E. J. Pratt

“ Blow out upon the raven plumes of this December night,
The world's unresting miseries, her shadow and her blight;
The story of her passions, and her dark, unfathomed sin,
The outward blow that slaughters, and the guilt
that slays within;
And deep from out the storm's last throes, peal
forth in life re-born,
The blazon of the future with the heralds of the morn;
The anthem of a world re-strung to human love and grace,
The full-toned orchestration of the heart-throbs of the race. ”

“ In stream and torrent, and in the mad plunge
Of cataract. Beyond the snow-capped ranges
Lusty young rivers tear and strain at the dugs
Of the foot-hills, and parting, force their pace
Through gorge and valley to the open sea.
Life, boundless, keen, ecstatic, uncontrolled!
Vast, heaving, surging life, strung to great thews,
Rapt in wide wonderments. Flail, life of Spring!
Born of prophetic gales and plangent shocks,
That rouse the torpor of earth's granite veins,
And sluggard eyes. Glorious in resurrection!
Thou peerless colorist of nature's life! ”

“ JULIAN.
Think they so to convince the heart with words
Like those, to mesh it with a logic meet
For bloodless ends? What though the winds of May
Call to the springing rootlets, lure the bud
From the rose-stem, and chase the resinous sap
From the pine's trunk to branch and topmost twig—
Who yields to such delusion? Does the spring
Forget November's hecatombs, the last
Convulsion of the leaf, the gale-torn limbs
Of trees scarred to the death, the flowers that danced
Upon the fields scythed by the autumn's hands. ”

“ But one eternal question. Then the moon
Grew dimmer as the mist increased, and showed,
In hazy outlines, hurrying forms that moved
In twos and threes, from place to place, and laid
Upon the stretchers, one by one, the dead,
Torn, jagged, mud-smeared and crumpled, carrying them
To rows of damp, deep trenches, newly dug,
Where they were placed in groups of eight or ten,
In order, side by side, and face to face—
And the moon shone full again—the harvest moon.
JULIAN.
Your words would tax the heart's belief. ”

“ From night's crystal bars,
Falling so gently
In wreaths of white stars;
Petals of mystery
Culled in far lands;
Crosses of Calvary,
Wrought by strange hands;
Gems from His mountains,
Facets so rare,
Foam from His fountain
Eternally fair.
Why do they lovingly
Leave their fair home,
These leaves of God's gardens,
To stray on earth's loam?
See how they hover
Over faces so cold,
How reverently cover
The young and the old! ”

“ The straylings of her brood flock to her wings—
Whirlwind and cloud, the thunder and the rain,
And what is left of night's unuttered things.
Now closed is every seam of sky and land.
The air, the water and the sod are one,
And every gulf of light and darkness spanned.
O spirits that love the daylight and the sun,
That with unerring fingers trace,
When night's dark moments are outrun,
The swarthy features of the morning's face ”

“ So different from the lightsome, freshening stir
That follows in the usual wake of gales.
Summer had taken leave, and yet the air
Seemed bashful of the fall, for every day
Mirrored the one before, as if the storm
Had over-wrought its ends, and paralyzed
The will of nature for the season's change.
The village-folk again commenced their work,
Rebuilding stages which the wind had wrecked
And littered round the beach; but work was done
By hands scarce conscious of the task, for thought
Was dazed, and eyes saw nothing but the sea. ”

“ Autumn has fled, and winter's mastery
Takes votive tribute from his white domain;
The Northern winds unleashed bring in the rain
Which, blending at the night's austerity,
Turns into hail and white-flaked fantasy
That weirdly haunt the streaming window-pane.
Within, a peace that only heaven sends
To men who, pilgrims though they be, yet know
Life's simple gifts—a home, the heart of friends,
The company of the past; a fragrant briar ”

“ Pungent with the airs of harvest.
They call with the silver fifes of the sea,
They breathe with the lungs of men,
They are one with the tides of the sea,
They are one with the tides of the heart,
They blow with the rising octaves of dawn.
They die with the largo of dusk,
Their hands are full to the overflow,
In their right is the bread of life,
In their left are the waters of death. ”

