Tom McInnes

Tom McInnes Poems

Tom McInnes Biography

Thomas Robert Edward MacInnes (né McInnes) (October 29, 1867 — February 11, 1951) was a Canadian poet and writer whose writings ranged from "vigorous, slangy recollections of the Yukon gold rush" (Lonesome Bar, 1909) to "a translation of and commentary on Lao-tzu’s philosophy" (The Teaching of the Old Boy, 1927). His narrative verse was highly popular in his lifetime. Life He was born Thomas Robert Edward McInnes in Dresden, Ontario. He moved to New Westminster with his family in 1874, and grew up there. His father, Thomas Robert McInnes, served in the Canadian Senate from 1881 to 1897, and as Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia from 1897 until 1900. Tom MacInnes was educated at University College, Toronto, graduating with a B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1887. Tom MacInnes studied law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Ontario, and was called to the bar in 1893. McInnes served as secretary to the Bering Sea Claims Commission in 1896 and 1897, and for part of 1897 was a member of the Yukon special police and customs force at Skagway. He acted as private secretary to his father, the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia, from 1898 until 1900 (when the elder McInnes was dismissed from the office).He was still spelling his surname "McInnes" as of 1916. MacInnes spent long periods in China, where he had business interests, between 1916 and 1927. One source says that he "returned to Canada with a lifelong hatred of Communists and Chinese." MacInnes wrote a series of articles on his Chinese experiences, published in 1926 in the Vancouver Morning Star and Vancouver Province, that became the basis of his 1927 book, Oriental Occupation of British Columbia. According to more than one sources, the book proposes that British Columbia adopt apartheid-like policies in dealing with what MacInnes perceived to be an undesirable influx of Chinese immigrants. Another source, though, calls Oriental Occupation... "a pamphlet," says that MacInnes had "developed a sympathy for Orientals living in British Columbia," and says that the pamphlet reflects his "views of British Columbia prejudice" against Orientals. In Vancouver, MacInnes joined the Canadian Union of Fascists.He became a leading activist in the fascist scene, founding the Nationalist League of Canada. Writing MacInnes's poetry was highly popular in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote "light, easy verse that dismissed smugness and respectability with unconcerned humour ... an amused detachment underlies his work, as though poetry were merely one form of expression, as good as any other." He believed "that joy and delight, rather than the prevalent melancholic outpourings of the soul, were essential to poetry." MacInnes can be compared to Robert Service, not least in the fact of their popularity in Canada at the time. Like Service in his Yukon and war poems, MacInnes, "was especially interested in examining man within a natural landscape, on the fringes of society." Also like Service, "his rhythms are often forced and pedantic, his rhyme-schemes careless and rough. "In some ways MacInnes seems to have modeled his career on that of Service. His first published work, A Romance of the Lost (1908), is a long yarn in rhyme about the Klondike Gold Rush, in the manner of the poems in Service's 1907 breakthrough work, Songs of a Sourdough. In 1913 MacInnes released Rhymes of a Rounder, on the heels of Service's 1912 Rhymes of a Rolling Stone. Unlike Service, though, MacInnes "was intrigued with elaborate poetic forms, such as the villanelle," and actually invented "a five-line stanza of his own he called the ‘mirelle’." Katherine Hale, reviewing Macinnes's first book in The Mail and Empire, pronounced that "the best poem is 'The Damozel of Doom,' an eerie, dreamlike, passionate piece, suggested by the teaching of old Tao, who believed that there are regions where dead souls may be awakened by desires so strong that they are drawn outward again to Earth, where, through finer desires, they again pass into Paradise. Then 'the peace of a thousand years may be theirs in Limbo'.... The coming of this desire, which shall ultimately free, or banish the soul to ages of 'utter vanishment' is depicted in 'The Damozel of Doom' – a poem worthy of the genius of Poe." John Garvin included three MacInnes poems, including "The Damozel of Doom," in his 1916 anthology Canadian Poets, and wrote of MacInnes's poetry:"Originality, constructive imagination, felicitous fancy, and delightful humour (if sometimes grim), combined with philosophic subtlety, much experience of life, and skilled artistry, are the outstanding qualities of this poet, so little known to Canadian readers, so worthy of their appreciation." In a 1933 talk, on Canadian poets who had become known in the early 20th century, Charles G.D. Roberts said: "Preeminent among these is Tom MacInnes, standing somewhat apart from the stream of our poetry, and tracing the inheritance of his very individual talent to Francois Villon and Edgar Alan Poe, with an occasional dash of Keats.")

The Best Poem Of Tom McInnes

Underground

ON a queer, queer journey
I heard the queerest sound,–
'Twas the Devil with a banjo
In a cavern underground,
Where the merry, merry skeletons
Were waltzing round and round,
While the clicking of their bones kept time.

Through a low, iron door,
With a huge iron bar,
A door perchance some careless
Imp had left ajar,


I crept behind a column cut
All out of Iceland spar,
And the carven angles twinkled frostily.

