Marjorie Pickthall
Encyclopedia
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall (September 14, 1883, Gunnersbury
, London, – April 19, 1922, Vancouver
), was a Canadian writer
who was born in England
but lived in Canada
from the time she was seven. She was once "thought to be the best Canadian poet
of her generation."
, part Irish and part Huguenot
.
According to her father, Pickthall had planned her career before she was six; she would be a writer and illustrator of books. Her parents encouraged her artistic talents with lessons in drawing and music; an accomplished violinist, she continued studying violin until she was twenty. .
By 1890, Pickthall and her family had moved to Toronto
, Canada
where her father initially worked at the city’s waterworks before becoming an electrical draftsman. Her only brother died in 1894.
Marjorie was educated at the Church of England
day school on Beverley Street in Toronto, (possibly St. Mildred's College
) and from 1899 at the Bishop Strachan School
. She developed her skills at composition and made lasting friendships at these schools, despite suffering poor health, suffering from headaches, dental, eye and back problems. Summers were spent walking and studying nature on the Toronto islands. As well, she read poetry: her favourite English poets were Fiona Macleod, William Morris
, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
.
From an early age [Pickthall] contributed stories to the magazines and newspapers; and before her first book appeared, her genius was recognized. She sold her first story, "Two-Ears", to the Toronto Globe for $3 in 1898, when she was still a student at Bishop Strachan.
"Two-Ears" (along with one of Pickthall's poems) would go on the next year to win The Mail and Empire
’s writing competition. By the age of 17 she was writing for both the Mail and Empire and the Globe, contributing to their "Young people’s corner" and "Circle of young Canada" pages.
Pickthall won the Mail and Empire contest again in 1900, this time for her poem "O keep the world for ever at the dawn." "With its Canadian inflection of the dream landscapes of late-19th-century aestheticism
and its impassioned language and musicality," says the Dictionary of Canadian Biography
, "it attracted the attention of professors whose critical support would ensure Pickthall’s lasting reputation." To those academics, Pickthall's "rejection of modernism
... and futurism
’s abrasive forms represented continuity with the idealism
of the 'confederation poets
'." In that year, she quit school and began to write full-time.
In July 1903 Pickthall's short story The Greater Gift was featured in the first edition of East and West (Toronto), a church magazine for young people. She became a regular contributor. Three serials she wrote for the magazine – Dick’s desertion: a boy’s adventures in Canadian forests (1905), The straight road (1906), and Billy’s hero, or, The valley of gold (1908) – were published as juvenile novels, illustrated by Charles William Jefferys
.
In 1904 her poem "The Homecomers" won third prize in a poetry contest and caught the attention of Pelham Edgar, professor of English at the University of Toronto
's Victoria College
. He began publishing her work regularly in the college magazine, Acta Victoriana. He also introduced her to Sir Andrew Macphail
, editor of the prestigious University Magazine, who also began regularly printing her poetry from 1907 on.
In 1905 Pickthall hired a New York agent, and soon began appearing in American magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine
, Harper's, McClure's
, and Scribner's. "Pickthall wrote more fiction during her very productive decade after 1905. Her poetry might be highly praised, but it paid little, while stories fetched as much as $150."
Pickthall was devastated by her mother's death in February, 1910. With the help of poet Helena Coleman, she got a job at the Victoria College library to make ends meet. However, back problems (and possibly a nervous breakdown) caused her to take a leave of absence in spring 1912. Later that year, determined to see some of the world, Pickthall went to England.
In her absence from Canada, Macphail's University Magazine published Pickthall's first collection of poetry, The Drift of Pinions, "in an edition of 1,000 boxed copies that sold out in ten days in November, 1913."
and then began renting Chalke Cottage in Bowerchalke
, Wiltshire
, with her second cousin Edith Emma Whillier. Successive summers were spent at Chalke Cottage. She began writing again and in 1914 wrote the historical novel Poursuite Joyeuse, which was published in 1915 as Little Hearts. The book was a failure; "it earned no more than £15. Nor, despite favourable reviews, did it facilitate Pickthall’s entry into the London literary world, which she felt was closed to her as a colonial.... Moreover, she was out of touch with the American market."
In 1916 she published The Lamp of Poor Souls, an expanded volume of poetry.
During 1915 and 1916 Pickthall trained in automobile mechanics to do her part in the war effort
. She was not accepted, so instead took work as a secretary and market gardener. This experience formed the basis of an essay, Women on the land in England, which was subsequently published in East and West. It also lead to an unsuccessful commercial venture in 1917, growing vegetables at Chalke Cottage with a woman known as Long-John.
In May 1918 health problems forced her to quit as assistant librarian in the South Kensington Meteorological Office, so she returned to Bowerchalke and completed 20 stories by the end of the year, "half of which were sold by January. Another creative burst between September and December 1919 produced a novel (The bridge: a story of the Great Lakes
), a verse drama (The wood carver’s wife), and 16 stories."
for Toronto, and then journeyed on to Lang Bay
in the Sunshine Coast area of British Columbia
with Edith Joan Lyttleton
; then on to the Boundary Bay
summer camp of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay where she revised The Bridge. She then began a new novel, The Beaten Man: "She struggled over this novel in Victoria in the winter of 1920–21 ... and rejected five drafts."
