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| Brass memorial plaque commemorating poet Archibald Lampman |
by Mike Steinhauer
St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, a small chapel-like structure, stands at a busy intersection at the corner of Montreal Road and Cody Avenue. The limestone building, with a short square bell tower and a semicircular apse, could easily be missed as the bright fluorescent lights of a nearby Burger King and the oversized signs of the many cash marts—promising cheap money—compete for attention along Montreal Road.
It may be difficult then to imagine that the church, constructed between 1887 and 1888, was once surrounded by fields and marked the western edge of Janeville—a rural suburb of Ottawa.
In the article ‘Ottawa and its Churches’, published in the Canadian Church Magazine in 1890, Rev. Rural Dean Pollard provides an early account of Anglican churches located within the Ottawa region. St. Margaret’s only gets a brief mention. “Following the line of Rideau Street, past the hospital that crowns the height of Sandy Hill, across the Rideau River and out the Montreal Road about a mile,” writes Pollard, “is a stone church, called St. Margaret’s, Janeville” (1).
Archibald Lampman, a contemporary of Pollard, was familiar with this route. In fact, he would have taken it often—by foot—to escape the sights and sounds of the city. Lampman, both a poet and a postal clerk, lived in Sandy Hill at the Philomène Terrace on Daly Avenue and felt confined to a menial job and restricted by a young wife he slowly became estranged from.
He crossed the Rideau River into Janeville frequently and it is said that he visited St. Margaret’s to meditate (2). The walks to the countryside that surrounded the small church inspired Lampman and may have influenced his poetry. These same walks also took him to the forest at Beechwood cemetery—a wild forest “through which he was accustomed to wander speering about the chilly margin of snow-water pools for the first spring flowers” (3). It was at Beechwood cemetery that Lampman also had to bury his infant son in 1894.
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| Exterior of St. Margaret’s Church as seen in 1900 |
It is not surprising that the poet, yearning for a simpler life, was drawn to St. Margaret's. Its low walls, sturdy buttresses, pointed arch windows and high-pitched roof—all referenced from English parish churches of the thirteenth century—created an unadorned but intimate space and provided a refuge from the industrialized environment Ottawa had become.
It is perhaps unusual, however, to find a plaque dedicated to Lampman inside of St. Margaret’s as neither his family, nor that of his wife, ever commissioned one. In some of the publications produced by St. Margaret’s Church, it is suggested that Lampman was one of their parishioners (4). This may not be quite correct as Lampman attended St. Alban Church in Sandy Hill—the church where he first met, and later married, Maud Emma Playter.
The story (or rather the lack of details) on how the plaque came to be deserves further attention. The plaque, which was unveiled in a quiet evening ceremony on June 27, 1907 (5), prominently hangs on the northern wall of the nave. It includes the last verse of Lampman’s sonnet Life and Nature:
I passed though the gates of the city,
The streets were strange and still,
Through the doors of the open churches
The organs were moaning shrill.
Through the doors and the great high windows
I heard the murmur of prayer,
And the sound of their solemn singing
Streamed out on the sunlit air;
A sound of some great burden
That lay on the world's dark breast,
Of the old, and the sick, and the lonely,
And the weary that cried for rest.
I strayed through the midst of the city
Like one distracted or mad.
"O Life! O Life!" I kept saying,
And the very word seemed sad.
I passed through the gates of the city,
And I heard the small birds sing,
I laid me down in the meadows
Afar from the bell-ringing.
In the depth and the bloom of the meadows
I lay on the earth's quiet breast,
The poplar fanned me with shadows,
And the veery sang me to rest.
Blue, blue was the heaven above me,
And the earth green at my feet;
"O Life! O Life!" I kept saying,
And the very word seemed sweet.
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| Interior of St. Margaret’s Church |
Regardless of how the plaque came to be, St. Margaret’s seems to be the perfect location for a memorial tablet for one of Canada’s ‘Confederation Poets’. Lampman composed much of his poetry during his excursions in the countryside (8). The poet, “a sensitive, romantic young man in the narrow and suffocating society of Ottawa at the end of the 19th century,” writes biographer Marcus van Steen, “was trapped in a low-paying job and in an impossible marriage” (9).
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| Lampman at the age of 29 |
Duncan Campbell Scott, a close friend, writes that Lampman, “born without means and always living on a narrow income,” had a desire for simplicity (10). Living “on the borders of the wild nature” allowed him to escape Ottawa. “Lampman felt contemporary society to be inimical to the values of the imaginative life. He protested constantly against an encroaching materialism which encouraged a defective, fragmented sensibility at the expense of vitality, intelligence, and spirit” (11).