I was frightened of the Devil,
And I wouldn't look at him,
But I watched a thousand goblins
From nook and cranny dim
A-glowering on the skeletons,
And every goblin grim
And ugly as an old gargoyle.

And bogles played on fiddles
To help the banjo out,
For 'twas nothing but the music
Kept alive that crazy rout;
But the big green toads could
Only hop about
To the rumbling of the bass bassoon.

Behind the Iceland column
I watched them on the sly,
Above them arched the cavern
With its roof miles high,
All ribbed with blue rock-crystal, shining
Bluer than the sky,
And studded with enormous stalactites.

But the lovely floor below,
With its level crystalline
Splendid surface spreading
Radiantly green!–
As if a lone, impearlèd lake
Of waters subterrene
Had frozen to a flawless emerald!

And down, down, down,
Its moveless depths were clear;
And down, down, down,
In wonder I did peer
At lost and lovely imagery
Beneath me far and near,–
Silent there and white forevermore.

But from the sunken beauty
Of that white imagery
Lissome shadows loosened
Flame-like and fitfully,
That formed anon to spheres serene
And mounted airily
And broke in golden bubbles through the floor.

There, bubble-like, they vanished
Amid the whirling crew,
Yet left a radiance trailing
Slowly out of view,
That sometimes o'er the skeletons
Such carnal glamour threw,
It flattered them to human shape again.

How long I watched I know not;
The weird hours went on,
Lost hours that bring the midnight
No nearer to the dawn,
When suddenly I felt a clutch,
And swiftly I was drawn
From out behind that carven block of spar.

My soul!–a skeleton!–
A rattling little thing,
Twined itself about me
As close as it could cling!
And in its arms with horror I
Perforce 'gan circling
Compelled by that fantastic orchestra.

Onward swept the waltzers
To the wicked tunes they played,
And soon we were amongst them,
And my rattling partner swayed
Whene'er the golden bubbles broke,
And trailing lights arrayed
Elusively around its naked bones.

A minute or an hour,–
Or maybe half a night,–


No matter, for at last
I was over all my fright,
And the music rippled through me till
I shivered with delight,
Fascinated like the fat green toads.

And by and by I noticed
How 'mid that grisly swarm
My clinging little partner
'Gan strangely to transform,–
I saw the bones as through a mist
Of something pink and warm,
That quivered and grew firm from top to toe.

Bright copper-coloured hair
Soon round her did curl,
Her mouth grew sweet with tints
Of coral and of pearl,
And she looked on me with eyes that seemed
Of lambent chrysoberyl,
While her body fair as alabaster shone.

A witch she was so lovely,
To all else I was blind,
And the Devil and the Goblins
And the Rout we left behind,
In our wild waltz whirling on
The cool sweet wind
Of the lone lorn caverns underground.

Like rose-leaves strewn
Upon a crystal tide,
Like thistle-down blown
By Zephyrs far and wide,
We swept in aimless ecstasy,
Silent side by side,
Careening through those caverns underground.

A minute or an hour,–
Or maybe half a night,–
No way have I to measure
The madness of that flight,


For the loosened zone of witchery
Made drunk with sheer delight,
Till we sank in happy stupor to the floor.

Nearby there was a grotto
That opened chapel-wise,
As from a rich cathedral,
In sacrilegious guise;
On the high Masonic altar were
Three crystal chalices,
And they held the sweetest poisons Hell can brew.

One was a liquor golden
That sparkled like the dew,
One was a wine that trembled,
And blood-red was its hue,
But the last Lethean elixir
Was dark as night, shot through
With glimmerings of green and violet.

Then rose the witch and muttered,
'Quick, for the hour is late!
Quick ere the music ceases
And the locks of the dungeons grate
O'er the host of haunted skeletons
That here brief revel make!
Come free me by this altar's alchemy!

'Drink thou the golden liquor
That lights yon jewelled rim,–
That sparkles fair as sunshine
On curls of seraphim!
Drink for the love I gave thee!
Or drink for a devil's whim!
But pledge me to the time that yet shall be!

'But the gloomy elixir
Give me, that I may sleep
With the white wraiths that slumber
In the dim green deep!
Where the silence of the under-world
Shall wrap me round and keep
My soul untouched by any dreams of day!'

I drank the cup of sunshine,
She drank the cup of night,
But the red we spilled between us
For sacrifice and plight
Of passion that must centre in
The sphereless Infinite
Ere her sweet life shall mix with mine again.

A moment all her beauty
Was lightened as with fire,
Her fair voluptuous body
With its trailing, loose attire,
And her eyes to mine did glow as in
A sunset of desire,–
Then prone she fell upon the chapel floor.

And the white flesh wasted from her
As she was falling dead,
Her very bones had crumbled,
Ere one farewell I said,–
From sight of that dire sorcery
In wild dismay I fled,
Seeking madly for the low iron door.

Behind the Iceland column
I found it still ajar,–
Through galleries of darkness
I travelled swift and far,
Until I reached the upper-world
And saw the morning star
Paling o'er a meadow by the sea.

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