Agnes Maule Machar was born in Kingston Upper Canada, on January 23, 1837. Her father was a theologian and head of the college that was to become Queen’s University, and throughout her long life she was actively involved in philanthropy and the local cultural community. Though encouraged in intellectual pursuits (she studied Latin and Greek before she was ten), she was not encouraged to write since, according to Ethelwyn Wetherald, her mother believed that “a literary vocation was not likely to promote a woman’s happiness” (300). Almost all of Machar’s work originally appeared under a pseudonym since “she feared her words would be little heeded, if it were known that they owed their being to a mere girl” (Wetherald 300). Machar chose “Fidelis” as her pen name because “Faithfulness is the quality I most value, and care most to possess” (quoted by Wetherald, 300). With the goal of encouraging Canadian patriotism, Machar wrote historical poems about heroic figures such as Laura Secord and Louis Riel, paeans to Canadian nature in her many “Thousand Island” poems, and more overtly patriotic poems such as “The Canadian Fatherland,” which reveals an intriguing shift in gender in the third stanza and calls for unity in diversity.

    Machar was active in numerous social organizations, including the Humane Society and the American Audubon Society “for the defence of birds from the ravages of fashion” (Wetherald 300). Efforts to galvanize women to political action are humorously portrayed in the poem “A Woman’s Meeting.” Though advocacy for causes such as higher education for women appears mostly in Machar’s prose, poems such as “Madonna of the Entry” (see also “No Room for the Baby,” the Week 7 [28 March 1890]: 268) reveal her passion for social justice.

    Machar published nine works of fiction, six histories, five biographies, and was a frequent contributor to Canadian periodicals such as the Canadian Monthly, the Week, and the Canadian Magazine and American periodicals such as Century Magazine, St. Nicholas, and Wide Awake. Most of [Page 61] her poetry was collected and published in Lays of the “True North” and Other Canadian Poems (1899), which was sufficiently popular to prompt the publication of an enlarged edition in 1902. Both Nancy Miller Chenier’s 1977 thesis and Carole Gerson’s essay on Machar and her contemporaries in Canadian Writers and Their Works provide detailed overviews of Machar’s fiction and her significant contributions to Canadian intellectual life. She was, as Gerson points out, an “outstanding crusader for the causes of temperance, labour, reform, feminism and…Christianity” (DLB 92:221).She died on January 24, 1927.

    Though apparently not musically gifted, Machar wins praise from Charles G.D. Roberts in 1888 for her “firm command of musical and simple lyric forms, and of vivid description” (234). The latter quality, which owes much to her enthusiasm for sketching and painting, results in some memorable imagery. Machar’s strengths and weaknesses as a poet are revealed through a comparison of her poem “The Passing of Clote Scarp” with Roberts’ poem on the same theme.

    Though William Douw Lighthall, the editor of Songs of the Great Dominion, described her in 1889 as “one of those who well disputes the palm for the leadership among Canadian poetesses” (458), she has not fared well over time. William Wilfred Campbell argued in an 1892 “At the Mermaid Inn” column that Machar was “more human and more interesting than any book she will ever write” (196), and Wetherald admits that “some of her poetry is produced by a collaboration of the artist and moralist within her, and that we are not so grateful for the moral as we are for the image,” (300-301). In a poem such as “Misunderstanding,” which makes effective use of contrasting memories of the same incident and some striking imagery, we see Machar at her best. Her penchant for didactic endings tends to mar our appreciation of poems such as “To a Friend in Europe” and “Untrodden Ways.” In fact, when the latter poem was republished by Ryerson in 1935, the closing stanza was left out entirely. Machar’s own approach to revision can be studied by comparing “The Happy Islands” with an earlier and longer version entitled “‘The Cliff’ to ‘The Islands.’”

