The Coming of the Princess, and Other Poems — Reading Companion

Diction and the Natural World

MacLean's vocabulary draws on both Romantic nature imagery and concrete Canadian details. In 'River Song,' the river is 'swift and silent and strong,' moving through a 'smoke-grimed city' where it 'turns the wheels and the spindles.' The poem juxtaposes the river's natural origins—'forest-learnt ditty'—with its industrial labor, a contrast that recurs in the collection. Elsewhere, she uses precise botanical terms: 'lime and the myrtle,' 'amaranths,' 'bobolinks.' These are not generic landscapes but specific, observed settings. The river's 'silver-shod lover' personification is typical of her tendency to animate nature with human attributes, yet she avoids sentimentality by grounding the image in the river's physical force.

Dialogue and the Dramatic Monologue

Several poems adopt a first-person speaker addressing an implied listener, creating a sense of intimate confession. In 'The Return,' the dying mother speaks directly to her children: 'Come closer to my side, / Your eyes are as clear and true.' The imperative 'Come' and the repeated 'Oh' exclamations give the poem a pleading, breathless quality. MacLean uses dashes and line breaks to mimic faltering speech—'Farewell your faces fade— / Fade—fade—and disappear.' This technique, also seen in 'River Song' where the river's movement is echoed by enjambed lines, suggests a voice struggling to articulate experience. The preface notes that MacLean's poems were first published in periodicals, which may explain their occasional reliance on direct address to engage a reading audience.

Structure and Repetition

MacLean frequently employs refrains and anaphora to build emotional intensity. 'River Song' repeats the opening line of each stanza—'Swift and silent and strong,' 'Blithe and merry and sweet'—creating a cumulative rhythm that mirrors the river's flow. In 'The Return,' the phrase 'Oh, friends!' and 'Oh God!' recur, marking moments of heightened feeling. The poems are typically short, with regular rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB) and consistent meter, reflecting Victorian conventions. Yet within these formal constraints, MacLean varies line length and uses internal rhyme ('low-browed arches,' 'noisome and smoke-grimed city') to add texture. The result is a controlled emotional arc, particularly in poems about death, where repetition suggests a speaker clinging to familiar patterns as a comfort.

The Child as Seer

Children appear in several poems as figures of innocence and spiritual insight. In 'The Child's World,' the speaker envies children who 'look with the dual vision / Of the baby and the seer,' seeing 'stars and the angels' and 'the amaranths of paradise.' This Romantic notion of the child as a conduit to the divine is tempered by MacLean's focus on the mother-child bond. In 'The Return,' the dying mother's longing for her children—'the faces of my little ones, / And the touch of their tender hands'—grounds the spiritual in the physical. The children are not abstract symbols but specific, embodied presences. MacLean's portrayal avoids idealization; the children's 'crystal clear' eyes are both literal and metaphorical, suggesting a clarity of perception that adults have lost.

Readers approaching The Coming of the Princess, and Other Poems will find a poet working within Victorian conventions while infusing them with a distinctly Canadian sensibility. MacLean's attention to the sounds of language—the 'swish of the wind in the wheat,' the 'bound of the church-bells'—rewards reading aloud. The collection's shorter lyrics, particularly those on domestic and natural themes, are more successful than its longer narrative poems. Pay attention to how MacLean uses repetition and direct address to create intimacy, and how her diction shifts between the colloquial and the elevated.

Reading about the river currents in this collection, I remembered sitting by the window one gray afternoon, watching my own mother fold laundry, her hands moving like the poem’s rhythm. A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems — A Closer Reading once gave me that same ache—a quiet sense of things passing, held gently between familiar walls.