Philomène Terrace
363-383 Daly Avenue
Written by Bytown Museum
on
03/Dec/2009
This massive two-and-a-half, eight-unit stone row house was built by Member of Parliament and quarry owner Honoré Robillard. He named the residence for his first wife, Philomène Barrette.
Philomène Terrace was once home to Archibald Lampman, one of the so-called Confederation Poets. Lampman was widely published in Canadian, American and British periodicals, notably the Week, the Globe, and American magazines Harper's and Scribner's.
In the early 1880s, Lampman moved to Ottawa and took an appointment as a low-paid clerk in the Post Office, a position he held for the rest of his life. A few years later, Lampman married Maud Playter, and with her financial support he privately published Among the Millet, and Other Poems. His collection met with critical acclaim and established Lampman as the finest English Canadian poet of his time. Lampman was only 37 when he died in 1899.
The poet’s last piece, written over two nights in January 1899, is called Winter Uplands.
The frost that stings like fire upon my cheek
The loneliness of this forsaken ground,
The long white drift upon whose powdered peak
I sit in the great silence as one bound;
The rippled sheet of snow where the wind blew
Across the open fields for miles ahead;
The far off city towered and roofed in blue
A tender line upon the western red;
The stars that singly, then in flocks appear,
Like jets of silver from the violet dome,
So wonderful, so many and so near,
And then the golden moon to light me home;
The crunching snowshoes and the stinging air,
And the silence, frost and beauty everywhere.
