Louise Morey Bowman, born in Quebec in 1882, wrote at a time when Canadian verse was turning away from Victorian formality and toward a more direct, image-driven lyricism. Her early-twentieth-century poem “The Lover” belongs to that shift: a short, exclamatory lyric in which a bright coastal day becomes an intimate companion. Rather than simply describing a landscape, the speaker addresses the wind as a living presence—one that brings her soul’s own wings to life—and asks it to remain as memory for greyer days.
At its heart, the poem treats joy not as a fleeting weather event but as something the self can keep. The speaker does not merely admire the day; she speaks to it, praises it, and finally names the wind an “ardent Lover Wind.” The wind’s wild sweetness is presented as the force that awakens something inward: the final line, “My soul’s own wings to me,” suggests that the speaker discovers freedom or creative energy through contact with the wind. The poem is therefore less about weather than about emotional awakening.
Bowman shapes that awakening through a lilting, song-like form. Each stanza follows an ABCB rhyme scheme, with second and fourth lines rhyming in pairs such as “sweet” and “feet,” “sky” and “by,” “glad” and “sad,” “free” and “me.” The lines alternate between longer four-beat lines and shorter three-beat lines, giving the poem the rocking, breathless movement of a windy walk. The opening repetition, “Oh such a windy windy day,” immediately sets a tone of delighted overflow, as if the speaker cannot help but repeat herself. Exclamations like “Oh” and the word “so” appear again and again, turning the poem into something like a spontaneous song.
The imagery is deliberately simple but vivid. The speaker reduces the scene to three colours: white, blue, and gold, repeated twice—once for the outer world of “sea and sand and sky” and later in “Your blue and white and gold, your song.” This palette links the physical landscape with the wind’s almost musical quality. The wind is personified not as a distant force but as a playful companion: it “frolics blithely by” and is called “gay, salt wind.” Words such as “glad,” “wild,” “sweet,” and “dancing feet” give the poem a physical joy. Against this brightness, the speaker quietly admits the existence of “still days grey and sad,” so the memory she asks for is a defence against future sorrow. The movement between bright and grey gives the exultant tone a tender edge.
What makes the poem significant is how thoroughly it internalises the natural world. The wind is not just scenery; it is a lover whose kiss is motion, whose gift is flight. The speaker’s request for the day to stay in her soul turns an external landscape into an emotional resource. For a woman poet of Bowman’s time, claiming such an “ardent” relationship with the wind also feels quietly bold. The lover here is not a human figure but a force of nature, and the passion is one of liberation rather than possession. The final image of “soul’s own wings” insists that wildness is not only outside the self but can be awakened within it. That fusion of landscape and inner life gives this small lyric its lasting power.