Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

English-Canadian Perspectives of LandscapeIn 19th-century settlement poetry, a contrast between a panoramic and arestricted view is invested with ideological as well as psychologicalsignificance. The pioneer is a prospector: he comes to the country in order toexplore and exploit its resources. The perspective most appropriate to thiscolonial frame of mind is the visual prospect of civilizable or civilizedland—while the land's resistance to the prospector's eye poses a threat. TheCanadian environment that creates the most intensive experience of restrictedvision is the forest interior, where one cannot see the wood for the trees. In themiddle of a forest, the natural world is as close to man as it can be. The distancebetween subject and object required for a perspectival view 12 is minimal, andorientation in what cannot be seen in perspective proves difficult or evenimpossible. 13This forest experience of claustrophobia and disorientation is frequentlyevoked in settlement poetry, as in the “Arrival” section of AlexanderMcLachlan's The Emigrant (1861):Soon we entered in the woods,On the trackless solitudes,Where the spruce and cedar madeAn interminable shade;And the pine and hemlock stood,Monarchs of the solitude,And we picked our way along,Sometimes right and sometimes wrong.The forest is “trackless,” unmapped, and its “interminable shade” contains nopromise of prospect. An equally unsettling experience is described in OliverGoldsmith's “The Rising Village” (1834). Here, too, the density and darknessof the trees makes a survey of the landscape impossible; the settler's home isthe only point on which the eye can fix in an otherwise undifferentiatedwilderness—but this refuge appears vulnerable:When, looking round, the lonely settler seesHis home amid a wilderness of trees:...Where solemn silence all the waste pervades,Heightening the horror of its gloomy shades ...Save where the sturdy woodman's strokes resound,That strew the fallen forest on the ground.The last two lines of this quotation provide a sense of relief which is achievedby the suggestion of a widening vision. Felling the trees, the woodman createsa vista to balance the forest's oppressiveness. When the perspective is thus13