Lögberg - 21.12.1950, Blaðsíða 3

LÖGBERG, FIMTUDAGINN, 21. DESEMBER, 1950
3
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,
Witli 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.
\
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 shóuld 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 we at times desire
To win with art of witchery
From Orpheus his lyre,
So we to eástward 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 indeed,
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.
G. St. felt the deepest loyalty. To this
fosterland he dedicated, as he himself
asserts, his toil, and here stood, he de-
clares, the cradle of hi* children. Few
if any have written more felicitously
of 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-storm by sward-ropes
bound”, or leisurely and pictorical as
for instance in his travel sequence En
Route. Here is its 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.
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 bowers,
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.
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;
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 tqs 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.
But ít was not tne region ot tne Ked
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 o’n the latter which at once made
But like spots moonlit shine the fields of grain ’gainst
The azure ground,
And haze light-gray the hollows fills, and fills too
Each dell and sound,
And lowest to the east the golden stars through
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 p>oetry; indeed
of modern English verse he had a
r.ather 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
^et 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 Depan-
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 remarks. 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 rich, 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!
(2) A translation of a few lines of
humorous verse entitled The Potent
Poets:
’Tis noised now, as greatest news, in whispers low,
That f>otent poets in the Westland do not grow.
But, brothers, we shall show the world our competence,
For actions are irrefutable evidence.
But we who Lögberg filled with verses mire-fraught,
And made the ditties that Heimskringla drove distraught,
We have, I think, the charge against us put to flight,
Though we have not as yet employed half our might.
And they their papers treble may, if they but dare,
For everything will nonetheless the same way fare.
(3) The following entire passage was
interpolated: —
It is sometimes asserted that St. G.
St. was rather cold and indeed defici-
ent in affection. In several passages the
poet expresses his awareness of this
charge and indicates that he has no
desire to win with his verse the love
of a maiden with her first novel
on her lap. Yet such poems as those
entitled Kurly and The Pretty Eyes
clearly show the poet’s feeling for girl-
hood and womanhood. Indeed in his
poem called Amatory Verses to Iceland
he explicitly asserts that he delights in
everything that is beautiful whereso-
ever it be “even”, he slyly adds, “on the
face of a maiden”, for he does not be-
lieve that “it is at all more unseemly
to admire a lovely lass than it is to ad-
mire a beautiful bud”. Nowhere does
St. G. St. show better his insight into
the imaginative mind of a maiden
than in his simple rural piece entitled
The Errand-Lass.
“Run out to the strait”, to the maiden said I
“And fetch me my Gray, and now speedily fly!”
And lightfooted ran she, as fleet as the hind,
But her return tarried. I waited, my mind
Kept count of the hours recalling for me
So much about human degeneracy,
And powers judicial, and judgments and laws,
That I turned a pamphlet of ethical \aws,
Of punishment and about vengence sure,
And I like a synod’s committee was dour.
So finally when to the home-field she led
My horse, I ran hurriedly up, and I said,
As I the rein snatched from her, “You will receive
A thorough good whipping, my girlie, this eve”.
“For heedlessness”, added I harshly to her,
“Does punishment which it has earned it incur”.
But startled at this, to herself did she say:
“Ah, sunrise, you did my returning delay”.
I off my guard was, and a smile gave thereat,
Yet brusquely I queried: “In what way was that?”
“In this way it chances”, she answered me, “When
The sun is bright-shining I many things then
Behold in the world that are novel: night’s dew
Seems silver and gold, and with sea-vapour blue,
The vales all are filled, and the fell-tops upbear
More black, as if tarred ships were voyaging there.
The tree’s crests uploom like to crag-bands at sea;
A hunting-place seems yonder heath-bush to be,
With silken nets spread out, the branches between,
All shining like silver, and ever so clean.
A throng is astir by the school-house’s thatch:
The swallows there flying are having a match.
Continued on page 7