint Lawrence at Les Éboulements, a portage.
Context
The collection appeared in Boston in 1898, from Copeland and Day, the publisher of his first book of verse and of his stories of 1896. The two Iroquois sonnets, his first “Indian” poems according to critics, contrast past and present. Current criticism reads in them the colonial myth of the vanishing race, and stresses, with Northrop Frye, the irony of this poetic grief in an official of the Department of Indian Affairs; the poet Armand Garnet Ruffo answered him with a poem in 1994.
Who it is for
A short collection of classical form, made up of sonnets, songs and a few narrative pieces.
Prizes and reception
No prize; “The Onondaga Madonna” is one of the author's poems most often reprinted in anthologies.
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