Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

“ I am the spirit astir
To swell the grain
When fruitful suns confer
With labouring rain;
I am the life that thrills
In branch and bloom;
I am the patience of abiding hills,
The promise masked in doom.
II
When the sombre lands are wrung,
And storms are out,
And giant woods give tongue,
I am the shout;{40}
And when the earth would sleep,
Wrapped in her snows,
I am the infinite gleam of eyes that keep
The post of her repose. ”

“ O deep of Heaven, ’tis thou alone art boundless,
’Tis thou alone our balance shall not weigh,
’Tis thou alone our fathom-line finds soundless,—
Whose infinite our finite must obey!
Through thy blue realms and down thy starry reaches
Thought voyages forth beyond the furthest fire,
And, homing from no sighted shoreline, teaches
Thee measureless as is the soul’s desire.
O deep of Heaven, no beam of Pleiad ranging
Eternity may bridge thy gulf of spheres!
The ceaseless hum that fills thy sleep unchanging
Is rain of the innumerable years. ”

“ In from the wide flats where the spent tides mourn
To yon their rocking roosts in pines wind-torn;
A line of grey snake-fence, that zigzags by
A pond, and cattle; from the homestead nigh
The long deep summonings of the supper horn.
Black on the ridge, against that lonely flush,
A cart, and stoop-necked oxen; ranged beside
Some barrels; and the day-worn harvest-folk,
Here emptying their baskets, jar the hush
With hollow thunders. Down the dusk hillside
Lumbers the wain; and day fades out like smoke. ”

“ The peopled streets to blithe-eyed Peace belong,
Glad housed beneath these crowding roofs of grey.
’Twas long ago this city prospered so,
For yesterday a woman died therein.
Since when the wharves are idle fallen, I know,
And in the streets is hushed the pleasant din;
The thronging ships have been, the songs have been;—
Since yesterday it is so long ago.
{34} DARK
Now, for the night is hushed and blind with rain,
My soul desires communion, Dear, with thee.
But hour by hour my spirit gets not free,—
Hour by still hour my longing strives in vain. ”

“ By fits the dim grey snakes of fence, that steal
Through the white dusk. The hill-foot poplars sigh,
While storm and death with winter trample by,
And the iron fields ring sharp, and blind lights reel.
Yet in the lonely ridges, wrenched with pain,
Harsh solitary hillocks, bound and dumb,
Grave glebes close-lipped beneath the scourge and chain,
Lurks hid the germ of ecstasy—the sum
Of life that waits on summer, till the rain
Whisper in April and the crocus come. ”

“ Thy flats the red floods fret,
Thy steady-streaming winds—no more
These work the rapture wrought of yore,
When all thy wide bright strength outbore
My soul from fleshly bar.{43}
A darkness as of drifted rain
Is over tide, and dyke, and plain.
The shadow-pall of human pain
Is fallen on Tantramar. ”

“ Make shrill the slow brook’s borders; pasture bars
Down clatter, and the cattle wander through,—
Vague shapes amid the thickets; gleam by gleam
Above the wet grey wilds emerge the stars,
And through the dusk the farmstead fades from view.
{7} FROGS
Here in the red heart of the sunset lying,
My rest an islet of brown weeds blown dry,
I watch the wide bright heavens, hovering nigh,
My plain and pools in lucent splendours dyeing.
My view dreams over the rosy wastes, descrying
The reed-tops fret the solitary sky ”

“ Lord of desire and beauty, like a God!
{5} THE COW PASTURE
I see the harsh, wind-ridden, eastward hill,
By the red cattle pastured, blanched with dew;
The small, mossed hillocks where the clay gets through;
The grey webs woven on milkweed tops at will.
The sparse, pale grasses flicker, and are still.
The empty flats yearn seaward. All the view
Is naked to the horizon’s utmost blue ”

“ A-shimmer like these fluttering slopes of peas,
And pale the open landscape everywhere.
From fence to fence a perfumed breath exhales
O’er the bright pallor of the well-loved fields,—
My fields of Tantramar in summer-time;
And, scorning the poor feed their pasture yields,
Up from the bushy lots the cattle climb,
To gaze with longing through the grey, mossed rails.
{11} THE MOWING
This is the voice of high midsummer’s heat. ”

