Heimskringla - 20.12.1950, Blaðsíða 4

4. SÍÐA
ST. G. STEPHANSSON
(1853 - 1927)
Framhald frá 1. blaðsíðu
Nowhere does the poet put his evalu-
ation of pioneering work more arrest-
ingly than in his query:
Yet was not the Baptist
Greater than the Messiah?
nor his affection for creative energy
more effectively than in his assertion
to the Lord:
Happiest was, I know, for you
The week in which you made the
world.
and St. G. St., the energetic farmer-
poet, is confident that cherubims were
not needed to stand guard at Eden’s
gate because no one would have the
folly to enter into Eden’s indolence ot
perfection. He is equally sure that the
angel of the Lord will not for a long
time be adequately rewarded for hav-
ing driven man out “to till for himself
a farmland, and to build him a hovel,
and by his toil to work towards his
hopes, and to sing songs of spring
where it had been songless before.'”
ra.
St. G. St. with his vitality and urge
for work could have become a well-to-
do farmer. As it turned out, however,
his entire life was spent in a struggle
between the compulsions of duty and
the claims of poetry. He had to work
unremittingly to maintain himself and
his family; his spirit of independence
and his sense of manhood did not al-
low him to do otherwise. But he also
had to be true to his poetic calling.
His rare moments of inspiration he
seldom attempts to describe:
There comes at times an hour
Unstaying, for so it must be,
When a sight, a secret bower,
A crevice is opened for me,
And I, in lightning flashes,
Can clearly see destiny.
but during all his life, with the de-
votion and the didacticism of a Words-
worth, he remained true to his inner
vision. Never felt he more exalted than
when he was composing his poetry, for
The longing for all that the loftiest was
Awakes when the verse-staves quiver.
and indeed when he warmed to his
creative urge St. G. St. became in mood
and mien like to one of his own char-
acters:
Of knee he was bowed and in back
he was bent,
And furrowed in palm and finger:
He seemed like a home-plant that hard-
luck had sent
To heath-wastes, to wither or linger.
But when his mood warmed, he fair
leafage obtained,
And, vital and venturing,
He gleaned him the glow by the
gnarléd boughs gained,
When burst out the buds in the
spring.
In one of his melancholy moments
the poet noted, no doubt with some re-
ference to himself:
Whom daily life oppresses e’er
With chores and with delays,
He sinks into his sepulchre
With all his finest lays.
IV.
Very poignant is the poem in which
St. G. St. acknowledges that his poetry
is the product of his sleepless nights.
In it he fancies the muse as upbraiding
him for unfairness to her:
To toil you hallowed your day and
your might:
To me you gave tempests, tiredness,
night.
and the poet admits the charge for he
knows full well that the poet’s art
should possess his soul undivided:
For the lord of your art
Owns alone your whole heart;
When to duty bow you,
Then your faith turns untrue.
He sometimes feels that he fails in
his task because his thought does vio-
lence to perfection in form:
A thought that’s lofty, strong and free,
Invigorates and gladdens me,
Einn Fyrir Alla
Á ný afslöðnum ársfundi fulltrúa Manitoba Pool Ele-
vators, var aðalræðumaðurinn Honorable Austin Taylor frá
New Brunswick, sem meira en tólf ár hefir verið búnaðar
ráðgjafi í því fylki.
Ræða hans fjallaði um lönd og fólk í norður Evrópu sem
hann heimsótti í fyrsta skifti í sambandi við ferð hans til
fjórða ársþings International Federation of Agricultural
Producers í Saltsjobaden, Svíþjóð.
Mr. Taylor varð hrifinn af hinum heilbrigðu búnaðar-
aðferðum á Norðurlöndum, umhyggju fyrir jarðveginum, og
verndun og eftirlit skóganna. Mest varð hann hrifinn af
samvinnu hugsjóninni, sem er aðallega undirstaða velmeg-
unar Svía, Dana, Norðmanna og Finna.