    Like Lampman and other poets of the period, Machar believed in the recuperative powers of nature, and she herself often sought refuge at Ferncliffe, her summer home overlooking the St. Lawrence at Gananoque. Though tempted to drift forever among her beloved islands, she returned always to the “nobler task” and higher cause. [Page 62]

Selected Bibliography

“The Cliff” to “The Islands” (Gananoque, ON: Privately Printed,     1891)
Lays of the “True North” and Other Canadian Poems (Toronto:     Copp, 1899) Enlarged 2nd edition (1902)
The Thousand Islands (Toronto: Ryerson, 1935)

Ethelwyn Wetherald, “Some Canadian Literary Women—II. ‘Fidelis,’” The Week (5 April 1888): 300-01; Charles G.D. Roberts, Poems of Wild Life, (Toronto: Gage, 1888):234; William Wilfred Campbell, “At the Mermaid Inn,” 26 November 1892 At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892-93 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979): 195-96; W.D. Lighthall, Songs of the Great Dominion (London: Walter Scott, 1889); Emily McManus, “Lays of the ‘True North’ and Other Canadian Poems: a Review,” Canadian Magazine 14 (December 1899): 174-77; R.W. Cumberland, “Agnes Maule Machar,” Queen’s Quarterly 34 (January 1927): 331-39; Nancy Miller Chenier, “Agnes Maule Machar: Her Life, Her Social Concerns, and a Preliminary Bibliography of Her Writing,” (MA Thesis, Carleton University, 1977); Carole Gerson, “Three Writers of Victorian Canada,” Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series 1:195-256 (Toronto: ECW, 1983); Ruth Compton Brouwer, “The ‘Between-Age’ Christianity of Agnes Machar,” Canadian Historical Review 65 (1984): 347-70; Carole Gerson, “Agnes Maule Machar,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 92 (1990): 220-21. [Page 63]

No sounds the dreamy stillness break;
    No echo o’er the lake is heard,

Canadian Monthly                                                 Lays of the“True
September 1874 (6:228)                                                North” 1899

Or, passing from the quaint old town,
    You wander up their rocky base,
While laden peasants clamber down [Page 65]
    The winding, walnut-shaded ways;—

What matter ’neath those skies or these

Canadian Monthly                                                 Lays of the“True
March 1876 (9:203-03)                                                North” 1899

You whisper, with a proud delight,
    That this reflection of September
Might cheer us on the wintriest night

Rose Belford’s                                                         Lays of the “True
Canadian Monthly                                                         North” 1899
January 1880 (4:82)

During the so-called war of 1812-14 between England and the United States, Laura Secord, the wife of a crippled British veteran, saved the British forces from surprise and possible destruction by the heroic action narrated in the ballad. Her home lay near the celebrated Queenston Heights, a few miles from the Falls of Niagara.

Brave James Secord, with troubled heart,
    And weary crippled frame,
That bore the scars of Queenston Heights,

But Laura, bending o’er her babes,
    Said, smiling through her tears:
‘These are not times for brave men’s wives

To milk her grazing cow she went;
    The sentry at the lines

Nor dark morass nor rushing stream
    Could balk the steadfast will,

With throbbing heart she told her tale;
    They heard with anxious heed,
Who knew how grave the crisis was,

Rose Belford’s                                                         Lays of the “True
Canadian Monthly                                                         North” 1899
June 1880 (4:575-77)

As through the tranquil mountain land
    The snorting engine onward flies.

The morning freshness is on him, [Page 72]
    Just wakened from his balmy dreams;
The wayfarers, all soiled and dim,

Rose Belford’s                                                         Lays of the “True
Canadian Monthly                                                         North” 1899
February 1882 (8:130)

While he who sought his people’s weal,
    Who loved his nation well,
The prisoner of your fire and steel, [Page 74]
    Lies doomed in felon’s cell!

c. 1885                                                                     Lays of the “True
                                                                                            North”1899

* The Canadian Robin, properly a species of thrush. [back]

Week 4 November                                                 Lays of the “True
1886 (3:788)                                                                     North” 1899

Week 15                                                                 Lays of the “True
December 1887 (5:36)                                                    North” 1899

Week 22                                                                 Lays of the “True
August 1890 (7:601)                                                        North” 1899

“The Cliff” to “The                                                 Lays of the “True
Islands” 1891                                                                 North” 1899

Saturday Night
3 December 1892 (6:8)

Canadian Magazine                                             Lays of the “True
November 1895 (6:46)                                                 North” 1899

Lays of the “True
North”1899

Lays of the “True
North” 1899

Here, long ago, amid this sylvan shade,
There grew, in budding bloom, an Indian maid,

Lays of the “True
North” 1899

* Clote-scarp or Glooscap is the Mic-mac Hiawatha, with something of the Western Balder and Hiawatha combined. [back]

Lays of the “True
North” 1899

Lays of the “True
North” 1899