The Ways Are Green

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The Ways Are Green is a dedication - a token of gratitude - for the nourishing and transformative power of nature.

The Words are from Ernest William Henley, author of the famous Invictus poem ('I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul'). Invictus is revered for its stirring invocation of courage and determination. It's an impassioned dedication to the strength of the human soul in adversity. Henley was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis from the age of twelve which necessitated the amputation of one of his legs. His critically lauded Hospital poems were written during a lengthy stay in the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, where his one remaining foot was also threatened with amputation. These works are vivid, ambigious and filled with subtle truth and courage. Henley's poem on The Ways Are Green gives us an insight into another side of his character. It shows us perhaps a counterbalancing source of inspiration for his powerful work on courage, inner strength and perserverence - i.e. his capacity for great joy and profound love of Nature. His Hopital poems conclude happily with the patient's joyful release:

"Carry me out

Into the wind and the sunshine,

Into the beautiful world."

Our poem is a continuation and acceleration of this. It's a work of bubbling joy, a cry of delight, soft fizzy laughter, a jig, unashamed revelling in the glory of Nature and therefore of being alive. 

Thompson's response to Nature is as deeply passionate. He expresses it through broad brush strokes and thick paint to capture the stark, wild beauty and pulsing colours of the Canadian landscape.

It was this landscape which inspired the relatively late flourishing of Tom Thomson into becoming one of the Canada's greatest ever artists. Decorative Panel III is painted from a lower-angle vantage point, typical for Thomson, with trees and foliage densely filling the frame. Blue sky flashes through the gaps. A sense of mystery and adventure is conjured and, as with Henley's poem, a youthful sense of magic. They radiate a belief that nature holds the key, that The Ways Are Green...

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The Artwork

Decorative Panel III

Tom Thomson 1915 - 1916

Decorative Panel III was one of four panels painted for the sitting room of Dr. James MacCallum’s cottage on Georgian Bay. They ended up not being used, however, as they were too large for their designated location.

James MacCallum was an incredibly important figure in Thomson’s development as an artist. It was he that persuaded Thomson to leave his work at commercial design company Rous and Mann to begin a painting career in earnest. He also covered his expenses for this transition.

Maccullum recognized in Thomson’s paintings "truthfulness, their feeling and their sympathy with the grim fascinating northland ... they made me feel that the North had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me since I was eleven when I first sailed and paddled through its silent places."

In Decorative Panel III we can see the influence of his earlier life in design and commercial arts  - with echoes of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movements evident.

It’s dense trees, laden with autumn glory are shot through with the blue yonder. We sense the vastness of the wilderness and are touched by the compelling freedom of ‘just beyond’. The low, narrow perspective conjures a sense of adventure and mystery. The overall effect, as in all of Thomson’s work, is one of  mystical reverence for Nature’s sublime immensity.

The Artist

Tom Thomson

1877 - 1917

Described as Canada’s very own Van Gogh, Thomson, in his tragically short 5 year career produced some of the most vibrant and beautiful landscapes of the 20th century. He had little, if any, formal training and only started painting in his thirties. From 1912 up to his untimely, mysterious death five years later he painted around 300 oil sketches from his expeditions into the Canadian wilderness. Through his thickly painted landscapes, broad brush strokes and vibrant atypical colours he worked with a natural area previously described as 'unpaintable'. 

His fellow artists from the design firm where’d he’d worked, along with two more from Toronto, formed in the spirit of Thomson, ‘The Group Of Seven’. They shared an appreciation for the stark beauty of rugged, untamed natural scenery. Believing they could develop a distinct Canadian art through direct contact with nature they created Canada’s first major art movement. They were undiscouraged by the abundant critical descriptions of their work, such as this lurid (and rather splendid) one:

‘The Hot Mush School of Painting, freakish, garish and the stuff of a drunkard's vomit’

Thomson disappeared during a canoeing trip on Canoe Lake in 1917 and his body was discovered there 8 days later. Officially recorded as ‘accidental drowning’ there has been much speculation on his death. His status as an expert woodsman fuelled disbelief that an accident could have been the cause. The Group Of Seven was officially formed after his death, but Thomson can be seen as perhaps its central figure - his paintings The West Wind and The Jack Pine are two of the group's most iconic pieces.

Biographer Harold Town, sees hints of an artistic evolution cut short in Thomson's work. He cites the oil painting Unfinished Sketch as "the first completely abstract work in Canadian art," presaging the innovations of Abstract expressionism. Thompson's leaning toward stylization and arresting use of forms and colour certainly pulls us into a creative emotional space beyond representation. He doesn't simply transplant us into the Canadian wilderness - he takes us there and feeds our imagination.

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The Words

XXXIII in Echoes of Life and Death

William Ernest Henley 1908

This early collection of poems from Henley is noteworthy for containing some of the earliest examples of free verse written in England.   

