Archibald Lampman: The Canadian Keats in the Garden of Thought
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
November 17, 1861
On this day, Archibald Lampman, the Canadian poet and naturalist, was born. Often called “The Canadian Keats,” Lampman’s heart belonged to the countryside — to camping trips, quiet fields, and the natural beauty that inspired his verse. His life, however, was cut short at only 37, the lingering result of rheumatic fever contracted in childhood.
Lampman’s poetry often returned to gardens as metaphors for wisdom and the soul. In his poem Knowledge, he compared our lifelong quest for understanding to tilling the earth, planting thought like seed, and walking in the blossoming garden of ideas:
“What is more large than knowledge and more sweet;
Knowledge of thoughts and deeds, of rights and wrongs,
Of passions and of beauties and of songs;
Knowledge of life; to feel its great heart beat
Through all the soul upon her crystal seat;
To see, to feel, and evermore to know;
To till the old world's wisdom till it grow
A garden for the wandering of our feet.Oh for a life of leisure and broad hours,
To think and dream, to put away small things,
This world's perpetual leaguer of dull naughts;
To wander like the bee among the flowers
Till old age find us weary, feet and wings
Grown heavy with the gold of many thoughts.”
His words reveal a longing for the contemplative life — for time enough to think, dream, and harvest wisdom as one gathers honey from a summer meadow.
Lampman rests today in Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa. Near his grave is a plaque inscribed with his poem In November, which closes with these haunting yet peaceful lines:
“The hills grow wintery white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor grey,
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.”
In those words, Lampman seemed to prepare his own epitaph — content, not in possessions or acclaim, but in the shelter of thought, the dreamlike solace of nature, and the eternal garden of poetry. His short life may have ended early, but his words remain, evergreen.
