The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Blaðsíða 17

Vol. 58 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
59
farmhome. Few poetic descriptions of the
Canadian landscape can surpass the incom-
parable beauty of the middle stanzas of his
“Toast to Alberta” -
Thy glorious valleys widen down
Through straths and shining passes,
By shelter-belts of forest brown
And hollows warm with grasses,
To a mighty plain of green, that wakes
In a wind that laughs and quivers,
Fringed with a hundred azure lakes,
Embroidered bright with rivers.
Here veils of Northern Light are
drawn
On high as winter closes,
And hoary dews at summer dawn
Adorn the wild red roses.
Sometimes the swelling clouds of rain
Repress the sun’s caresses;
But soon the mountains smile again
And shake their icy tresses.30
For one who never wrote for financial
gain, the sheer volume of Stephansson’s
published work is astonishing. His poems
fill 1,800 pages, while his articles and letters
occupy a further 1,400 pages. Had his
energy been devoted entirely to agricul-
ture, coupled with his willingness to exper-
iment with new methods, it is likely that he
would have become a prosperous farmer in
time. But his vocation for poetry meant
that he was little better off materially than
he would have been had he remained a ten-
ant farmer in the old country.31
Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to
escape the conclusion that the richness of
his poetry grew, at least in part, out of the
poverty of his material circumstances. It is
hard to imagine that his words would have
been more precious or profound had he
been pensioned off to devote himself solely
to writing, since the challenges of everyday
life flow though his words.
It is not a simple matter to categorize
Stephansson politically, since his social
philosophy blended elements of strong
individualism, on the one hand, and an
embrace of socialist ideals, on the other.
No political party was broad enough or,
perhaps more accurately, sufficiently free
of self interest, to encompass the full range
and depth of his views. Consequently, his
support for political parties or movements
was always something of a pragmatic
wager. In Wisconsin, he supported the
Republicans, then still very much the party
of Abraham Lincoln, while in Dakota he
supported the Democrats, who at the time
sought to reduce protectionism. After
moving to Canada, he initially supported
Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals, who advo-
cated economic reciprocity and distanced
the dominion from the military and colo-
nial policies of Great Britain. Later he sup-
ported the United Farmers of Alberta dur-
ing that movement’s more progressive
period. Whatever party he supported, he
held to the ideal of advancing democracy.
“Democracy has this advantage over other
forms of government, when it is free of
corruption, in that it serves as a forum for
the education of the public on how to live
together in the most just and benign way
possible. With all its inevitable faults,
Democracy can in any case not put the
blame on the government alone, for those
who vote for the government in power will
have to take responsibility for their deci-
sion.”32 However else he might be
described, Stephansson was a radical demo-
crat in politics no less than he was in reli-
gion. We often find his socio-political
views expressed in biting social satires,
some of which demolish conventional
viewpoints in as little as a four-line stanza,
but the essence of his social ethic is con-
tained in his turn-of-the-century poem
“Evening” -
Where wealth that is gathered by taxes
or tolls
Or tariffs - is counted as vain,
Where no one’s success is another
one’s loss,
Nor power the goal and the gain
- The first of commandments is jus-
tice to all,
And victory causes no pain.33
Nowhere were Stephansson’s political
views more strident than when it came to
his unqualified condemnation of war as a
means for resolving human conflict. It is
impossible to escape the conclusion that he
would have been disgusted to see the trivi-
alization of warfare by present-day politi-