Newfoundland Verse

by E. J. Pratt

A Fragment from a Story

I

(THADDEUS, a traveller, speaking to Julian,
an old man)

. . . . . . . . .
. . . Fields far and near,
Hills, ridges, valleys, lowlands, marsh and plain,
Far to the horizon's utmost rim were filled
With clashing millions. All earth's tribes
Had by some common instinct gathered there,
Peopling the shadows of the awful zone—
The forest shades, the fissures of great rocks,
And caverns cut within the rotted mould;
Each nation's youth, its lithest, strongest, best,
Closed up the crimson rendezvous. The streams
That ran their livid washings through the clefts
Of spade or nature's highways, fouled and choked
With drifted foliage of a year grown old,
Too soon, with autumn's hectic leaves and limbs,
And sheddings rare of dearer castaways.
As leaves fall, so upon the plains fell men;
Some tossed awhile within the gust of combat,
High on the sweltered air, returned to earth
As flesh and blood and bone unrecognized,
And indistinguishable dust. Some swayed,
Not knowing why they did, as if a breath
Of unnamed pestilence had touched their senses,
Robbed them of aim and guidance. Thus they drooped
And fell; and others could not die till hours
Wore into days and nights. Restless they moved.
And shuddered; clutched convulsively at stones
Or roots, and clenched their teeth upon their hands,
Stifling their moans. And lads of growing years,
Who pain or weariness had never known,
Lay in strange sleep upon the fields, alone,
Or huddled up in ghastly heaps where death
Had flung them. Night winds gambolled with their hair,
Golden and brown and dark—they heeded not.
And far along the distant battle lines—
Movements as various as the tides, the rise
The flow, the swift recessions of despair;
Huge gaps that rendered void the toil of years.
The lines re-formed and the price paid; strong men
Who lunged and parried thrusts and lunged again,
Struck and were struck, unknown to each the foes,
Save in the general quarrel and its cause.
And through the lulls of intermittent fight
Was blown death's bitterest music—the low sob
Of brothers mourning brothers dead, the curse
Of fallen men that had not seen their foes,
The unavailing moan that answers moan
At night in the far comradeship of wounds.
Then, strangest of all sights, the harvest moon
A moment broke through misty cloud, and shed
Upon the fields a sickly, yellow light,
Disclosing pallid faces, blue, strained lips,
And eyes that stared, amazed, through open lids
That had no time to shut—that looked and asked
But one eternal question. Then the moon
Grew dimmer as the mist increased, and showed,
In hazy outlines, hurrying forms that moved
In twos and threes, from place to place, and laid
Upon the stretchers, one by one, the dead,
Torn, jagged, mud-smeared and crumpled, carrying them
To rows of damp, deep trenches, newly dug,
Where they were placed in groups of eight or ten,
In order, side by side, and face to face—
And the moon shone full again—the harvest moon.

JULIAN.

Your words would tax the heart's belief. I thought
That here along these shores when, at the close
Of a week of storm, the gull alone remained
Upon the waters, and the blinds were drawn
Within a hundred homes, that there was left
On earth nothing that might out-range the winds.

THADDEUS.

Death—Death stalked everywhere on land and sea,
In clouds that banked the sun, in mists that hid
The stars, or half disclosed the swollen moon.
No cavern sunk beneath the earth but bore
His foot-prints. Deep below the waters' rim
Great fish had trailed his scent. Earth's myriad forms
Had felt the plague-spot of his rampant touch.
From the small field-mouse, caught within the fumes
Of sulphurous air that crept from knoll to knoll,
Withering the grass blades, to the giant fighter
Of storm and wave that, ribbed and sheathed with steel,
Felt the swift scorpion in her sides, then rocked
And plunged with bellowing nostrils till she sank
In a wild litany of guns, with wind,
And night, and flame. But busier was his hand
With subtler workmanship. On eye and brow
And cheek were delved the traces of his passing—
Blindness, that like a thunder-clap at noon.
Closed on the sight; furrows that struck the veins,
Turning the red sap from its wonted course;
Sharp lines of pain and fury and quick hate
That on the instant changed to graven stone,
Callous and motionless. And deadlier still,
With flying leap he strode a continent,
Or the wide prairies of a sea, and snatched
The cup from the wan fingers of a life
That slaked its thirst upon the wine of hope;
So sure his hand—light, as with finger-tips,
He touched the hair and wove the grey and white
Within the brown, or hard, with rough-spurred heel,
He mauled the bosom till its heavings ceased.

