The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lundy's Lane and Other Poems, by Duncan Campbell Scott

THE HEIGHT OF LAND

Here is the height of land:

The watershed on either hand

Goes down to Hudson Bay

Or Lake Superior;

The stars are up, and far away

The wind sounds in the wood, wearier

Than the long Ojibway cadence

In which Potàn the Wise

Declares the ills of life

And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound

Of acquiescence. The fires burn low

With just sufficient glow

To light the flakes of ash that play

At being moths, and flutter away

To fall in the dark and die as ashes:

Here there is peace in the lofty air,

And Something comes by flashes

Deeper than peace;—

The spruces have retired a little space

And left a field of sky in violet shadow

With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.

Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;

There is no sound unless the soul can hear

The gathering of the waters in their sources.

We have come up through the spreading lakes

From level to level,—

Pitching our tents sometimes over a revel

Of roses that nodded all night,

Dreaming within our dreams,

To wake at dawn and find that they were captured

With no dew on their leaves;

Sometimes mid sheaves

Of braken and dwarf-cornel, and again

On a wide blue-berry plain

Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;

A rocky islet followed

With one lone poplar and a single nest

Of white-throat-sparrows that took no rest

But sang in dreams or woke to sing,—

To the last portage and the height of land—:

Upon one hand

The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,

And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,

Glimmering all night

In the cold arctic light;

On the other hand

The crowded southern land

With all the welter of the lives of men.

But here is peace, and again

That Something comes by flashes

Deeper than peace,—a spell

Golden and inappellable

That gives the inarticulate part

Of our strange being one moment of release

That seems more native than the touch of time,

And we must answer in chime;

Though yet no man may tell

The secret of that spell

Golden and inappellable.

Now are there sounds walking in the wood,

And all the spruces shiver and tremble,

And the stars move a little in their courses.

The ancient disturber of solitude

Breathes a pervasive sigh,

And the soul seems to hear

The gathering of the waters at their sources;

Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark;

The region-spirit murmurs in meditation,

The heart replies in exaltation

And echoes faintly like an inland shell

Ghost tremors of the spell;

Thought reawakens and is linked again

With all the welter of the lives of men.

Here on the uplands where the air is clear

We think of life as of a stormy scene,—

Of tempest, of revolt and desperate shock;

And here, where we can think, on the bright uplands

Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on life

Until the tempest parts, and it appears

As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:

A Something to be guided by ideals—

That in themselves are simple and serene—

Of noble deed to foster noble thought,

And noble thought to image noble deed,

Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,

Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt

Whether the perfect beauty that escapes

Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing

Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:

Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest

The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,

And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.

The ancient disturber of solitude

Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,

And the dark wood

Is stifled with the pungent fume

Of charred earth burnt to the bone

That takes the place of air.

Then sudden I remember when and where,—

The last weird lakelet foul with weedy growths

And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,

Skin of vile water over viler mud

Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,

And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,

Not to be urged toward the fatal shore

Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden roar

Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with light

And terror. It had left the portage-height

A tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,

Covered still with patches of bright fire

Smoking with incense of the fragrant resin

That even then began to thin and lessen

Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.

'Tis overpast. How strange the stars have grown;

The presage of extinction glows on their crests

And they are beautied with impermanence;

They shall be after the race of men

And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,

Entangled in the meshes of bright words.

A lemming stirs the fern and in the mosses

Eft-minded things feel the air change, and dawn

Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.

How often in the autumn of the world

Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be rebuilt

With deeper meaning! Shall the poet then,

Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,

Brood on the welter of the lives of men

And dream of his ideal hope and promise

In the blush sunrise? Shall he base his flight

Upon a more compelling law than Love

As Life's atonement; shall the vision

Of noble deed and noble thought immingled

Seem as uncouth to him as the pictograph

Scratched on the cave side by the cave-dweller

To us of the Christ-time? Shall he stand

With deeper joy, with more complex emotion,

In closer commune with divinity,

With the deep fathomed, with the firmament charted,

With life as simple as a sheep-boy's song,

What lies beyond a romaunt that was read

Once on a morn of storm and laid aside

Memorious with strange immortal memories?

Or shall he see the sunrise as I see it

In shoals of misty fire the deluge-light

Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,

And feel the lulled earth, older in pulse and motion,

Turn the rich lands and the inundant oceans

To the flushed color, and hear as now I hear

The thrill of life beat up the planet's margin

And break in the clear susurrus of deep joy

That echoes and reëchoes in my being?