'The Wood-Carver's Wife', published in the University Magazine in April 1920, "was staged at the New Empire Theatre in Montreal in March 1921 and later at Hart House Theatre in Toronto." Audiences and reviewers responded enthusiastically.
In 1921 Pickthall settled in the Clo-oose
community of the Ditidaht people on the west coast of Vancouver Island
(a community immortalized in her poem, "The Sailor's Grave at Clo-oose, V.I."). Soon, though, her health failed and she was admitted to a nursing home
in Victoria, British Columbia
.
in Vancouver in 1922. She is buried beside her mother in St. James Cemetery (Toronto)
. Although her father was her executor her estate was bequeathed to her aunt, Laura Mallard, in whose home she had done most of her writing.
A collection of her poems and a volume of her collected short stories
were both published posthumously.
"Her father compiled and published her Collected Poems in 1925 and again, definitively, in 1936."
Garvin quoted from the book review
in Saturday Night
magazine:
At Pickthall's death, Pelham Edgar wrote: "Her talent was strong and pure and tender, and her feeling for beauty was not more remarkable than her unrivalled gift for expressing it." Archibald MacMechan
called her "the truest, sweetest singing voice ever praised in Canada." In his 1925 biography
, Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance, Lorne Pierce
could point to ten poetic tributes from top Canadian poets. Pierce himself praised her "Colour, Cadence, Contour, Craftsmanship."
Yet, as Donald A. Precosky writes in Pickthall's Poetry Foundation
biography of today: "Probably no other Canadian writer has suffered such a plunge in reputation as Marjorie Pickthall.... Now her work, except for two or three anthologized pieces, goes unread.".
For Precosky, the reason for that change was simple: "The fact is that her initial popularity was based upon extraliterary criteria. Her rejection of modernism
in style and attitude made her the darling of conservative Canadian critics." Such an artificial popularity would be transitory almost by definition. "But she has fallen victim to time.... modernism has replaced nineteenth-century romantic verse
."
To a modernist like Precosky, the very things Saturday Night saw to praise in Pickthall's work a century ago – its flawless rhyme and rhythm, and that the poet does not write with an eye on the headlines – are the very things wrong with it:
Pickthall's poetry became, to an extent, a pawn in a literary game between traditionalists and modernists. Just as traditionalists like MacPhail boosted her poetry due to their rejection of modernism, modernists deprecated it due to their rejection of traditionalism; her decline in popularity was no less based on "extraliterary criteria" than her earlier popularity.
To take one notorious example: "In his On Canadian Poetry (1943), E.K. Brown ridiculed the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall with such malicious conviction that it is perhaps not surprising to find Lorne Pierce, whose loyal appreciation for Pickthall knew no bounds, rescinding his evaluation of the poet in the same year." Brown saw Pickthall as "the object of a cult" – the anti-modernist cult. To him, her verses represented "the final phase" of English Canada's tradition of Romantic poetry
.
Pierce subsequently tried to offer a balanced judgement of her work in his Introduction to her 1957 Selected Poems, where he talked about both strengths and weaknesses. Pickthall's strengths, as he saw them, were "grace and charm, restrained Christian mysticism, and unfailing cadence;" her weaknesses, "preoccupation with the unearthly, with death and regret, with loneliness and grief, where the tendency is toward emotional interpretations of life, and rapture and intuition are substituted for the discipline of reason."
For Pierce, Pickthall had already begun to repeat herself by the time of her first book: "'Bega,' 'The Little Sister of the Prophet,' and 'The Bridgegroom of Cana,' all published in 1909, ... [show] the full maturity of her powers. When Drift of Pinions ... appeared in 1913, she had already written much of her best poetry, and was to continue not only the repetition of her favourite attitudes and metaphors, but even the vocabulary that included such words as gray, little, silver, rose, dreams, mist, dove, and moth."
Northrop Frye
, for one, found Pierce's judgement too dismissive: "The introduction is written with much sympathy, but tends to confirm the usual view of this poet as a diaphanous late romantic
whose tradition died with her.... I have some reservations about this. She died at thirty-nine: if Yeats
had died at the same age, in 1904, we should have had an overwhelming impression of the end of a road to Miltown that we now realize would have been pretty inadequate.... Pickthall was, of course, no Yeats, but her Biblical- Oriental pastiches were not so unlike the kind of thing that Ezra Pound
was producing at about the same time, and there are many signs of undeveloped possibilities in this book."
The comparisons to Yeats and Pound are apt. Like Pound and his mentor Eliot
, Pickthall crammed her verses with literary allusions; but while this made Pound and Eliot cutting-edge to some, all it got her was the epithet, "Pickthall the Obscure." Like Yeats, she used recurring symbols (like the rose) throughout her poems; but while Yeats's symbolism
has long been admired, Pickthall received only the criticism that she was repeating "even the vocabulary" of her older work.