JULIAN.

Where ever in its course was this wide world
So plunged in an unmeasured desolation?
What tenders offered, save in a fool's faith,
Would gamble on the chance of raising it
From the complete involvement of its ruin?

THADDEUS.

Many there were who, clutching at a straw
Of some dark saying of the past, some tone,
Or flash of eye carrying strange emphasis,
Sought for the battered remnants of their faith
An anchorage; and around a clay-damp grave
That buried hope with dust would stoop to tie
Their heartstrings to a pansy, murmuring thus:
"Who bade this flower renew its own fair lease
Of youth perennial? Springs it not this year
From the same soil and root, with that same pride
With which a year ago it lifted up
Its face before the sun? Does not each year
Declare its trumpet-pledges at the spring?"

JULIAN.

Think they so to convince the heart with words
Like those, to mesh it with a logic meet
For bloodless ends? What though the winds of May
Call to the springing rootlets, lure the bud
From the rose-stem, and chase the resinous sap
From the pine's trunk to branch and topmost twig—
Who yields to such delusion? Does the spring
Forget November's hecatombs, the last
Convulsion of the leaf, the gale-torn limbs
Of trees scarred to the death, the flowers that danced
Upon the fields scythed by the autumn's hands.
The writhen spectres of earth's quick decay
Flashed out upon the winds? All these as dust
Around the season's tombs—dust-heaps, no more;
As sands that eddy in the desert, these:
For these no resurrection. What amends
Does summer make for winter's numbing stroke?
It's death he gives, not slumber. His pale forms
Breathe not again, and eyelids that have closed
On the congealing air reflect no more
The warm glance of the sun. The swallows build
Their nests once more within the eaves; the thrush,
The red-breast and the lark cover again
Their young in bush and tree and meadow-grain—
They have not died. But weak ones that, impaled
Upon the thorn, screamed out their notes of pain,
Or dashed, wing-broken, by the wildering blast,
Fell when their strength had failed them on far plains,
On treeless hills, or dazed in homeward flight,
Fluttered and sank in furrows of the sea—
Their song has ended; they return no more.

THADDEUS.

Yet, like a crocus in the swamps of spring,
I saw life push its way through mire of death, Triumphant.

JULIAN.

How?

THADDEUS.

A ship lay motionless,
Not anchored, nor becalmed, but held in spell
Of some great shock. She listed heavily
As though a hidden wound had gripped her loins,
And in the rain and chill were lowered boats,
So filled they lacked the margin of an inch
To meet the water's edge. A law well known
To men who live upon the sea here ran
Its old and honored course. The boats were few
And small, and there was left upon the deck
A sturdier throng who stretched out willing hands
To save the weak. One boat hung yet suspended,
Filled short of obvious risk, and a slim girl
Stepped out, and gave an aged woman, left
Unnoticed in the crowd, her place. Her lips
Were closed, and her face pale, but yet a smile
Made soft and sweet the pallor of her cheeks.
Then out into the night the boat was rowed,
Steadily and silently. No clamour broke
The stillness on the deck, nor was there sound
Of any voiced farewell, but here and there
A hand was raised, and a white fluttering
Answered the distant rhythm of the oars.

JULIAN.

Chaos indeed may well disclose a star
Caught unaware within the tangled drift
Of cloud and chasing glooms. Look on the plains
Again. Charred ruins, not of nature's hand,
Lie deep within unfathomable slime.
How foul the wreckage stands—a spectacle
So ill that it might seem to bar for ever
The lily's right to grow therein again.

THADDEUS.

And yet a few short hours before, when death
Was taking in his most exacting toll
Of this, his bloodiest year, were women seen,
Fulfilling well their office. Lovingly
Their hands were placed on the hot flush of wounds
Made by the steel of surgeon and of foe.
They beat the angels, at the angels' game,
Those women. God might well His embassage
Forego—His feudals of pure space—and take
In chartered ministry those lovelier forms,
They know the ravelled driftings of our life,
And hence God's art of salvage all the more.