O Life is intuition the measure of knowledge

And do I stand with heart entranced and burning

At the zenith of our wisdom when I feel

The long light flow, the long wind pause, the deep

Influx of spirit, of which no man may tell

The Secret, golden and inappellable?

NEW YEAR'S NIGHT, 1916

The Earth moans in her sleep

Like an old mother

Whose sons have gone to the war,

Who weeps silently in her heart

Till dreams comfort her.

The Earth tosses

As if she would shake off humanity,

A burden too heavy to be borne,

And free of the pest of intolerable men,

Spin with woods and waters

Joyously in the clear heavens

In the beautiful cool rains,

Bearing gladly the dumb animals,

And sleep when the time comes

Glistening in the remains of sunlight

With marmoreal innocency.

Be comforted, old mother,

Whose sons have gone to the war;

And be assured, O Earth,

Of your burden of passionate men,

For without them who would dream the dreams

That encompass you with glory,

Who would gather your youth

And store it in the jar of remembrance,

Who would comfort your old heart

With tales told of the heroes,

Who would cover your face with the cerecloth

All rustling with stars,

And mourn in the ashes of sunlight,

Mourn your marmoreal innocency?

FRAGMENT OF AN ODE TO CANADA

This is the land!

It lies outstretched a vision of delight,

Bent like a shield between the silver seas

It flashes back the hauteur of the sun;

Yet teems with humblest beauties, still a part

Of its Titanic and ebullient heart.

Land of the glacial, lonely mountain ranges,

Where nothing haps save vast Æonian changes,

The slow moraine, the avalanche's wings,

Summer and Sun,—the elemental things,

Pulses of Awe,—Winter and Night and the lightnings.

Land of the pines that rear their dusky spars

A ready midnight for the earliest stars.

The land of rivers, rivulets, and rills,

Straining incessant everyway to the sea

With their white thunder harnessed in the mills,

Turning one wealth to another wealth perpetually;

Spinning the lightning with dynamic spindles,

Till some far city dowered with fire enkindles.

The land of fruit, fine-flavoured with the frost,

Land of the cattle, the deep-chested host,

The happy-souled, that contemplate the hours,

Their dew-laps buried in the grass and flowers.

And, O! the myriad-miracle of the grain

Cresting the hill, brimming the level plain,

The miracle of the flower and milk and kernel,

Nurtured by sun-fire and frost-fire supernal,

Until the farmer turns it in his hand,

The million-millioned miracle of the land.

And yet with all these pastoral and heroic graces,

Our simplest flowers wear the loveliest faces;

The sparrows are our most enraptured singers,

And round their songs the fondest memory lingers;

Our forests tower and tremble, star-enchanted,

Their roots are by the timid spirits haunted

Of hermit thrushes,—trancèd is the air,

Ever in doubt when they shall sing or where;

The mountains may with ice and avalanche wrestle,

Far down their rugged steeps dimple and nestle

The still, translucent, turquoise-hearted tarns.

And Thou, O Power, that 'stablishest the Nation,

Give wisdom in the midst of our elation;

Who are so free that we forget we are—

That freedom brings the deepest obligation:

Grant us this presage for a guiding star,

To lead the van of Peace, not with a craven spirit,

But with the consciousness that we inherit

What built the Empire out of blood and fire,

And can smite, too, in passion and with ire.

Purge us of Pride, who are so quick in vaunting

Thy gift, this land, that is in nothing wanting;

Give Mind to match the glory of the gift,

Give great Ideals to bridge the sordid rift

Between our heritage and our use of it.

Then in some day of terror for the world,

When all the flags of the Furies are unfurled,

When Truth and Justice, wildered and unknit,

Shall turn for help to this young, radiant land,

We shall be quick to see and understand:

What shall we answer in that stricken hour?

Shall the deep thought be pregnant then with power?

Shall the few words spring swift and grave and clear?

Use well the present moment. They shall hear.

August, 1911.

FANTASIA

Here in Samarcand they offer emeralds,

Pure as frozen drops of sea-water,

Rubies, pale as dew-ponds stained with slaughter,

Where the fairies fought for a king's daughter

In the elfin upland.