"However," as Wanda Campbell noted in her essay on Pickthall in Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets, "an increasing number of scholars are discovering that Pickthall, once labelled 'Pickthall the Obscure,' did indeed have something to say, though it was often buried beneath traditional forms, decorative surfaces, and Pre-Raphaelite lushness. Both Diana Relke and Alex Kizuk explore aspects of a feminist poetic and offer new interpretations of individual poems."
Kizuk's interpretation is interesting: "Pickthall's verse achieves that quality of poetic autonomy that Roman Jakobson
called 'literariness.' Her verse might best be introduced as an intense apostrophe
to literary beauty: a turning away from the trial to address the judges in impassioned language that an audience may only overhear. Her poems draw upon a body of literary precedents in order to construct a coherent and fantastic defence against unsatisfied desire and what she perceived to be a fundamental incoherence in modern life."
Discussing Pierce's later judgement, Sandra Campbell cautions the reader against accepting anyone's inerpretations or judgements, urging him or her to read the poems instead and make a judgement of his or her own: "Sandra Campbell explains that Pierce had his own reasons for presenting Pickthall in this way, and argues for a reconsideration of her as 'A woman writer of pain and presence whom we all, male and female alike, ought to read, hear, see, and assess with new eyes.'"
The Encyclopedia of Liteature says: "Of Pickthall's adult fiction, Little hearts (1915), set in the eighteenth-century Devonshire countryside, and The bridge; a story of the Great Lakes (1922), employ melodramatic incident." (The Bridge, like her juveniles, began as a magazine serial.) "As in most of her short stories, Pickthall in these novels fails to integrate fully descriptive detail, character, and incident."
Others have had more favorable impressions. Poet and critic Anne Compton
wrote of Pickthall's first novel: "Little Hearts (1915) reveals an Impressionist
’s awareness of light and confirms Robert Garrett’s observation that '[f]ew writers know how to paint air as she does.' Light erases outlines, turns landscapes fluid: ... 'a small wood lay, long and narrow, like a river turned to trees'.... Not only landscapes, but also characters, and their conditions, are depicted in terms of light.... As Oakshott expectantly enters the wood for a meeting, 'the world was a cool silver light that dazzled him.'"
In The Bridge, Pickthall "attempted a sharper psychological characterization and a realistic style culled from reading Balzac."
with a lot of early Yeats in it. It turned out to be a violent, almost brutal melodrama
with a lot of Browning
in it."
Others have been surprised, considering Pickthall's reputation as the poster child for traditionalism, to find it to be a "modernist drama", "not typical of Pickthall's ... poetry." As a Modern Drama article by P. L. Badir was headlined: “‘So entirely unexpected’: the modernist dramaturgy
of Marjorie Pickthall’s The wood carver’s wife.”
The plot, set in pre-Conquest Quebec, concerns a carver who "murders his wife’s lover in order to have a model for the proper expression of grief for his wooden pietà
. Here Pickthall’s use of synaesthesia conveys her vision of the complex web of human and natural realms, in which masculine containment contrasts with feminine intertwining. 'The cedar must have known ... I should love and carve you so,' the sculptor sang to his wife/model." "The Woodcarver's Wife touches on issues of gender, race, and eroticism, all charged with violence and intensity that though not easily accessible in the 1920s ultimately became an object of great interest for modern feminist critics."
, Harper's, McClure's
, Scribner's, plus many other journals and young people's magazines.
Except where noted, bibliographic information courtesy Brock University.
Gunnersbury
Gunnersbury is a place in the London Borough of Hounslow, with its northern edge in the London Borough of Ealing, west London. It has an area of less than half a square kilometre and is within the west area of the Chiswick W4 postal district of London....
, London, – April 19, 1922, Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
), was a Canadian writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
who was born in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
but lived in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
from the time she was seven. She was once "thought to be the best Canadian poet
Canadian poetry
- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...
of her generation."
Life
Marjorie Pickthall was born in 1883 in the west London district of Gunnersbury, to Arthur Christie Pickthall, a surveyor and the son of a Church of England clergyman, and Elizabeth Helen Mary Pickthall (née Mallard), daughter of an officer in the Royal NavyRoyal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
, part Irish and part Huguenot
Huguenot
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...
.
According to her father, Pickthall had planned her career before she was six; she would be a writer and illustrator of books. Her parents encouraged her artistic talents with lessons in drawing and music; an accomplished violinist, she continued studying violin until she was twenty. .
By 1890, Pickthall and her family had moved to Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
where her father initially worked at the city’s waterworks before becoming an electrical draftsman. Her only brother died in 1894.
Marjorie was educated at the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
day school on Beverley Street in Toronto, (possibly St. Mildred's College
St. Mildred's-Lightbourn School
St. Mildred's Lightbourn School is an independent all-girl's school in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. The Junior School, with about 300 students, includes girls from Junior Kindergarten to grade six. The Senior school also has 300 students and goes from grade seven to grade twelve.-History:St...
) and from 1899 at the Bishop Strachan School
Bishop Strachan School
The Bishop Strachan School is Canada’s oldest day and boarding school for girls. The School has approximately 820 day students and 80 boarding students ranging from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 12 . The school seeks to nurture the academic, social, emotional, spiritual, creative and physical...