Ibúar Canada af Norðurlanda ættum eru samvinnu hug-
sjóna-menn að ætterni og eðlisfari. Þrjú vesturfylkja sam-
böndin, The Wheat Pools, vita að þeir eru heilhuga styrkj-
endur þeirra, framsæknir bændur, sem bera fyrir brjósti hag
þjóðarinnar jafnt sínum eigin. Ekki allir, en flestir þeirra
geta með sanni notað slagorð samvinnufélaganna: “Einn
fyrir alla, allir fyrir einn”.
WINNIPEG
CANADA
Manitoba Pool Elevators
Winnipeg Manitoba
Saskatchewan Cooperative
Producers Limited
jgina Saskatchewan
Alberta Wheat Pool
BEZTU JÓLA OG NÝÁRSÓSKIR
TIL ÍSLENDINGA
Þökk fyrir viðskiftin
TORONTO GROCERY
PAUL HALLSON
714 Ellice Ave,
Winnipeg, Man,
Talsími 37 466
But breaks through speech and pros-
ody,
And piles up staves erroneously.
Excessive self- criticism was not how-
ever characteristic of the poet; he
knew that lack of time for revision ac-
counted for some of his lapses and
sometimes in a lighter vein he could
laugh at his own infelicities. Indeed
he poked fun at the prolific verse with
which he and his brother-bards had
flooded the local weeklies.
In a more serious mood however St.
G. St. desired to achieve the utmost
skill in his art, in order to serve better
by his verse the cause of humanity; to
a prominent poet-contemporary in
Iceland he rather ruefully wrote:
The art had yet not fared o’erseas
To freehold in our land;
We could thy verse-sword, whetted,
seize,
And wield it in our hand.
V.
In his more ample western milieu
St. G. St. did indeed wield his verse-
sword as dexterously and as well as
any modern man, in his fight for ideas
and ideals. The strength of his combat-
iveness lay essentially in two things:
in his equipoise between thought and
feeling, and in his sound common-
sense. He was no visionary world-citi-
zen:
A poor pretence is “cosmopolitan”,
“World-patriotism” is for every man
Too great: to gra^p it our
Short hands have not the power.
But he recognizes that human brother-
hood will lead towards the ideal, the
rule of intelligence and justice:
The first approach to equity and
reason
Is found if men approve of brother-
hood.
and he counsels men:
To think not in the years but in the
ages
Nor ask in full bt eve for each day’s
wages.
The poet was a lifelong advocate of
the underlings, whether these were
individuals or peoples. From this
source emanated some of his most
severe strictures on men and society.
The poet felt a deep sympathy for
labouring men everywhere, but he
could not identify himself with their
party, any more than he could with
other formal organizations. Indeéd his
exacting nature was well aware that
the masses often endorse mediocrity,
and he knew that middling men never
raise the multitude and that a people
is readily reduced to a rabble, lose it
but its language. The poet rests his
hopes on the intelligent few:
Venture the faction of the few and free
To join, if you but know of three!
•
In order however to improve the lot of
the many the poet is prepared to ac-
quiesce in the desecration of nature;
a waterfall, for instance, may be harn-
essed:
To lift a load a thousand could not
heave
So hands o’ertaxed and tired, rest
receive.
On the other hand the assertion of
mastery over men is repugnant to him:
indeed the tyrant merely debases him-
self:
More like a thrall than thralls will be
The thralls’ house-master finally.
and the poet takes some comfort in
the thought that such tyranny must
often in the end make way before a
more gentle power:
Than Gprman might will prove more
strong
The Danish mothers’ cradle-song.
Indeed to his soul animated by symp-
athy and understanding violence in
any form was an utter anathema.
VI.
As a sociologist St. G. St. felt a deep
sense of personal responsibility for all
that goes awry in human society,
whether it was internationally by wav
of wars, or internally, in the malpract-
ices of individuals. He asserts that the
guilt of the transgressor is somehow
partly his:
And oft meseems that I a share
In an offender’s fault must bear,
Albeit innocent am I,
And nowise to the crime was jiigh.
This deep sense of responsibility,
this unyielding strictness with himself
and his abiding honesty condition his
entire outlook on life. One must face
things as they are:
What good is his who dusk as
brightness deems?
He stays the lighting which all men
require.
To know that dusk is dark more blest
meseems:
It wakens in me for the dawn desire.