Here they sell you jade and calcedony,

And the matrix of the turquoise,

Spheres of onyx held in eagles' claws,

But they keep the gems as far asunder

From the dull stones as the lightning from the thunder;

They can never come together

On the mats of Turkish leather

In the booths of Samarcand.

Here they sell you balls of nard and honey,

And squat jars of clarid butter,

And the cheese from Kurdistan.

When you offer Frankish money,

Then they scowl and curse and mutter,

Deep in Kurdish or Persan

For they want your heart out and my hand

In the booths of Samarcand.

They would sell your heart's blood separate,

In a jar with a gold brim,

With a text of burning hatred

Coiled around the rim;

They would sell my hand upon a beam of teak wood,

In the other scale a feather curled;

They would sell your heart upon a silver balance

Weighed against the world.

But your heart could never touch my hand,

They could never come together

On the mats of Turkish leather

In the booths of Samarcand.

THE LOVER TO HIS LASS

Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet,

Cover her with morning, this thing of pure delight,

Mantle her with midnight till a mortal cannot

See her for the garments of the light and the night.

How far I wandered, worlds away and far away,

Heard a voice but knew it not in the clear cold,

Many a wide circle and many a wan star away,

Dwelling in the chambers where the worlds were growing old.

Saw them growing old and heard them falling

Like ripe fruit when a tree is in the wind;

Saw the seraphs gather them, their clarion voices calling

In rounds of cheering labour till the orchard floor was thinned.

Saw a whole universe turn to its setting,

Old and cold and weary, gray and cold as death,

But before mine eyes were veiled in forgetting,

Something always caught my soul and held its breath.

Caught it up and held it, now I know the reason;

Governed it and soothed it, now I know why;

Nurtured it and trained it and kept it for the season

When new worlds should blossom in the springtime sky.

How have they blossomed, see the sky is like a garden!

Ah! how fresh the worlds look hanging on the slope!

Pluck one and wear it, Love, and ask the Gardener's pardon,

Pluck out the Pleiads like a spray of heliotrope.

See Aldebaran like a red rose clamber,

See brave Betelgeux pranked with poppy light;

This young earth must float in floods of amber

Glowing with a crocus flame in the dells of night.

O you cannot cheat the soul of an inborn ambition,

'Tis a naked viewless thing living in its thought,

But it mounts through errors and by valleys of contrition

Till it conquers destiny and finds the thing it sought.

Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet,

Cover her with morning, this thing of pure delight,

Mantle her with midnight till a mortal cannot

See her for the garments of the light and the night.

THE GHOST'S STORY

All my life long I heard the step

Of some one I would know,

Break softly in upon my days

And lightly come and go.

A foot so brisk I said must bear

A heart that's clean and clear;

If that companion blithe would come,

I should be happy here.

But though I waited long and well,

He never came at all,

I grew aweary of the void,

Even of the light foot-fall.

From loneliness to loneliness

I felt my spirit grope—

At last I knew the uttermost,

The loneliness of hope.

And just upon the border land,

Where flesh and spirit part,

I knew the secret foot-fall was

The beating of my heart.

NIGHT

The night is old, and all the world

Is wearied out with strife;

A long gray mist lies heavy and wan

Above the house of life.

Four stars burn up and are unquelled

By the low, shrunken moon;

Her spirit draws her down and down—

She shall be buried soon.

There is a sound that is no sound,

Yet fine it falls and clear,

The whisper of the spinning earth

To the tranced atmosphere.

An odour lives where once was air,

A strange, unearthly scent,

From the burning of the four great stars

Within the firmament.

The universe, deathless and old,

Breathes, yet is void of breath:

As still as death that seems to move

And yet is still as death.

THE APPARITION

Gentle angel with your mantle,

All of tender green,

I was yearning for a vision

Of the life unseen.

When you hovered in the sunset,

Just as rain was done;

Where the dropping from the poplars

Seemed like rain begun.

There you gathered forming slowly

Rounding into view:

All your vesture glowed like verdure

When the sap is new.

Then you mutely gave your warning

And I felt the stress

Of its passion and its presage

And its utterness.

There you swayed one tranquil moment,

Mystically fair,

Then you were not of the sunset,

Were not in the air.

AT SEA

Three are emerald pools in the sea,

And wing-like flashes of light;

The sea is bound with the heavens

In a large delight.