. She developed her skills at composition and made lasting friendships at these schools, despite suffering poor health, suffering from headaches, dental, eye and back problems. Summers were spent walking and studying nature on the Toronto islands. As well, she read poetry: her favourite English poets were Fiona Macleod, William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
.
Canadian writing career
According to the The Canadian EncyclopediaThe Canadian Encyclopedia
The Canadian Encyclopedia is a source of information on Canada. It is available online, at no cost. The Canadian Encyclopedia is available in both English and French and includes some 14,000 articles in each language on a wide variety of subjects including history, popular culture, events, people,...
From an early age [Pickthall] contributed stories to the magazines and newspapers; and before her first book appeared, her genius was recognized. She sold her first story, "Two-Ears", to the Toronto Globe for $3 in 1898, when she was still a student at Bishop Strachan.
"Two-Ears" (along with one of Pickthall's poems) would go on the next year to win The Mail and Empire
The Mail and Empire
The Mail and Empire was formed from the 1895 merger of The Toronto Mail and Toronto Empire newspapers, both conservative newspapers in Toronto, Canada. The paper merged with The Globe to form the The Globe and Mail in 1936....
’s writing competition. By the age of 17 she was writing for both the Mail and Empire and the Globe, contributing to their "Young people’s corner" and "Circle of young Canada" pages.
Pickthall won the Mail and Empire contest again in 1900, this time for her poem "O keep the world for ever at the dawn." "With its Canadian inflection of the dream landscapes of late-19th-century aestheticism
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
and its impassioned language and musicality," says the Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is a dictionary of biographical entries for individuals who have contributed to the history of Canada. The DCB, which was initiated in 1959, is a collaboration between the University of Toronto and Université Laval...
, "it attracted the attention of professors whose critical support would ensure Pickthall’s lasting reputation." To those academics, Pickthall's "rejection of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
... and futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
’s abrasive forms represented continuity with the idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
of the 'confederation poets
Confederation Poets
"Confederation Poets" is the name given to a group of Canadian poets born in the decade of Canada's Confederation who rose to prominence in Canada in the late 1880s and 1890s. The term was coined by Canadian professor and literary critic Malcolm Ross, who applied it to four poets Charles G.D...
'." In that year, she quit school and began to write full-time.
In July 1903 Pickthall's short story The Greater Gift was featured in the first edition of East and West (Toronto), a church magazine for young people. She became a regular contributor. Three serials she wrote for the magazine – Dick’s desertion: a boy’s adventures in Canadian forests (1905), The straight road (1906), and Billy’s hero, or, The valley of gold (1908) – were published as juvenile novels, illustrated by Charles William Jefferys
Charles William Jefferys
Charles William Jefferys was a Canadian painter, illustrator, author, and teacher best known as a historical illustrator.-Biography:...
.
In 1904 her poem "The Homecomers" won third prize in a poetry contest and caught the attention of Pelham Edgar, professor of English at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
's Victoria College
Victoria University, Toronto
Victoria University is a constituent college of the University of Toronto, founded in 1836 and named for Queen Victoria. It is commonly called Victoria College, informally Vic, after the original academic component that now forms its undergraduate division...
. He began publishing her work regularly in the college magazine, Acta Victoriana. He also introduced her to Sir Andrew Macphail
Andrew Macphail
John Andrew Macphail, Kt, MD, MRCS was a Canadian physician, author, professor of medicine, and soldier. "A prolific and versatile writer, Sir Andrew Macphail was one of the most influential Canadian intellectuals of his time."-Life and Work:Macphail was born in Orwell, Prince Edward Island, on...
, editor of the prestigious University Magazine, who also began regularly printing her poetry from 1907 on.
In 1905 Pickthall hired a New York agent, and soon began appearing in American magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine
The Century Magazine
The Century Magazine was first published in the United States in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City as a successor to Scribner's Monthly Magazine...
, Harper's, McClure's
McClure's
McClure's or McClure's Magazine was an American illustrated monthly periodical popular at the turn of the 20th century. The magazine is credited with creating muckraking journalism. Ida Tarbell's series in 1902 exposing the monopoly abuses of John D...
, and Scribner's. "Pickthall wrote more fiction during her very productive decade after 1905. Her poetry might be highly praised, but it paid little, while stories fetched as much as $150."
Pickthall was devastated by her mother's death in February, 1910. With the help of poet Helena Coleman, she got a job at the Victoria College library to make ends meet. However, back problems (and possibly a nervous breakdown) caused her to take a leave of absence in spring 1912. Later that year, determined to see some of the world, Pickthall went to England.
In her absence from Canada, Macphail's University Magazine published Pickthall's first collection of poetry, The Drift of Pinions, "in an edition of 1,000 boxed copies that sold out in ten days in November, 1913."
Move to England
In England, Pickthall first stayed with her uncle, Dr. Frank Reginald Mallard, in HammersmithHammersmith
Hammersmith is an urban centre in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in west London, England, in the United Kingdom, approximately five miles west of Charing Cross on the north bank of the River Thames...
and then began renting Chalke Cottage in Bowerchalke
Bowerchalke
Bowerchalke or Bower Chalke is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, about southwest of Salisbury. It is in the south of Wiltshire, about from the county boundary with Dorset and from that with Hampshire. It is in the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding...