The poet cannot accept orthodox
Christianity because to him it irration-
ally removes from man his responsib-
ility:
That I believe this folly, friend,
think you,
That I my earlier debts can wipe
away
With the performance of duty new?
No kindly acts the older sins repay.
Indeed the poet asserts that for him
disbelief brought the light of under-
standing and emancipation from the
gloom of death:
She came like a gleam to the grave’s
darkness cold,
And with her sheen shining did all
things enfold.
It seemed to me that through the ages
she glowed,
And to me the world’s meaning trans
parent showed.
St. G. St. is very laudatory of the
eloquent Unitarian Ingersoll, yet he is
at pains to point out that he is not his
subject nor his disciple, but only his
less vigorous and younger brother.
The poet is essentially a rationalist;
“chance” is for him merely “a cause un-
known” and the gods of men down
through the ages háVe been moulded
by “humanity’s outlook of the mom-
ent”.
VII.
If one were to single out a poem in
which some of the basic ideas of the
poet are expressed. perhaps the best
choice would be the one entitled Even-
ing. In this piece, St. G. St. after say-
ing much in the pessimistic mood of a
Matthew Arnold, ends with lines that
may recall the invincible optimism of
a Robert Browning:
When I in the twilight alone am become,
And trappings have tossed from me,
And Earth has pursued herself out of the sun,
So that in the shade is she,
And talk turns drowsy to canine yelps
And slumbers presently,
And life’s care, that livelong day’s watch, at my door
Downdrooping, asleep does sit; —
(She frightened up all of my light-wingéd lays,
So from me they songless flit;
She wing-broke each thought of mine soaring on high,
Intending the heav'ns for it.) —
How sore-fain I’d settle with all and forget
All too if I freely might
Have dreams, in the stillness and dusk, of the land
Which day has ne’er lit with light,
Where hopes out of wreckage, and bards’ errant aims
May ever on shore alight.
The land in which naught the subventions high
Of heav’n need ever emend,
Where nobody’s weal is another man’s woe,
f Nor might is the highest end,
Where vict’ry wounds none, where ordinance first
Is fairness, to which all bend.
But then comes the wakefulness, dreadful and wan,
That drives off my peace and rest,
And then me assail the lost souls who betrayed
The good that they had possessed,
And then loudly wail the wraith-outcasts of earth:
The powers that died suppressed.
And then I see opened deep agonies’ depths,
With toil on bendéd knees,
While indolent pelf-quest on poverty thrives,
Like rot in the living trees:
The few the mad multitude’s senses and will
Bewilder and sway with ease.
For ever men’s dealings are dubious all,
And doubtful their amity,
As he finds, who caught is by night, nigh a band
Bivouaced for robbery,
And, who with his eyes closed, can hear the foes are
Approaching him stealthily.
It seems on earth wayless, the ’wildering night
Drags woefully on and on,
As if the shades still had not thinned, and advance
Were falsehood — so faint its dawn —
For even of old mounted men’s minds as high,
And where then is aught that’s won?
More widely for aye is Enlightenment borne,
By each age a little brought. —
She deepens not, mounts not, but lengthens her way,
Like daylight is longer wrought,
But man’s lifetime brief, which the moment but marks,
Yet knows of that diff’rence naught.
But even to shepherds in solitude she
Comes, calm as the dayspring bright,
And gleams in their souls, though the glow is unseen —
So silently comes her light,
And I — who can sing to a Stygian world,
Such staves on a sleepless night,
And climb can serenely the ultimate couch,
From which I will part not me,
Am sure that survives, with its warmth and its light,
My every exspectancy,
And that what was best in my own soul lives, and
The sunlight at least will be!
vra.
The poet clearly had no hope of per-
sonal immortality. Hence when he is
confronted with the death of one dear
to him, he finds his only refuge in
manly endurance. An excellent in-
stance of this is found in the conclud-
ing poem of a series of four which he
composed, over several years, for a
much-beloved boy which he lost in
childhood. The piece is marked by un-
affected simplicity and a courageous
close:
Good-bye to summer. Autumn, I greet thee,
Upon the hill that is the boundary.
Behind me lies the region summer-long,
With sunny mornings and soft plover’s song.
