Árdís - 01.01.1947, Page 39

The other prays to shield her love from harm,
To strengthen his young, proud, uplifted arm.
Ah how her white face quivers thus to think,
Your tomahawk his life’s best blood will drink.”
But when she seems to see most clearly the British point of view
she switches again to the side of the Indian and the dominant note at
the end of the poem is sympathy for the Indian and a keen sense of the
injustice he has suffered. The Indian wife in the poem rejects her gener-
ous feeling toward her enemies because she feels that the British wife
would have no sympathy for her viewpoint.
“She never tliinks of my wild aching breast,
Nor prays for your dark face and eagle crest
Endangered by a thousand rifle balls,
My heart the target if my warrior falls.
O! coward self I hesitate no more;
Go forth, and win the glories of the war.
Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men’s hands,
By right, by birth we Indians own these lands,
Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low ...
Perhaps the white man’s God has willed it so.”
These two are not the only poems in which Pauline Johnson laments
the fate of the Indian. I will mention only one more, “The Corn Husker”,
a short poem about an old Indian woman who is gathering tíie corn.
“Age in her fingers, hunger in her face,
Her shoulders stooped with weight of work and years,
But rich in tawny coloring of her race,
She comes afield to strip the purple ears.
And all her thoughts are with the days gone by,
Ere might’s injustice banished from their lands
Her people, that today unheeded lie,
Like the dead husks that rustle through her hands.”
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