, Wiltshire
Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...
, with her second cousin Edith Emma Whillier. Successive summers were spent at Chalke Cottage. She began writing again and in 1914 wrote the historical novel Poursuite Joyeuse, which was published in 1915 as Little Hearts. The book was a failure; "it earned no more than £15. Nor, despite favourable reviews, did it facilitate Pickthall’s entry into the London literary world, which she felt was closed to her as a colonial.... Moreover, she was out of touch with the American market."
In 1916 she published The Lamp of Poor Souls, an expanded volume of poetry.
During 1915 and 1916 Pickthall trained in automobile mechanics to do her part in the war effort
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. She was not accepted, so instead took work as a secretary and market gardener. This experience formed the basis of an essay, Women on the land in England, which was subsequently published in East and West. It also lead to an unsuccessful commercial venture in 1917, growing vegetables at Chalke Cottage with a woman known as Long-John.
In May 1918 health problems forced her to quit as assistant librarian in the South Kensington Meteorological Office, so she returned to Bowerchalke and completed 20 stories by the end of the year, "half of which were sold by January. Another creative burst between September and December 1919 produced a novel (The bridge: a story of the Great Lakes
Great Lakes
The Great Lakes are a collection of freshwater lakes located in northeastern North America, on the Canada – United States border. Consisting of Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, they form the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total surface, coming in second by volume...
), a verse drama (The wood carver’s wife), and 16 stories."
Return to Canada
On 22 May 1920 she sailed from LiverpoolLiverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
for Toronto, and then journeyed on to Lang Bay
Saltery Bay Provincial Park
Saltery Bay Provincial Park is a provincial park in British Columbia, Canada, located southeast of the city of Powell River, and on the north side of the entrance to Jervis Inlet in the central area of that province's Sunshine Coast region....
in the Sunshine Coast area of British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
with Edith Joan Lyttleton
Edith Joan Lyttleton
Edith Joan Lyttelton was an Australasian author, who wrote as G.B. Lancaster. She was born in Tasmania, and bought up on a sheep station in Canterbury, New Zealand. She produced 11 novels, a collection of stories, two serialised novels and over 250 stories.She was New Zealand's most widely read...
; then on to the Boundary Bay
Boundary Bay
Boundary Bay is situated on the Pacific coast of North America on the border between the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. state of Washington....
summer camp of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay where she revised The Bridge. She then began a new novel, The Beaten Man: "She struggled over this novel in Victoria in the winter of 1920–21 ... and rejected five drafts."
'The Wood-Carver's Wife', published in the University Magazine in April 1920, "was staged at the New Empire Theatre in Montreal in March 1921 and later at Hart House Theatre in Toronto." Audiences and reviewers responded enthusiastically.
In 1921 Pickthall settled in the Clo-oose
Clo-oose, British Columbia
Clo-oose is a village of the Ditidaht people in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It is located just southwest of the west end of Nitinat Lake in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island, about south of Port Alberni...
community of the Ditidaht people on the west coast of Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island is a large island in British Columbia, Canada. It is one of several North American locations named after George Vancouver, the British Royal Navy officer who explored the Pacific Northwest coast of North America between 1791 and 1794...
(a community immortalized in her poem, "The Sailor's Grave at Clo-oose, V.I."). Soon, though, her health failed and she was admitted to a nursing home
Nursing home
A nursing home, convalescent home, skilled nursing unit , care home, rest home, or old people's home provides a type of care of residents: it is a place of residence for people who require constant nursing care and have significant deficiencies with activities of daily living...
in Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of British Columbia, Canada and is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of about 78,000 within the metropolitan area of Greater Victoria, which has a population of 360,063, the 15th most populous Canadian...
.
Death and commemoration
Pickthall was 38 years old when, 12 days after surgery, she died of an embolismEmbolism
In medicine, an embolism is the event of lodging of an embolus into a narrow capillary vessel of an arterial bed which causes a blockage in a distant part of the body.Embolization is...
in Vancouver in 1922. She is buried beside her mother in St. James Cemetery (Toronto)
St. James Cemetery (Toronto)
The Anglican St. James Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Toronto still in operation. Opened in 1844 as the burial ground for St. James Cathedral. To date over 89,000 interments and 75,000 cremations have taken place at the cemetery. Recognizing the growing trend towards cremation throughout the...
. Although her father was her executor her estate was bequeathed to her aunt, Laura Mallard, in whose home she had done most of her writing.
A collection of her poems and a volume of her collected short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
were both published posthumously.
"Her father compiled and published her Collected Poems in 1925 and again, definitively, in 1936."