In front a region nowise wide there shows,
For on its midmost slope the sunset glows.
But think thou not in sorrow bowed I stand,
Though sink the sun to ev’ning’s shadow-land.
WINNIPEG, 20. DES. 1950
WINNIPEG, 20. DES. 1950
HEIMSKRINGLA
5. SIÐA
With that land’s lord I made my peace of yore,
And him I trust, for we have met before.
My farewell sure to my departed friend
Is: It is well with you where’er you wend.
And these exactly were my words when I
The last time bade my little boy good-bye.
But liefer to my mind became this ground,
And its dust dearer, since he rest here found.
Though quail the heart in grief-filled breast to go
The way that homewards leads it unto woe,
Yet for the man, who shrank not, it is sure
That grief unmended manhood makes endure.
IX.
As is natural, St. G. St. is much pre-
occupied with Iceland. In one of his
greatest Iceland-poems, written under
the caption In Defence of the Land,
the poet begins with a picturesque ex-
ordium on the maid of the mountains:
Of rhymes and runes thou Outgarth’s
warden fairest,
Ocean’s queen, set in either hem-
isphere,
Who mantle green and wind-blown
headgear wearest,
Our land of mountains, mother-island
dear.
In another celebration-piece he tells
his audience that every Icelandic mem-
ory is a tablet of gold; here he avails
himself of the theme of the greatest
of the Eddic poems, The Sibyl’s Proph-
ecy.
You recall how it went, with antiquity
flown,
And the Anses’ world burnt, and the
Flame-fiend o’erthrown,
And our earth laid in ruins,—the heav-
ens nine too, —
So the world and the sun had to wax
up anew:
Yet saved there was something on
which not the fire
Could make any headway: gold tablets
entire.
—Here, Canada, lapped in the shelter-
ing lea
Of summer, on sward warmed by sun-
light, sit we,
With similar gain: each remembrance
we hold
Of Iceland is for us a tablet of gold.
In the celebration-piece, which has
become the cherished possession of
Icelandic men wherever they are, St.
G. St. asserts that every son of Iceland
will ever bear in his mind and mien
the features of his beloved land; for
him it will be his heart’s ideal:
Though all lands in long travels,
You should lay ’neath your feet,
In your mind and your heart yet
Your old homeland’s marks meet!
You volcano and ice-sea,
Fall and geyer-fount bore!
Bred nigh scree-height and ling-heath!
Heir to skerry and shore!
O’er all earth and the heavens,
In your thoughts you may fare,
Still your falls and your fell-slopes
All your Future’s lands bear!
Near Eternity’s sea-rim
Your dear isle doth abide,
Like a world of spring nightless,
Where the outlook is wide.
’Tis mid dream-haunts Icelandic
That your heart-hopes e’er dwell,
Wherein thawed is each glacier,
And enflowered each fell!
You volcano and ice-sea,
Fall and geyer-fount bore!
Bred nigh scree-height and ling-heath!
Heir to skerry and shore!
And in one of his rare allusions to the
classics, the poet yearns for the power
of Orpheus to charm our western corn-
fields and woodlands overseas, to a-
dorn the barren heaths of the home
land:
This no one knows as well as we,
That wé at times desire
To win with art of witchery
From Orpheus his lyre,
So we to eastward o’er the sea,
To Iceland’s moors had power
To charm our grain and greenery
Of woods, the wastes to dower.
But the poet on the other hand is
certain that men of Icelandic lineage
have precious gifts to bestow on the
land of their adoption. Nowhere does
he express this idea more vigorously
than in one of his celebration-poems
addressed to America:
Though so it prove that silenced be our lay
’Bout burg and steadings, and though no one may
Our tongue remember, to oblivion swept,
Yet something there will evermore be kept
And cherished in your bosom s fost ring care,
Which will of mind Icelandic witness bear.
So much you need to earn you excellence,
So many things, too, of a competence
To match the profits of prosperity
And men’s aggressive urge of energy.
Though granted be that gold have worth mdeed,
And that a people numbers large may need,
Of assets for a nation to acquire
The fairest are: the saga and the lyre.
It was however to Canada that St.
