The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Page 16

58
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #2
“As far as one can see,” he wrote, “life is
eternal; it was and it will be. ... What each
and every individual has in common with
the life of the living will live on after he
ceases to exist.”26 Both Stephansson’s sto-
icism and his belief only in the immortality
of influence were reflected in his graveside
address for Gestur: “Had he lived longer,
he would have become more of a man but
never a better one. ... He has enriched our
memories, and although it is so very
painful to lose him, the void in my life
would have been far more grievous had he
never been mine and if I had never known
the enjoyment of his company.”27
Stephansson’s most original creations
found their inspiration in the natural world
with all its majesty and meaning. This ten-
dency is seen even in his earlier work, such
as this passage from his days in Dakota:
When fields of grain have caught a
gleam of moonlight
But dark the ground -
A pearl-grey mist has filled to over-
flowing
The dells around;
Some golden stars are peeping forth to
brighten
The eastern wood -
Then I am resting out upon my
doorstep
In nature’s mood.28
It was in Canada, though, that his
nature poetry blossomed in both quantity
and quality. If his childhood in Iceland
unleashed his thirst for knowledge, and if
his experiences in the United States led him
to religious and social radicalism, then it
can be said that it was in Canada where he
matured as a poet and achieved greatness.
Many of Stephansson’s poems and espe-
cially his Alberta poems portray the
breathtaking scenery of the Canadian land-
scape and distill from that landscape a sense
of life’s meaning, the “sermons in stones”
of which Shakespeare wrote in As You
Like It. He even managed to give texture to
the Manitoba flatlands:
By prairie and slough-side the train
that we rode
Drove ever relentlessly north.
To our left the great River lay turbid
and red
And sprawled itself sullenly forth.
Its breast never quickened in rapid or
fall,
Its dull heavy waters were fain
To waddle forever with arms full of
mud
And the slummocky clay of the plain.
The landscape unchanged and
unchangeable stood,
Save only where dryads of grace
Had woven on edges of wandering
brooks
A leafy embroid’ry of lace;
But the land itself lay like an infinite
board,
Unslivered, unknotted, and clean,
As if all of the stuff of Creation were
smoothed
And stained an ineffable green.29
It should come as no surprise, though,
that Stephansson’s best nature poetry drew
its inspiration from the immediate neigh-
bourhood of his modest Alberta
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