JULIAN.

These are fine colors woven in a grey
And tattered fabric.

THADDEUS.

Grant you not as well
A value to a life that's lost! The lad
That struck out in the storm without a star,
Or faintest glimmer of a port, that took
His orders with blanched cheeks, yet with a heart
That pumped its resolution through young limbs,
Untaxed till now by paths wherein the errand
Failed by fore-doom of the sure goal—think you,
That with his eyes made blind before he struck
The highway, when his senses clouded fast
With the delusions of ungoverned winds,
That falling here, somewhere around the place
Of starting, he should then be counted out,
His life not worth the value of a smile?

JULIAN.

This tangled, sacrificial thread has grown
Till it has thickened to a scourge that bears
No discipline in human fashionings.

THADDEUS.

Causes lost awhile on earth try out
On new arenas fiercer qualities.
They are re-born upon the air; they storm
The souls of men; find homes in thunder peals;
Are hitched to lightnings. Slain, they rise again
With such forged temper that they turn aside
The opposing edge of armouries of steel.
Marks he the issue well, who sees here naught
Save huge world-fires upon whose smouldering ruins
Man's hand has lost its cunning to re-build,
Or that the piles new-reared shall fall once more
In the mad blasts that periodic run
Their cycles of decay? May not the eye
Range over those dun fields of death and see,
From vile putrescence, beauty rise in light
Unquenchable? May not the scar remind
The sufferer of his healing as of wound?

JULIAN.

Look how in cluttered heaps the crosses rise,
Stacked pile on pile, until they twist and sag
The rivets on the bolted doors of God.
This is a storm beyond imaginings,
Unknown to land or sea. Were waves and gales
The only agents of man's ruin, then
The chance might fall upon his side—the fight
With nature growing simpler every hour,
Her ways being known; but when the struggle takes
Its eddying fortunes in these blinded routes,
Not once, nor twice, as though an incident
Of casual kind had touched man's history,
But as a baffling epidemic strikes
A thousand times his life, failure of cure—
How strike this foul, insistent integer
Clean from his life? ... The taint is in the blood.

II

A LATER SPRING

A flash of indigo in the air,
A streak of orange edged with black!
A bluebird skimmed the spruces there,
A redstart followed in his track.

The light grows in the eastern skies,
The deeper shadows are withdrawn;
From marsh and swamp the vapors rise
In the cool cloisters of the dawn.

What loom, a-weaving on the land,
Such color and fragrance fuses!
Magenta and white on moss and sand,
Azaleas, arethusas.

And higher up along the steeps,
The pink of mountain-laurel;
While lower down the yellow creeps
From celandine and sorrel.

Sea-foam or snow-drift, flecked with spurt
Of flame, upon the grasses spread.
The snow is foam of mitre-wort;
The flame, the ragged robin's red.

..............

Where sits the lily of the morning dew
When light winds waken,
And gems that the violets hold
Gently are shaken
To crystalline purple and blue,
And emerald, crimson and gold
From the heart of the rose unfold,
And burst into view;

There, at the dawn's first blush,
The notes of a brown thrasher fall,
And the importunate voice of the thrush
Blends with a tannager's call;
There, under a dragon-fly's wings,
A stream carols by with sweet noise,
And slowly a daffodil swings
To a humming-bird's marvellous poise.

(Thaddeus, walking through a field in the direction of Julian's home. The day is warm and sunny. A rapid stream, a short distance away, flows through a valley whose banks slope down from small hills covered with evergreen. Afar off, the land is high and forest-clad. At a bend of the stream he suddenly meets Julian.)

THADDEUS.