The poet found comfort outside of the city (12) and found solace in places like St. Margaret’s. Whitridge writes that “Lampman and [Waddell] occasionally stopped beside the church to rest on long weekend walks through the environs of Ottawa” (13). The church’s surroundings provided a space to escape for a poet who “wrote bitterly against marriage, the church, the government, industrialization, and the stifling effects of city life. The poet became increasingly a prey to hypochondria, anxiety, insomnia, and nervous tension” (14).
Lampman died of pneumonia at the age of 37 in 1899. His wife, Maud Emma Playter, became the first woman to work at the Library of Parliament where she died, at her desk, in 1910 (15). Katherine Waddell never married and lived with her mother and later her sister until she retired. According to Whitridge, Waddell “died alone at the age of sixty in a small cottage near Hudson, north of Montreal” (16).
The plaque, a beautiful brass memorial tablet, still hangs today on the walls of St. Margaret’s Church—some hundred years after it was unveiled.
NOTES
(1) Pollard, Rural Dean. 1890. “Ottawa and Its Churches.” Canadian Church Magazine. (p. 103)
(2) As stated by both Marion Rogers and the Muséoparc Vanier. Rogers, Marion. 1962. “Archibald Lampman Meditated Here; The Church with the High-up Cornerstone.” Ottawa Diocesan News, June; Muséoparc Vanier. n.d. “Circuit Vanier.” Accessed November 2, 2013. http://www.museoparc.ca/circuitvanier/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ouest.pdf.
(3) Lampman, Archibald, and Duncan Campbell Scott. 1900. The Poems of Archibald Lampman; Edited with a Memoir by Duncan Campbell Scott. Toronto: George N. Morgan & Co., Limited. (p. xxiv)
(4) Edmond and Pavlis write that one St. Margaret’s memorial plaques was placed “in memory of a parishioner, the famous poet Archibald Lampman.” Edmond, Patricia, and Egon Pavlis. 1998. “St. Margaret’s Anglican Church; Erected 1887; 206 Montreal Road; Vanier, Ontario; 746-815”. St. Margaret’s Church. In a previous handout Elizabeth Wiesner writes that Lampman “although not a regular church goes, may have dropped into St. Margaret’s on his way home after a walk in the surrounding countryside.” Wiesner, Elizabeth. [before 1969]. “St. Margaret’s Church, Eastview, Erected 1887”. St. Margaret’s Church.
(5) “Tablet Unveiled; To Memory Late Archibald Lampma at St. Margaret’s, Janeville.” 1907. Ottawa Citizen, June 28.
(6) A more recent publication by Eric Ball suggests that it may have been more likely that the tablet was donated by a Lampman’s friends from Ottawa. Ball does not dispute the affair with Waddell. Ball, Eric. 2013. Archibald Lampman : Memory, Nature, Progress. Montreal; Kingston: McGill - Queen’s University Press. (p. 159)
(7) Whitridge adds that “considerable evidence exists to suggest that there was at least a brief liaison; but it may have endured for four or five years.” Whitridge, Margaret Coulby. 1975. Lampman’s Kate : Late Love Poems of Archibald Lampman 1887-1897. Ottawa: Borealis Press. (p. 19)
(8) Lampman and Scott, p. xxiii
(9) Van Steen, Marcus. 1975. “Lampman’s Secret Love Poems.” [Ottawa Citizen?], August.
(10) Lampman and Scott, p. xxii
(11) Davies, Barrie. 1977. “Marginal Lampman.” Canadian Literature 73 (Summer): 122–124.
(12) Scott writes that “in the city he walked habitually with a downcast glance, with his eyes fixed upon the ground; in the fields and woods he was alert and observant.” (Lampman and Scott, p. xxi)
(13) Whitridge, p. 22
(14) Whitridge, p. 14
(15) Email conversation with Dianne Brydon, past Director General, Learning and Access Services, Library of Parliament; November 14, 2013.
(16) Whitridge, p. 22
Photo Credits
Brass plaque: Mike Seinhauer, 2013
Exterior of St. Margaret’s Church: Anglican Diocese of Ottawa Archives; 51-03-9
Interior of St. Margaret’s Church: Mike Steinhauer, 2013
Lampman at the age of 29: Topley Studio Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, PA-025725