The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Side 15

Vol. 58 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
57
Unitarians as part of the larger freethought
movement, “Stephansson’s relationship
with the Unitarian church itself remained
ambiguous,” according to Jane
McCracken.21 While he may have found
the Unitarians more congenial to his own
thinking, even this liberal church must have
seemed timid in its challenge to religious
orthodoxy, while continuing many church-
ly practices that differed little from their
Lutheran neighbours. Moreover, his con-
cern for these worldy matters left him
impatient with the metaphysical preoccu-
pations of religion, whether liberal or
orthodox:
I quite expect that very soon
I’ll weary of this fussing
How holy men are splitting hairs
When God they keep discussing.22
Like most free-thinkers of the time,
Stephansson held the person of Jesus in
high regard, even if he dismissed any
notion of his divinity. He held him to be a
prophetic teacher, a social revolutionary,
who challenged the selfishness and greed
that led human beings to exploit one anoth-
er, offering an ethic of love as an antidote:
He preached that human love, alone,
Could lead the way to Heaven’s
throne;
That all our deepest wisdom went
To waste, if lacking good intent.23
At the same time, his admiration for
the pioneer, who prepared the ground for
those who followed, led him to ask the
audacious question, “Yet was not the
Baptist / Greater than the Messiah?”24 For
even his more liberal readers this rhetorical
question, which esteemed John the Baptist
over Jesus, was unthinkable.
Overall, neither Jesus nor convention-
al religious themes figured prominently in
Stephansson’s poetry. His poetic imagina-
tion preferred sagas to scriptures, nature to
theology, and everyday figures to distant
messiahs.
Despite his deep affection for his
friends and neighbours, which is most evi-
dent in his touching eulogies, his broad
sympathy for humankind, and the idealism
of his social views, Stephansson was not
much given to sentimentality. In light of
the remarkably wide range of subject mat-
ter and styles in his poetry, his work con-
tains surprisingly few verses that might be
considered love poems. Richard Beck
writes of the poet’s “manliness” and it may
well be that Icelandic culture is one of the
few remaining that consider poetry a
“manly” art rather than a pursuit of the
soft-hearted and sentimental. Yet there is
an unmistakable tenderness reflected in his
work, such as his eulogy for his son, Jon,
who died at the age of three while the fam-
ily still lived in Dakota. This poem was
composed in four stages over a period of
fourteen years, the second part a year after
his son’s death:
Just one year ago,
When buds were springing
Wakened by April showers,
Down this same pathway
Where alone I walk now
You romped at my side, my darling.
Wild flowers bright and
Green leaflets shining
You clutched in your wee soft hand;
And from the bushes
When you scampered to me
Piping, “See daddy, I’m here!”
Fall is approaching,
Frozen hoary
The leaves by the pathways I walk on;
Your feet are unmoving,
Your lips are cold now,
And stiffened your little fingers.
Along here I wander,
No one to pick me
Flowers that grow by the wayside;
Yet I keep hearing
From the rose bushes,
Your baby voice, “Daddy, I’m
here!”25
Years later, Stephansson lost his six-
teen-year-old son, Gestur, who succumbed
to the rare misfortune of being electrocut-
ed by grasping a wire fence that had
become charged with electricity from a
lighting strike. These losses must have been
especially bitter to a man who harboured
no faith in personal immortality, believing
as he did that, while life itself had a quality
of immortality, individual humans did not.