Writing
Marjorie Pickthall "stood as proof in the eyes of the next generation of female poets that women could indeed earn the respect and attention of a literary establishment dominated by men."Poetry
"Pickthall's literary reputation rests ultimately on the ... poetry published during her lifetime." During her lifetime, that was a high reputation indeed. For John Garvin, writing in Canadian Poets in 1916, even back in Pickthall's days on the youth pages it had been "evident that a genius of a rare order had appeared in Canadian literature." Nor was he alone in thinking that. By 1913, when her first book of poetry was releasd: "For once the reviewers and critics generally were of one opinion that the work was the product of genius undefiled and radiant, dwelling in the realm of pure beauty and singing with perfect naturalness its divine message."Garvin quoted from the book review
Book review
A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review could be a primary source opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. It is often carried out in periodicals, as school work, or on the internet. Reviews are also often...
in Saturday Night
Saturday Night (magazine)
Saturday Night was a Canadian general interest magazine. It was founded in Toronto, Ontario in 1887.The publication was first established as a weekly broadsheet newspaper about public affairs and the arts, which was later expanded into a general interest magazine. The editor, Edmund E. Sheppard,...
magazine:
- "The Drift of Pinions is exquisitely lyrical, with a flawless rhythm and melody.... This poet pays no heed to the headlines of to-day ... but goes her way in the world of iris-buds and golden fern, hearing and seeing only the things that are most excellent.... It is impossible in comment or quotation to give an idea of the subtle beauty of execution, the ideal spirituality of conception, which make such poems as 'The Lamp of Poor Souls' and 'A Mother in Egypt' poetic achievements of the rarest kind.... The singer's gifts are splendour and tenderness of colour, sweetness of silvery phrase, and a true poet's unwavering belief in 'the subtle thing called spirit.
At Pickthall's death, Pelham Edgar wrote: "Her talent was strong and pure and tender, and her feeling for beauty was not more remarkable than her unrivalled gift for expressing it." Archibald MacMechan
Archibald MacMechan
Archibald McKellar MacMechan FRSC was a Canadian academic at Dalhousie University and writer. His works deal mainly with Nova Scotia and its history. The Halifax Disaster was an official history of the Halifax Explosion.Born in Kitchener, Ontario, he is credited with reviving Hermann Melville's...
called her "the truest, sweetest singing voice ever praised in Canada." In his 1925 biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
, Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance, Lorne Pierce
Lorne Pierce
Lorne Albert Pierce was a Canadian publisher, editor, and literary critic who published and promoted Canadian literature for more than forty years during his tenure as editor of Toronto's Ryerson Press...
could point to ten poetic tributes from top Canadian poets. Pierce himself praised her "Colour, Cadence, Contour, Craftsmanship."
Yet, as Donald A. Precosky writes in Pickthall's Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is a Chicago-based American foundation created to promote poetry in the wider culture. It was formed from Poetry magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly....
biography of today: "Probably no other Canadian writer has suffered such a plunge in reputation as Marjorie Pickthall.... Now her work, except for two or three anthologized pieces, goes unread.".
For Precosky, the reason for that change was simple: "The fact is that her initial popularity was based upon extraliterary criteria. Her rejection of modernism
Modernist poetry in English
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...
in style and attitude made her the darling of conservative Canadian critics." Such an artificial popularity would be transitory almost by definition. "But she has fallen victim to time.... modernism has replaced nineteenth-century romantic verse
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
."
To a modernist like Precosky, the very things Saturday Night saw to praise in Pickthall's work a century ago – its flawless rhyme and rhythm, and that the poet does not write with an eye on the headlines – are the very things wrong with it:
- The verses are gentle, dreamy, and musical yet somehow empty. She has nothing to say but she says it harmoniously. The world of her poetry, with its ivory towerIvory TowerThe term Ivory Tower originates in the Biblical Song of Solomon , and was later used as an epithet for Mary.From the 19th century it has been used to designate a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life...
s, Persian lovers, and 'amber bars' of sunlight, is not drawn from life but from her reading of romantic literature."
Pickthall's poetry became, to an extent, a pawn in a literary game between traditionalists and modernists. Just as traditionalists like MacPhail boosted her poetry due to their rejection of modernism, modernists deprecated it due to their rejection of traditionalism; her decline in popularity was no less based on "extraliterary criteria" than her earlier popularity.
To take one notorious example: "In his On Canadian Poetry (1943), E.K. Brown ridiculed the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall with such malicious conviction that it is perhaps not surprising to find Lorne Pierce, whose loyal appreciation for Pickthall knew no bounds, rescinding his evaluation of the poet in the same year." Brown saw Pickthall as "the object of a cult" – the anti-modernist cult. To him, her verses represented "the final phase" of English Canada's tradition of Romantic poetry
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
.
| Finis Give me a few more hours to pass With the mellow flower of the elm-bough falling, And then no more than the lonely grass And the birds calling. Give me a few more days to keep With a little love and a little sorrow, And then the dawn in the skies of sleep And a clear to-morrow. Give me a few more years to fill With a little work and a little lending, And then the night on a starry hill And the road's ending. |
| — Marjorie Pickthall, The Canadian (Dec. 1919). |
Pierce subsequently tried to offer a balanced judgement of her work in his Introduction to her 1957 Selected Poems, where he talked about both strengths and weaknesses. Pickthall's strengths, as he saw them, were "grace and charm, restrained Christian mysticism, and unfailing cadence;" her weaknesses, "preoccupation with the unearthly, with death and regret, with loneliness and grief, where the tendency is toward emotional interpretations of life, and rapture and intuition are substituted for the discipline of reason."