“ Then full across the desert speeds,
Until he falls,
Caught by the Avenger near the City Gates;—
So underneath the heavens' lighted scroll,
Ablaze with cryptic tokens of the slain,
Headlong to shore thy spiral waters roll
Swept by the besom of the winds; by rain
And thunder driven in flight
Along the galleries of the night,
Until upon the surge-line locked in strife
With reef and breaker thou art shattered, soon
In fang and sinew to be strewn
Around the cliffs that guard the ports of life. ”

“ Spring's gales have lost
Their power the earth to leaven,
For those dark vapors would exhaust
The lavender of heaven.
VIII
A DIRGE
Now let the earth take
Into its care,
All that it travailed for,
All that it bare.
Leaves of the forest,
Yellow and red,
The drifting and scattered,
The dying and dead;
Grass of the hill-slopes,
Sickled and dried,
Vines that over-night
Blasted and died;
Blossoms and flowers
Nipped with the cold,
Trees that have fallen
A century old;
Moths of the candle-flame,
Gnats from the stream,
Wraiths from the moonlight,
Spectres of dream ”

“ Was ever night so wild as this—this bleak December night!
Veiled in the sombre shroud that sepulchred the day;
Why thus bereft of heaven's beams, of moon and starry light,
Are all its ancient charms in sorrow laid away?
The year dies out with drifted leaves, with winds
and floods of rain,
Companions of the tempest with its brood of fears;
And voices far above us echo back the world's great pain,
In tongueless language inarticulate through tears. ”

“ Held under bonds to move
Around unpeopled shores—
Moon-driven through a timeless circuit
Of invasion and retreat;
But with a lusty stroke of life
Pounding at stubborn gates,
That they might run
Within the sluices of men's hearts,
Leap under throb of pulse and nerve,
And teach the sea's strong voice
To learn the harmonies of new floods,
The peal of cataract,
And the soft wash of currents
Against resilient banks,
Or the broken rhythms from old chords
Along dark passages
That once were pathways of authentic fires
And swept by the wings of dream. ”

“ Causes lost awhile on earth try out
On new arenas fiercer qualities.
They are re-born upon the air; they storm
The souls of men; find homes in thunder peals;
Are hitched to lightnings. Slain, they rise again
With such forged temper that they turn aside
The opposing edge of armouries of steel.
Marks he the issue well, who sees here naught
Save huge world-fires upon whose smouldering ruins
Man's hand has lost its cunning to re-build,
Or that the piles new-reared shall fall once more
In the mad blasts that periodic run
Their cycles of decay? ”

“ The autumn, too, has taken wing,
The year has rushed into its death.
Gone, like the memory of a dream,
A rainbow hovering o'er a stream;
And we, of nature's joys bereft,
Are with her deepening shadows left,
With grey upon the sea,
And driftwood on the reef,
With winter in the tree,
And death within the leaf. ”

“ Strong with a strength unmeasured, as the chainless
lightnings—free;
Ye nether rivals of the thunders, as their voice your own,
Yet theirs excelling in your major harmonies of tone;
Ye mighty arbiters of light and shade, of hope and gloom,
Who fashion for the morn its cradle, for the eve its tomb,
Who garrison the towers of God with clouds in dark array,
Marshalling their watch and slumber till their hidden fires play ”

“ She looked upon his face, a night long past,
When croup had racked his frame—when she had fought
Death with a woman's courage as she watched
The cradle's tiny heavings, till the dawn
Revealed the cooling moisture on the brow,
And told her she had won. In that high test
She well remembered how her rising strength
Could pit itself against the Adversary,
Emerge, though weakened with the night's long fight,
Triumphant, glad, rejoicing with the morn. ”

“ Shall fast cover the dead.
IX
THE SEED MUST DIE
Ye meadows, groves, your birth renew; ye orchards, vineyards, grow!
Where fast the wastrel waters of the Marne and Yser flow;
On the plains bestow your verdure, to the hills your odors fling.
Before the smile of Ceres, let your golden censer swing.
For never since great Nature ran her sluices to the sea,
And opened up her flood-gates at the Rain-God's first decree,
Have richer tides flowed round your rooted hidings in the clay,
Than these which seek quite other veins from those of yesterday. ”