Night comes out of the east

And rushes down on the sun;

The emerald pools and the light pools

Are darkened and done.

Our boat dips and cleaves onward,

Careless of night or of light,

Following the line of her compass

By her engines' might.

Through the desert of air and of water;

Like the lonely soul of man,

Following her fate to the ending,

Unaware of the hidden plan.

Sure only of battle and longing,

Of the pain and the quest,

And beyond in the darkness somewhere

Sure of her rest.

MADONNA WITH TWO ANGELS

Under the sky without a stain

The long, ripe, rippling of the grain;

Light, broadcast from the golden oats

Over the blackberry fences floats.

Madonna sits in a cedar chair

Tranquillized by the warm, still air;

One of the angels asleep on her knee

Under the shade of an apple tree.

The other angel holds a doll,

Covered warm in a tiny shawl;

The toy is supposed to be fast asleep

As the sister angel: in dimples deep

The grave, sweet charm on the baby face

Repeats the look of maturer grace

That hovers about Madonna's eyes,

One of the heavenly mysteries

From far ethereal latitudes

Where neither doubt nor trouble intrudes.

Ponder here in the orchard nest

On the truth of life made manifest:

The struggle and effort was all to prove

That the best of the world is home and love.

MID-AUGUST

From the upland hidden,

Where the hill is sunny

Tawny like pure honey

In the August heat,

Memories float unbidden

Where the thicket serries

Fragrant with ripe berries

And the milk-weed sweet.

Like a prayer-mat holy

Are the patterned mosses

Which the twin-flower crosses

With her flowerless vine;

In fragile melancholy

The pallid ghost flowers hover

As if to guard and cover

The shadow of a shrine.

Where the pine-linnet lingered

The pale water searches,

The roots of gleaming birches

Draw silver from the lake;

The ripples, liquid-fingered,

Plucking the root-layers,

Fairy like lute players

Lulling music make.

O to lie here brooding

Where the pine-tree column

Rises dark and solemn

To the airy lair,

Where, the day eluding,

Night is couched dream laden,

Like a deep witch-maiden

Hidden in her hair.

In filmy evanescence

Wraithlike scents assemble,

Then dissolve and tremble

A little until they die;

Spirits of the florescence

Where the bees searched and tarried

Till the blossoms all were married

In the days before July.

Light has lost its splendour,

Light refined and sifted,

Cool light and dream drifted

Ventures even where,

(Seeping silver tender)

In the dim recesses,

Trembling mid her tresses,

Hides the maiden hair.

Covered with the shy-light,

Filling in the hushes,

Slide the tawny thrushes

Calling to their broods,

Hoarding till the twilight

The song that made for noon-days

Of the amorous June days

Preludes and interludes.

The joy that I am feeling

Is there something in it

Unlike the warble the linnet

Phrases and intones?

Or is a like thought stealing

With a rapture fine, free

Through the happy pine tree

Ripening her cones?

In some high existence

In another planet

Where their poets cannot

Know our birds and flowers,

Does the same persistence

Give the dreams they issue

Something like the tissue

Of these dreams of ours?

O to lie athinking—

Moods and whims! I fancy

Only necromancy

Could the web unroll,

Only somehow linking

Beauties that meet and mingle

In this quiet dingle

With the beauty of the whole.

MIST AND FROST

Veil-like and beautiful

Gathered the dutiful

Mist in the night,

True to the messaging,

Dreamful and presaging

Vapour and light.

Ghostly and chill it is,

Pallid and still it is,

Sudden uprist;

What is there tragical,

Moving or magical,

Hid in the mist?

Millions of essences,

Fairy-like presences

Formless as yet;

Light-riven spangles,

Crystalline tangles

Floating unset.

Frost will come shepherding

Nowise enjeoparding

Frondage or flower;

Just a degree of it,

Nought can we see of it

Only its power.

Earth like a Swimmer

Plunged into the dimmer

Wave of the night,

Now is uprisen,

An Elysian vision

Of spray and of light.

'Tis the intangible

Delicate frangible

Secret of mist,

Breathing may banish it,

Thought may evanish it,—

Ponder and whist!

Passionless purity,

Calmness in surety

Dwells everywhere,

A winnowed whiteness,

A lunar lightness

Glows in the air.

