Lögberg - 21.12.1950, Qupperneq 2

2
LÖGBERG, FIMTUDAGINN, 21. DESEMBER, 1950
/
PROF. SKULI JOHNSON:
Stephan Q. Steohanóóon 853—/927)
An address delivered at the unveiling of a monument and the dedication of a provincial park
in his honour, at Markerville, Alberta, on September 4th, 1950.
Mr. Chairman,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am deeply conscious of the honour
done me by the Historic Sites and
Monuments Board of Canada in invit
ing me to address you on this memor
able occasion. It is one of importance
in the history of Alberta, and indeed
of Canada as a whole; assuredly it is
unique in the annals of Icelandic men
in America. But as an old Icelandic
adage expresses it: a difficulty accomp-
anies every distinction: the honour of
participating in these proceedings puts
on my shoulders a heavy responsibility
Fortunately the reputation of the
dead will not be permanently impair
ed by my remarks. There is further
comfort in the reflection that no reas-
onable person will expect me to do
justice to so vast a theme as Stephan G
Stephansson in the short time at my
disposal.
But the brevity of time might cause
me to make dogmatic assertions about
the poet, and my enthusiasm for him
both as an author and as a man might
lead me to indulge in exaggerations
In order to guard against these faults,
I shall throughout seek a footing in
facts and illustrate the points I make
by appeals to his poetry. Needless to
say, my citations, though they are as
adequate as I can make them, are in
sufficient for a complete picture: they
present what the Romans would call
the scattered limbs of a poet (disiecta
membra jroetae).
I.
There is nothing in the antecedents
or in the circumstances of Stephan G
Stephansson to account for him. Of
humble peasant origin, he was reared
on a little farm-annex in northern Ice-
land, which was so poor that it long
ago went back into wasteland. He had
no formal education; his only reading
was in borrowed sagas and in the fam
ily Bible. For sixteén years he laboured
as a pioneer in Wisconsin and North
Dakota and was little known. It was
when he migrated to Canada to be-
come a pioneer in Alberta that his
poetic powers really matured. The
prairie-land, the foothills and the
Rockies made him a poet of national
significance.
St. G. St. is essentially in the peas-
ant-poet tradition of Iceland. He has
a passion for the intricate forms that
mark the native Ballad-poetry of the
unlettered, and his love of the Iceland-
ic quatrain in all its diversities is
evidenced by his abundant output of
this kind of verse. Of his six volumes
perhaps a fourth is devoted to this lit-
erary genre. But St. G. St. steeped him-
self besides in the earlier lore and liter-
ature of his land, and for both matter
and metre, he often goes back to the
Eddas and the Scaldic poetry. His
knowledge of the Saga-literature of
Iceland is also amazing, and he is
especially fond of delineating potent
personages of the past who confronted
difficulties oF who broke new paths.
Often too does he correlate an incident
of the past with some vital problem ol
the present. He thus puts the precious
ore that he has mined from the in-
éxhaustible wealth of Iceland’s cul-
ture to use for his contemporaries, not
only in Iceland but also on this cont-
inent where he laboured so long and
arduously. He has a firm footing in
the past and in the present; he stands
on Iceland and America; indeed in his
intelligent interest in humanity, and
his passionate advocacy of the solution
of problems of world-wide importance
this bard-colossus bestrides the earth!
II.
St. G. St. however regarded himself
as no world-figure but primarily as a
pioneering farmer. He was proud to
be a tiller:
I am a farmer; all I own
Is under sun and shower.
This idea influences much of his
thought; indeed it colours his concept
of life:
Life is a growth;
Progress is life’s true happiness.
Barrenness of spirit is the worst fate
that he can wish for his enemies:
Send me for foemen persons who
possess
A wintry spirit and hearts verdureless.
At times St. G. St. waxes lyrical over
the precious imponderables which his
farmer-soul enjoys:
What worth on fields and flocks you
place?
What worth on dollars any
Against the wealth, the verse and grace
Of summer-ev’nings many?
Again and again St. G. St. calls to
mind ideas familiar to us from the
Ayrshire ploughman:
External sheen to rank extreme
Ne’er raised a man up, but
A kingly nature crowns supreme
The crofter in his hut.
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’«
gate because no one would have the
folly to enter into Eden’s indolence of
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.
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,
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.
and the poet takes some comfort in ally removes from man his responsib-
IV.
Very poignant is the poem in which
St. G. St. acknowledges that his poetry
is the product of his sleepless nights.
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 grasp 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 at eve for each day’s
wages.
The poet was a lifelong advocate of
the underlings, whether these were
individuals or peoples. Frofn 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. Indeed 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.
the thought that such tyranny must
often in the end make way before a
more gentle power:
Than German 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 way
of wars, or internally, in the malpract-
ices of individuals. He asserts that the
guilt of the transgressor is somehow
partl.y 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 nigh.
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-
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 have 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 i* 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, ín 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,
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 éven 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!
VIII.
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