Our words are actually the third verse from the 33rd poem of 47 in this collection. The title of of this ART WRD, The Ways Are Green, is taken from the first line of the joyous, pastoral idyll of a poem. You can read all three of its gleeful, bounding verses by clicking on the grey box at the bottom of this page. Be prepared to grin widely and sent into a dizzy revery over golden springtimes in nature, both remembered and imagined...

The Writer

William Ernest Henley

1849 - 1903

Despite a lifetime marred by ill health, William Ernest Henley’s remarkable capacity for strength and resilience are the qualities that emerge most from his work and legacy. Henley was an influential poet in the late Victorian Era. His best-known work, Invictus, published in 1875 is often cited to invoke determination in the face of extreme adversity. 

The real-life inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s infamous character Long John Silver, Henley had his left leg amputated after contracting tubercular arthritis aged twelve. In a letter to Henley, Stevenson writes to his friend, “I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver”. The influential literary critic Leslie Smith, who had published some of Henley’s ‘hospital poems’, introduced the two writers on a hospital visit in 1875. Subsequently, they became close friends for over a decade and worked together on several plays.

It was not just Henley who was immortalised in the words of his literary friends, his daughter also provided J. M. Barrie with the inspiration for Wendy in his most famous work, Peter Pan. Tragically, Margaret died aged six of cerebral meningitis, before the publication of the original play.

Born in 1849 in Gloucester as the oldest of six children, Henley later received his degree from St Andrews in 1893. It was after this that he spent 3 years in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, recovering from a pioneering surgery performed by Joseph Lister to save his remaining foot from amputation. Here, he wrote his In Hospital poems, which are noted for their use of free verse. The stark realism of the depictions of Victorian poverty and his frank insights, free of self pity, into his own experiences as a patient, set them apart from much of the work of his contemporaries. Although their subject matter was sombre, the hospital poems end on a positive note, with Henley’s adoration of nature’s ‘lusty wit’ clear as he exalts in his return to the ‘wind and sunshine’ of the outside world.

After his recovery, Henley enjoyed a successful career as a prominent journalist, publisher, editor and critic. He died aged 53, after a fall from a railway carriage reawakened the latent tuberculosis infection in his body. 

"I'll stick to painting as long as I can.” 
― said to his father

"Take everything as it comes; the wave passes, deal with the next one."

"Say Mark... you know just what I want, three trees... Black spruce rough cold looking trees you know what I mean. Trees against a cold green grey northern sky - where can I get them at once?” 
― said to Algonquin Park Ranger and close friend Mark Robinson

“O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, 
And the marvel of earth and sun 
Is all for the joy of woman and man 
And the longing that makes them one.” 
― Hawthorn and Lavender: With Other Verses

“Thick is the darkness--
Sunward, O, sunward!
Rough is the highway--
Onward, still onward!
Dawn harbors surely
East of the shadows.
Facing us somewhere
Spread the sweet meadows.
Upward and forward!
Time will restore us:
Light is above us,
Rest is before us.” 
― XI from A Book Of Verses, 1876

"Far in the stillness a cat
Languishes loudly. A cinder 
Falls, and the shadows 
Lurch to the leap of the flame.” 
― Vigil

"Life - give me life until the end,
That at the very top of being,
The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,
Out of the reddest hell of the fight
I may be snatched and flung
Into the everlasting lull,
The immortal incommunicable dream.” 
― London Voluntaries; The Song of the Sword, and Other Verses

"This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.” 
― Views and reviews; essays in appreciation: I. Literature. II. Art

"The nightingale has a lyre of gold,
The lark’s is a clarion call,
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,
But I love him best of all.

For his song is all of the joy of life,
And we in the mad, spring weather,
We two have listened till he sang
Our hearts and lips together.” 
― The Blackbird

"Open your heart and take us in,
Love - love and me” 
― Why, My Heart, Do We Love Her So?

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me, 
     Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
     For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
     I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
     My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
     Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
And yet the menace of the years 
     Finds and shall find me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 
     How charged with punishments the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate, 
     I am the captain of my soul. 

The ways are green with the gladdening sheen
Of the young year's fairest daughter.
O, the shadows that fleet o'er the springing wheat!
O, the magic of running water!
The spirit of spring is in every thing,
The banners of spring are streaming,
We march to a tune from the fifes of June,
And life's a dream worth dreaming.

It's all very well to sit and spell
At the lesson there's no gainsaying;
But what the deuce are wont and use
When the whole mad world's a-maying?
When the meadow glows, and the orchard snows,
And the air's with love-motes teeming,
When fancies break, and the senses wake,
O, life's a dream worth dreaming!

What Nature has writ with her lusty wit
Is worded so wisely and kindly
That whoever has dipped in her manuscript
Must up and follow her blindly.
Now the summer prime is her blithest rhyme
In the being and the seeming,
And they that have heard the overword
Know life's a dream worth dreaming.

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