But in the heart of it

Every least part of it

Blooms with the charm,

Star-shape and frondage

Broken from bondage

Forged into form.

Crystals encrusted,

Diamonds dusted

Line everything,

Tiny the stencillings

Are as the pencillings

On a moth's wing.

And O, what a wonder!

No farther asunder

Than atoms are laid,

The arches and angles

Of star-froth and spangles

Cast their own shade.

Out from the chalices,

The pigmy palaces

Where the tint hides,

Opal and sapphire

Half-pearl and half-fire

The colour slides;

Till the frail miracle

Rapturous lyrical

Flushes and glows

With a wraith of florescence

That tempers or lessens

The light of the snows.

Held all aquiver,—

But now with a shiver

The power of the sun

Dissolves the laces

Of the tender mazes,

All is undone.

But the old Earth brooding,

All wisdom including,

Affirms and assures

That above the material,

Triumphal imperial

Beauty endures.

THE BEGGAR AND THE ANGEL

An angel burdened with self-pity

Came out of heaven to a modern city.

He saw a beggar on the street,

Where the tides of traffic meet.

A pair of brass-bound hickory pegs

Brought him his pence instead of legs.

A murky dog by him did lie,

Poodle, in part, his ancestry.

The angel stood and thought upon

This poodle-haunted beggar man.

"My life is grown a bore," said he,

"One long round of sciamachy;

I think I'll do a little good,

By way of change from angelhood."

He drew near to the beggar grim,

And gravely thus accosted him:

"How would you like, my friend, to fly

All day through the translucent sky;

To knock at the door of the red leaven,

And even to enter the orthodox heaven?

If you would care to know this joy,

I will surrender my employ,

And take your ills, collect your pelf,

An humble beggar like yourself.

For ages you these joys may know,

While I shall suffer here below;

And in the end we both may gain

Access of pleasure from my pain."

The stationary vagrant said,

"I do not mind, so go ahead."

The angel told the heavenly charm,

He felt a wing on either arm;

"Good-day," he said, "this floating's queer

If I should want to change next year—?"

"Pull out that feather!" the angel said,

"The one half black and the other half red."

The cripple cried, "Before you're through

You may get fagged, and if you do,—"

The angel superciliously—

"My transformed friend, don't think of me.

I shall be happy day and night,

In doing what I think is right."

"So so," the feathered beggar said,

"Good-bye, I am just overhead."

The angel when he grasped the dish,

Began to criticize his wish.

The seat was hard as granite rocks,

His real legs were in the box.

His knees were cramped, his shins were sore,

The lying pegs stuck out before.

In vain he clinked the dish and whined.

The passers-by seemed deaf and blind.

As pious looking as Saint Denis,

An urchin stole his catch-penny.

And even the beggar's drab-fleeced poodle

Began to know him for a noodle.

"It has an uncelestial scent,

The clothing of this mendicant;"

He cried, "That trickling down my spine

Is anything but hyaline.

This day is like a thousand years:

I'd give an age of sighs and tears

To see with his confectioned grin

One cherub sitting on his chin.

That cripple was by far too sly—

I wish he'd tumble from the sky,

That things might be as they were before;

I really cannot stand much more!"

The beggar in the angel's guise,

Rose far above the smoky skies.

But being a beggar, never saw

The charm of the compelling law

That turned the swinging universe:

'Twas gloomy as an empty purse.

Often with heaven in his head,

He blundered on a planet dead.

And when with an immortal fuss,

He singed his wings at Sirius.

He plucked the feather with his teeth,

The charm was potent and beneath,

He saw the turmoil of the way

Grown wilder at the close of day,

With the sad poodle, can in hand,

The angel still at the old stand.

"My friend," said the angel, hemming and humming,

"Truly I thought you were never coming."

"That's an unhandsome thing to say,

Seeing I've only been gone a day.

But there's nothing in all your brazen sky

To match the cock of that poodle's eye.

Take your dish and give me my wings,

'Tis but a fair exchange of things."

The beggar felt his garment's rot,

The horn ridge of each callous spot;

He clinked his can and was content;

His poverty was permanent.

IMPROVISATION ON AN OLD SONG

(The refrain is quoted by Edward Fitzgerald in one of his letters)

I

Growing, growing, all the glory going;

Flashing out of fire and light, burning to a husk,

All the world's a-dying and failing in the dusk—