“ Rash eyes, kept ignorant in their own despite,
It lets not see the unsightliness they will,
But paints each scanty fairness fairer still,
And still deludes us to our own delight.
It fades, regathers, never quite dissolves.
And, ah! that life, ah! that the heart and brain
Might keep their mist and glamour, not to know
So soon the disenchantment and the pain!
But one by one our dear illusions go,
Stript and cast forth as time’s slow wheel revolves. ”

“ Crisped by the first frost, feel the thresher’s flail,
Then flock the blue wild-pigeons in shy haste
All silently down Autumn’s amber trail,
To glean at dawn the chill and whitening waste.
{16} THE CICADA IN THE FIRS
Charm of the vibrant, white September sun—
How tower the firs to take it, tranced and still!
Their scant ranks crown the pale, round, pasture-hill,
And watch, far down, the austere waters run
Their circuit thro’ the serious marshes dun.
No bird-call stirs the blue ”

“ The salty currents of the sap. The air
Hums desolately with wings that seaward fare,
Over the lonely reaches beating low.
The wastes of hard and meagre weeds are thronged
With murmurs of a past that time has wronged;
And ghosts of many an ancient memory
Dwell by the brackish pools and ditches blind,
In these low-lying pastures of the wind,
These marshes pale and meadows by the sea.
{9} THE FIR WOODS
The wash of endless waves is in their tops,
Endlessly swaying, and the long winds stream
Athwart them from the far-off shores of dream. ”

“ And the great floods turn seaward, roaring home.
IX
And now, O tranquil marshes, in your vast
Serenity of vision and of dream,
Wherethrough by every intricate vein have passed
With joy impetuous and pain supreme
The sharp fierce tides that chafe the shores of earth
In endless and controlless ebb and flow,
Strangely akin you seem to him whose birth
One hundred years ago
With fiery succour to the ranks of song
Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong. ”

“ Out there in the night with Nance, under the stars an’ moon;
An’ I vowed I’d have my say in the tidiest kind of way,
An’ she shouldn’t have no more call to think me a blame gossoon.
At last the preachin’ come to an end, an’ the folks all crowded out.
’Fore I knowed what I was about we was on the road fur home.
But the sky was overcast an’ a thick snow droppin’ fast,
An’ a big wind down from the mountins got a-rantin’ an moanin’ some. ”

“ An’ as the time drawed nigh fur turkeys an’ mince pie
The woods, all white an’ frosted, was a sight worth showin’.
The snow hung down the woodpiles all scalloped-like an’ curled.
You’d swear in all the world ther’ warn’t no fences any more. ”

“ Of strange death turned aside.
{95} HOW THE MOHAWKS SET OUT FOR MEDOCTEC
[When the invading Mohawks captured the outlying Melicite village of Madawaska, they spared two squaws to guide them down stream to the main Melicite town of Medoctec, below Grand Falls. The squaws steered themselves and their captors over the Falls.]
I
Grows the great deed, though none
Shout to behold it done! ”

“ The sonnets reprinted are ‘The Sower,’ ‘The Potato Harvest,’ ‘Tides,’ ‘In September,’ ‘Dark,’ ‘Rain,’ and ‘Mist.’ The Ode for the Centenary of Shelley’s Birth was first published by the Williamson Book Company, of Toronto, in December 1892, in a limited edition of two hundred copies.
C. G. D. R,
Kingscroft, Windsor, N.S., Canada:
May 1893.
{ix}{viii}
CONTENTS
{1}{xii}
ACROSS THE FOG THE MOON LIES FAIR
Across the fog the moon lies fair. ”

“ An’ Nance an’ me believe in our parson’s innovations;
We ain’t much skeered o’ Rome, an’ we reckon he can preach some,
An’ we call that evenin’ sarvice a Providential Dispensation.
{91} THE SUCCOUR OF GLUSKÂP
(A MICMAC LEGEND)
The happy valley laughed with sun,
The corn grew firm in stalk,
The lodges clustered safe where run
The streams of Peniawk. ”