St. felt the deepest loyalty. To this
jsterland he dedicated, as he himself
sserts, his toil, and here stood, he de-
lares, the cradle of his children. Few
: any have written more felicitously
f our Canadian west. Beauties of
phrase and figure abound in his de-
scriptions of the country from the Red
River valley to the Rockies. At times
he is arrestingly concise as when he
speaks of “a sand-stortn by sward-ropes
bound”, or leisurely and pictorical as
for instance in his travel sequence En
Route. Here is íts opening stanza:
O’er prairies and marshes the engine us took
the pathway that northwards e’er led.
Mid silt on our left, there meandered along
the muddy and haven-calm Red,
That lifts ne’er a foot o’er a channel or fall,
for strength of e’en streams dies away,
If wander they ever with water-arms filled
by prairie-land’s murkiest clay.
All featureless was the whole outlook to view,
save where the wood-goddesses’ hands,
On flats, along waterways’ verges had laid
their leaf-woven, clustering bands.
The region itself like a limitless board,
all knotless, there was to be seen,
Which Nature had tilted a trifle on edge,
and planed, and then painted in green.
At a later stage the description of
the train rushing along in the night is
even more striking. Here the poet
identifies the engine with the Doom-
ship of the Eddic mythology (Nail-Far-
er);
The train into space and the darkness its way
circuitous, indistinct, dashed,
And never more quick was its coursing than then:
it spurted, and hurtled and flashed.
But out from me, straight and unstaying, on high
each star in the firmament raced;
The engine spewed embers, in breath-spasms deep,
whose sparks there up-eddied and blazed;
The prairie, becalmed, floated, pitch-dark, about —
a deluge, wave-void, unverged —
And over that calm sea of shadows our train,
like Nail-Farer, flame-freighted, surged.
But it was not the region of the Red
nor of the Saskatchewan (of which he
wrote also) that commanded the poet’s
main attention, but rather, as was nat-
ural, that of the Red Deer and the
Rockies. The opulent majesty of his
poem on the latter which at once made
The Bard of the Rockies a synonym
for him in all places in which Icelandic
speech is spoken unfortunately defies
translation: it is a veritable metrical
tour de force. What St. G. St. did with
mountain scenery is readily seen, on a
smaller scale, in his lines on Mount
Lone-Dweller:
So high o’er the lowly Mount Lone-Dweller towers,
That ling-tufts in wonderment gaze on his bowCrs,
And bushes turn dizzy so high up to crawl,
And crag-blooms can find them no toe-hold at all.
Albeit the blast that his summit all bare
Oft harries, must cold be, retreats he yet ne’er:
The hallowéd image of hardihood and
Of frankness from fell chiselled there does he stand.
No Canadian poet is more deeply
responsive to the wide reaches of our
west. For St. G. St. the open spaces of
Alberta are essential for the freedom
of men in the New World. This he
puts most emphatically in the closing
stanza of one of his admirable Alberta
poems:
You I love, West’s wild-land,
Lea of life and nurture,
With exspanse extensive,
Rooming hopes unnumbered,
For without you nowhere
Would be fort ’gainst thraldom,
And the Western freedom
Be romance and falsehood.
Indeed with the poet’s eye St. G. St.
observes and with the artist’s impulse
delineates all the seasonal changes, all
the miens and moods, of his cherished
home-region. It is under such influ-
ences, he asserts that his “weather-
sensitive mind” moulds its verse.
XI.
Nowhere does St. G. St. express
more felicitously than in the. poem
called At Toil’s Close, the complete
harmony between the poet’s soul and
his surroundings. Though it was writ-
ten before he migrated to Canada, it
may, in a sense, be regarded as the
peaceful farewell of the farmer-poet.
When sunny slopes, on summer’s eve, enswathed are
The shadows by,
And mid the branches of the trees the moon hangs
Her half-shield high,
And my perspiring brow begins to freshen
Eve’s breath-cool breeze,
And, after day’s work, each worn power welcomes
The night-tide’s peace;
When out afield the flocks’ bells tinkle clearly
And quietly,
And in the woods a bird’s eve-song sounds singly
And plaintively,
And in a half-stave seems the breeze to lisp when
Most loud is she,
And laughter lief of bairns by brook’s marge playing
Is borne to me;
But like spots moonlit shine the fields of grain ’gainst
The azure ground,
And haze fight-gray the hollows fills, and fills too
Each dell and sound,
And lowest to the east the golden stars through
N The branches gleam,
Then in the eve’s calm sit I outside under
My gable’s beam.