For Pierce, Pickthall had already begun to repeat herself by the time of her first book: "'Bega,' 'The Little Sister of the Prophet,' and 'The Bridgegroom of Cana,' all published in 1909, ... [show] the full maturity of her powers. When Drift of Pinions ... appeared in 1913, she had already written much of her best poetry, and was to continue not only the repetition of her favourite attitudes and metaphors, but even the vocabulary that included such words as gray, little, silver, rose, dreams, mist, dove, and moth."
Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
, for one, found Pierce's judgement too dismissive: "The introduction is written with much sympathy, but tends to confirm the usual view of this poet as a diaphanous late romantic
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
whose tradition died with her.... I have some reservations about this. She died at thirty-nine: if Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
had died at the same age, in 1904, we should have had an overwhelming impression of the end of a road to Miltown that we now realize would have been pretty inadequate.... Pickthall was, of course, no Yeats, but her Biblical- Oriental pastiches were not so unlike the kind of thing that Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
was producing at about the same time, and there are many signs of undeveloped possibilities in this book."
The comparisons to Yeats and Pound are apt. Like Pound and his mentor Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Pickthall crammed her verses with literary allusions; but while this made Pound and Eliot cutting-edge to some, all it got her was the epithet, "Pickthall the Obscure." Like Yeats, she used recurring symbols (like the rose) throughout her poems; but while Yeats's symbolism
Symbolism
Symbolism is the applied use of symbols. It is a representation that carries a particular meaning. It is a device in literature where an object represents an idea.A symbol is an object, action, or idea that represents something other than itself....
has long been admired, Pickthall received only the criticism that she was repeating "even the vocabulary" of her older work.
"However," as Wanda Campbell noted in her essay on Pickthall in Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets, "an increasing number of scholars are discovering that Pickthall, once labelled 'Pickthall the Obscure,' did indeed have something to say, though it was often buried beneath traditional forms, decorative surfaces, and Pre-Raphaelite lushness. Both Diana Relke and Alex Kizuk explore aspects of a feminist poetic and offer new interpretations of individual poems."
Kizuk's interpretation is interesting: "Pickthall's verse achieves that quality of poetic autonomy that Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
called 'literariness.' Her verse might best be introduced as an intense apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
to literary beauty: a turning away from the trial to address the judges in impassioned language that an audience may only overhear. Her poems draw upon a body of literary precedents in order to construct a coherent and fantastic defence against unsatisfied desire and what she perceived to be a fundamental incoherence in modern life."
Discussing Pierce's later judgement, Sandra Campbell cautions the reader against accepting anyone's inerpretations or judgements, urging him or her to read the poems instead and make a judgement of his or her own: "Sandra Campbell explains that Pierce had his own reasons for presenting Pickthall in this way, and argues for a reconsideration of her as 'A woman writer of pain and presence whom we all, male and female alike, ought to read, hear, see, and assess with new eyes.'"
Fiction
Much of Pickthall's fiction is disposable. Her three juvenile novels, for instance, were magazine serials, written to a formula to meet a deadline. "In each book a boy or young man, isolated by orphanhood or financial straits, is forced to undertake a journey, during which he must solve a trying problem; its solution, through a combination of luck (‘Providence’), a new spiritual and moral rectitude, and a fresh sense of duty, leads to his re-integration into the family or society."The Encyclopedia of Liteature says: "Of Pickthall's adult fiction, Little hearts (1915), set in the eighteenth-century Devonshire countryside, and The bridge; a story of the Great Lakes (1922), employ melodramatic incident." (The Bridge, like her juveniles, began as a magazine serial.) "As in most of her short stories, Pickthall in these novels fails to integrate fully descriptive detail, character, and incident."
Others have had more favorable impressions. Poet and critic Anne Compton
Anne Compton
-Biography:Compton was born and raised in the farming community of Bangor, Prince Edward Island. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Prince Edward Island, her Masters from York University and finally her PhD from the University of New Brunswick. Dr...
wrote of Pickthall's first novel: "Little Hearts (1915) reveals an Impressionist
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
’s awareness of light and confirms Robert Garrett’s observation that '[f]ew writers know how to paint air as she does.' Light erases outlines, turns landscapes fluid: ... 'a small wood lay, long and narrow, like a river turned to trees'.... Not only landscapes, but also characters, and their conditions, are depicted in terms of light.... As Oakshott expectantly enters the wood for a meeting, 'the world was a cool silver light that dazzled him.'"
In The Bridge, Pickthall "attempted a sharper psychological characterization and a realistic style culled from reading Balzac."
Drama
Because "Pickthall's reputation rests predominantly on her career as a poet," says the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, "her play The Woodcarver's Wife has only recenty gained the critical attention it deserves.'" Many have expressed their surprise on reading the play. Frye, for instance, wrote: "I expected to find it Celtic twilightIrish Literary Revival
The Irish Literary Revival was a flowering of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century.-Forerunners:...
with a lot of early Yeats in it. It turned out to be a violent, almost brutal melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
with a lot of Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...
in it."