There is a quality in this air that stirs
The blood as readily as the balsam sap.
What brew, what chemistry; what hand is this
That grips the pestle? Never was the grass
So green upon the fields. A miracle!
Throughout arterial nature, marble-cold
And pale, are heard the joyous sounds of life
Revived; earth's wells are opened in the vales;
Through ice-clad mountains, chiselled by the hands
Of northern blasts, the gurgling waters run
In stream and torrent, and in the mad plunge
Of cataract. Beyond the snow-capped ranges
Lusty young rivers tear and strain at the dugs
Of the foot-hills, and parting, force their pace
Through gorge and valley to the open sea.
Life, boundless, keen, ecstatic, uncontrolled!
Vast, heaving, surging life, strung to great thews,
Rapt in wide wonderments. Flail, life of Spring!
Born of prophetic gales and plangent shocks,
That rouse the torpor of earth's granite veins,
And sluggard eyes. Glorious in resurrection!
Thou peerless colorist of nature's life!
With what unrivaled hands the lines are drawn.
The shadows set, and the rich hues enwrought
Upon how great a canvas! The far climb
Majestic of fresh-foliaged ash and elm
Along the mountain crags; the river banks
Where the white spray falls softly on the iris,
And violets creep along the sides; the gift
Of minted treasure on the open fields,
Where bloom those golden legions of the earth—
The daffodils and lowland marigolds;
Cerulean tints that light our common paths.
That bless our road-sides, cheer our vacant wastes;
Bluets and harebells and the lilac bloom;
Orchards a-flame beneath a setting sun,
And, trailing slow around moss-covered rocks.
The flower of May superlatively veined.
Come! Leave your tents, O mortals, gather here
In Nature's high rotunda, crystal-domed,
And offer praises .... Julian, give me
Your hand. We meet under new skies to-day.
The times are changed; the earth renews her face;
There is a fine contagion in the spring
For heavy hearts.

JULIAN.

You would infect the blood
Of an old man.

THADDEUS.

Come, Julian! In this life
There is an unslain good that has outlived
All floods and fires. There are undaunted spirits
The age has not destroyed. I have seen them breathe
Upon dry bones until they leaped with sinew;
Even flotsam by their touch was salvable.
No life, however craven at the face,
But found a courage stirring at the core.
The groundwork's there to build a structure on;
The hand that yesterday tore like an eagle's claw
Now pours in balm to-day, blesses and cures.
There is a restoration in a smile
We knew not of; we had forgotten it—
But wings unseen were flying in the night.

JULIAN.

I would there was a rock from which man's hopes
Might never more be swept, or that his blood
Might always bathe his heart with healthy stream.
But those alternate currents, like the seasons,
Have been our fateful legacy through all time.
What power is this you speak of, that the dark
May sudden blaze with light before the morn
Is ushered in at nature's call? Is this
The ultimate conquest of her will, that day
Shall not know supersession by the night,
With earth's diurnal axis overruled?

THADDEUS.

Have you not noticed, standing in the aisles
Of some high-vaulted temple when the massed
And reverent throngs were hushed in expectation,
How a great organ poured forth like a flood
Its spell of music as the master's hands
Swept the wide boards? What power over the soul
To lift its hopes, to plant its aspirations
In the rich soil of heaven came from the touch!
But let untutored fingers meet the keys,
And the rapt ear is split by harsh discords.
Are not the strings, the instrument, the same
With either press? But how extremes depend
Upon the craft of him who plays. Life's songs
From baser jars and fretted failures range
Along the gamut of their enterprise,
In spiral movement to such high refrains
As could, with buoyant amplitude of roll,
Lift up the souls of sinking men, and float
The world's grey cares on seas of evening-calm...
Have you not heard such music when the winds
Are given boundless space wherein to blow
Upon the greenness of the earth? They pass,
And from the meadows and the valley-slopes
The latent rhythms of the daisies blend
With the low rustle of the sedge. They pass
Again, and lo, in grander orchestra,
The pines lift up their voices on the hills.
A blade of grass, a daisy or a pine,
A wave, a waterfall, a heart-string, these,
Tuned to the world's blood rhythms, now await.
As cords you touch, as reeds you breathe upon,
The rising pulses of the morning air.

JULIAN.

Dust gathers in my mouth. I cannot speak
What I would say. Whether it is the drought
Of age, or some strange filtrate of the past
That sets a parchèd seal upon the lips,
I do not know. It may be that from thistles
I tried to gather figs, or where I looked
Before I plucked, I said the vines were dry.
Now I am old. I find the roadways blocked,
And memory, ranging through the fungus years,
Finds but the husks where it would take the fruit.
And yet there is a knocking in this clay—
A restless flame—something that, if it could,
Would leap these grammared confines of slow speech,
And give the echo to your dancing words.

THIS BOOK IS A PRODUCTION OF
THE RYERSON PRESS,
TORONTO, CANADA