For full my heart is then of rest and joy,
Of peace my soul;
And then meseems that blitheness love and beauty
Be world’s words sole,
And that all things are blessing me and for me
My pray’rs impart,
And that the earth and heaven are at rest on
The eve’s kind heart.
But when at last, the day done, the accounting
To end is brought,
And at whatever worth the world may value
The work I’ve wrought,
In such a calm I fain would be to fashion
A feeling lay,
And give the world a reconciling hand-clasp
At close of day.
XII
St. G. St. appears to have been little
influenced by English poetry; indeed
of modern English verse he had a
rather poor opinion. His only poem
on an English writer is a peculiar one
on Shakespeare entitled The Robber.
He also wrote a fragmentary piece cal-
led An Epilogue to Byron’s English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
From English or any other language
St. G. St. translated very little; he was
too original and too independent a
poet to indulge in the restatement of
the ideas of others. It should however
be observed in passing that the few
versions he made are extremely well
executed. He evidently selected them
because they were congenial to his
feelings and his philosophy. Represent-
ative pieces are: Ingersoll’s verse on
death, Tennyson’s lines on honest
doubt (In Mem. 96, 11-12), Longfel-
low’s The Village Blacksmith, Kipling’s
If, Robert Service’s The Stretcher
Bearer, and The Last Leaf and The
Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes.
On the other hand very little has as
yet been done by learned Canadians to
bring this great Icelandic-Canadian
poet to the attention and the knowl-
edge of their fellow-citizens. It is to be
hoped that today and its proceedings
here may stimulate men’s interest in
this man and his works. In the .near
future there will be inaugurated at
the University of Manitoba, a Depari-
ment of Icelandic Language and Liter-
ature. It will, I take it, be one of the
primary tasks of the prospective in-
cumbent of this chair, to interpret for
Icelandic-Canadians, and for their fel-
low citizens as well, the mind and art
of Stephan G. Stephansson, whose
significance both Alberta and Canada
at large are on this occasion so signally
recognizing for all times to come.
With necessary alterations this ad-
dress on Stephan G. Stephansson was
given again in Winnipeg on Septem-
ber 18th, under the auspices of the
Jon Sigurðson Chapter of the I.O.D.
E. in aid of its fund for the Chair in
Icelandic at the University of Mani-
toba. The speaker took the opportun-
ity of enlarging somewhat the scope of
his former ren}arks. The principal ad-
ditions were the following matters:
(1). A translation of the poem The
Fosterland which was read in the orig-
inal Icelandic at the ceremony in
Markerville by ófeigur Sigurdsson, a
friend of St. G. St. of long standing:
Land to which is hallowéd
My toil, my children’s cradle-stead!
Put have I in lay and line
Mid thy grasses poems mine;
Later will thy grass for me
Make o’er my head poetry.
With thee as home my mind
And heart are intertwined.
I do not in millions measure
At how much thy worth I treasure,
Nor do I in verse enfold
All thy praises hundred-fold.
Be thou not rfch, my heart
Sings out that such than art:
Destitute joyed I
Thy fells and fields anigh.
This then is verdict thine:
Thou wert delight of mine.
Far off if from thy side,
Out to the World’s haunts wide,
Were I to migrate, I
Would for thy sunlight sigh,
And miss thy sleet-storms, land
Bare, and upbuildéd land,
Storm-land and shelter-land,
Land of both dell and height,
Dusk’s land, and land of light,
Land to which is hallowéd
My toil, my children’s cradle-stead!
Framh.
Gunnar Erlendsson
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Phone 23 996 761 Notre Dame Ave.
Just west of New Maternity Hospital
NELL’S FLOWER SHOP
Wedding Bouquets, Cut Flowers
Funeral Designs, Corsages
Bcdding Plants
Nell Johnson Ruth Rowland
27 482 88 790