“ Till our eye-balls cracked with the salt and the frost;
Till only iron and fire that night
Survived on the ice as we stumbled on;
As we fell and rose and plunged—till the light
In the south and east disclosed the dawn,
And the sea heaving with floes—and then,
The Eagle in wild pursuit of her men. ”

“ Roaming the plains would scorn such thoughts as these;
The ox, the zebra and the ass appease
Their several hungers, earth-born as they are—
Without afflatus, without mind—with far
More worthy satisfactions. What care you
(recurrence of symptoms)
For the primrose by the river's brink, the blue
Within the violet's eye, in fine, for flowers?
Eating and drinking you lay waste your powers,
The world being too much with you. Have you felt
A presence that disturbs you? Have you knelt
At Nature's shrine, bathed at her crystal fount,
And found her central peace? ”

“ Bring forth the fruitage of your loins in deep, impurpurate stain,
Ye vines, that sprang to life from out the throes of British pain;
Gird on your strength, ye pines that shade the dead on yonder height;
Re-knot your tissues with the stubborn fibre of their might.
And let the rose its crimson darken towards the purple shade,
Full-flushed with blood imperial—the price that Britain paid,
The lily and the jonquil greet once more their native hills,
Companioned by anemones and sun-crowned daffodils. ”

“ Then out into the night the boat was rowed,
Steadily and silently. No clamour broke
The stillness on the deck, nor was there sound
Of any voiced farewell, but here and there
A hand was raised, and a white fluttering
Answered the distant rhythm of the oars.
JULIAN.
Chaos indeed may well disclose a star
Caught unaware within the tangled drift
Of cloud and chasing glooms. Look on the plains
Again. Charred ruins, not of nature's hand,
Lie deep within unfathomable slime. ”

“ Now pour such tides as Nature never wrought.
The ruddier treasures of a wealth untold.
O Nature! Thou that lovest life
In herb and brute and feathered kind,
Who leadest from the night's long strife
The morn with rays of promise lined ”

“ Their heartstrings to a pansy, murmuring thus:
"Who bade this flower renew its own fair lease
Of youth perennial? Springs it not this year
From the same soil and root, with that same pride
With which a year ago it lifted up
Its face before the sun? Does not each year
Declare its trumpet-pledges at the spring?" ”

“ Come! Leave your tents, O mortals, gather here
In Nature's high rotunda, crystal-domed,
And offer praises .... Julian, give me
Your hand. We meet under new skies to-day.
The times are changed; the earth renews her face;
There is a fine contagion in the spring
For heavy hearts.
JULIAN.
You would infect the blood
Of an old man.
THADDEUS.
Come, Julian! ”

“ JULIAN.
Look how in cluttered heaps the crosses rise,
Stacked pile on pile, until they twist and sag
The rivets on the bolted doors of God.
This is a storm beyond imaginings,
Unknown to land or sea. Were waves and gales
The only agents of man's ruin, then
The chance might fall upon his side—the fight
With nature growing simpler every hour,
Her ways being known ”

“ Two from the broadsides—off we tore,
In the breathless rush for the day's attack,
With the speed of hounds on a caribou's track.
With the rise of the sun we started to kill,
A seal for each blow from the iron bill
Of our gaffs. ”

“ For sucklings, for the race at those low stages
Of history that form the world's Dark Ages.
From your contentions, then, must I assume
That in your mind's horizon is no room
For formulæ that dominate our times;
For laws that tell how by successive climbs
Our common human nature has become
The paragon magnificent for dumb
And erring brutes? Millions of years have passed
Between the first crude cycle and the last,
In which, despite the bludgeonings of chance
And fate, has man his own deliverance
Wrought out; survived the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ”

“ Of spade or nature's highways, fouled and choked
With drifted foliage of a year grown old,
Too soon, with autumn's hectic leaves and limbs,
And sheddings rare of dearer castaways.
As leaves fall, so upon the plains fell men ”

“ Around the moon—there is no safer thing
For prophesyin' weather; as for cold,
You boasted that your man up yonder told
That frost was comin'. Why, sure, a skunk knows
That and more; three months ahead he grows
A chunkier tail.
THE SCHOLAR.
Your language, my good sir,
Is rank: but, waiving that, I must aver
With emphasis that human life is longer,
As knowledge grows from more to more, and stronger,
With every age, the race. ”