Others have been surprised, considering Pickthall's reputation as the poster child for traditionalism, to find it to be a "modernist drama", "not typical of Pickthall's ... poetry." As a Modern Drama article by P. L. Badir was headlined: “‘So entirely unexpected’: the modernist dramaturgy
Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Dramaturgy is a distinct practice separate from play writing and directing, although a single individual may perform any combination of the three. Some dramatists combine writing and...
of Marjorie Pickthall’s The wood carver’s wife.”
The plot, set in pre-Conquest Quebec, concerns a carver who "murders his wife’s lover in order to have a model for the proper expression of grief for his wooden pietà
Pietà
The Pietà is a subject in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, most often found in sculpture. As such, it is a particular form of the Lamentation of Christ, a scene from the Passion of Christ found in cycles of the Life of Christ...
. Here Pickthall’s use of synaesthesia conveys her vision of the complex web of human and natural realms, in which masculine containment contrasts with feminine intertwining. 'The cedar must have known ... I should love and carve you so,' the sculptor sang to his wife/model." "The Woodcarver's Wife touches on issues of gender, race, and eroticism, all charged with violence and intensity that though not easily accessible in the 1920s ultimately became an object of great interest for modern feminist critics."
Publications
Pickthall published over 200 stories and approximately 100 poems, plus numerous articles. She was published in Atlantic Monthly, The Century MagazineThe Century Magazine
The Century Magazine was first published in the United States in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City as a successor to Scribner's Monthly Magazine...
, Harper's, McClure's
McClure's
McClure's or McClure's Magazine was an American illustrated monthly periodical popular at the turn of the 20th century. The magazine is credited with creating muckraking journalism. Ida Tarbell's series in 1902 exposing the monopoly abuses of John D...
, Scribner's, plus many other journals and young people's magazines.
Poetry
- "The homecomers" (1904) and other successive poems in the periodical journal Acta Victoriana
- 1907 onwards - poems featured in University Magazine of McGill UniversityMcGill UniversityMohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
in MontrealMontrealMontreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
and were published as a collection The drift of pinions (1913) - The Drift of Pinions (Montreal: University Magazine, 19131913 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 8—Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London...
) - The Lamp of Poor Souls, and Other Poems. (New York: Lane, 19161916 in poetry-- Closing lines of "Easter 1916" by William Butler Yeats, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:...
) - includes poems published in the earlier volume (reprinted 1972) - The woodcarver's wife, a verse-drama, begun in England in 1919 and finished in Victoria in 1920, first presented by the Community Players of Montreal at the New Empire Theatre.
- The Woodcarver’s Wife, and Later Poems. Toronto: McClelland, 19221922 in poetry— Opening lines from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, first published this yearNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Pulitzer Prize for Poetry established...
. - Mary Tired. (London: Stonebridge Press, 1922)
- Two Poems (Toronto: Ryerson, 1923)
- Little songs (McClelland, 19251925 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* T. S. Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank....
) - The Complete Poems of Marjorie Pickthall (Toronto: McClelland, 1925) - compiled by her father, including ‘fugitive and hitherto unpublished poems’ (2nd edition 19361936 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* James Laughlin founds New Directions Publishers in New York, which published many modern poets for the first time;...
) - The Naiad and Five Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson, 19311931 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Louis Zukofsky edits the February issue of Poetry magazine. The issue eventually will be recognized as the founding document of the Objectivist poets...
) - The Selected Poems of Marjorie Pickthall, Ed. Lorne Pierce (Toronto: McClelland, 19571957 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Howl obscenity trial in San Francisco brings significant attention to beat poetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg...
)
Stories
- "Two Ears" (1898) story, published in the Toronto Globe
- "The greater gift" (July 1903), in the first issue of East and West (Toronto)
- Angels’ Shoes (London: Hodder, 1923) anthology of 24 short stories - Pickthall's proposed title was Devices and desires
Novels
- Poursuite Joyeuse (1914) - historical novel. published as Little Hearts (London: Methuen, 1915)
- The Bridge: a Story of the Great Lakes (London: Hodder, 1922)
- novel, serialised in 1919 in Everybody’s Magazine (New York) for $1,000 and The SphereThe SphereThe Sphere is a large metallic sculpture by German sculptor Fritz Koenig, currently displayed in Battery Park, New York City, that once stood in the middle of Austin J. Tobin Plaza, the area between the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan...
(London)
- novel, serialised in 1919 in Everybody’s Magazine (New York) for $1,000 and The Sphere
- The Beaten Man (1921) - unpublished novel, redrafted throughout 1920-21
Children's novels
- Dick’s Desertion Toronto: Musson, 1905.
- The Straight Road Toronto: Musson, 1906.
- Billy’s Hero, or, The Valley of Gold Toronto: Musson, 1908.
Except where noted, bibliographic information courtesy Brock University.
External links
- Selected Poetry of Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922) - Biography and 14 poems (Adam and Eve, Daisy Time, Exile, Finis, Kwannon, The Lamp of Poor Souls, Marching Men, The Sailor's Grave at Clo-oose V.I., A Saxon Epitaph, Song, Stars, Thoughts, V.I., Vision, The Wife)
- Marjorie Pickthall in Canadian Poets - Biography and 5 poems (The Lamp of Poor Souls, The Pool, The Shepherd Boy, The Bridegroom of Cana, A Mother in Egypt)