Classic Poem

The Eastern and the Western gates
Are open, and we see her face!
Between her piney steeps she waits
The coming of each alien race.
Dear Genius of a virgin land,
Kanata! Sylph of northern skies!
Maid of the tender lip and hand,
And dark, yet hospitable, eyes.

Thou art our Spirit of Romance,
Our Faerie Queen, our Damsel lorn,
Who, framed by some mysterious chance,
In undiscovered woods wast born.
In days of love and life gone by,
Ere waned the light, ere ebbed the tide,
Wild singers sought thy company,
And supple forms from forests wide.

They sported on the golden shore,
And far dim headlands of the past;
Untrammelled all, their spirits bore
No sense of soil by passion cast.
No philosophic doubts were theirs,
No tideless, stern pursuit of gain,
No weariness of life, no cares,
No yearnings underlaid with pain.

But, wild and true and innocent,
They plucked the blossom of the year,
Where savours of the woods were blent.
With music of the waters clear.
Death had no fears; it but revealed
A spectral world to spectral eyes,
Where spirit-wildings roamed afield,
And spirit-pinions swept the skies.

Where still the chase they would pursue,
And o'er the vacant rivers glide
With ghostly paddle and canoe,
With phantom forests on each side—
Forever, where no frost should fall
To waste the sweetness of the light,
Nor old age and its funeral,
Nor bitter storm, nor ancient night.

'Tis past, Kanata! Weightier days
Strain tight the girdle of the year;
Pale feet are in thy forest-ways,
Pale faces on thy plains appear;
And eyes, adventurous, behold
The gathering shadows on thy brow,
Where sacred graves of grassy mould
Turn black beneath the westering plough.

Thy plains are whispered of afar,
Thy gleaming prairies rich increase;
And, leaning on their tools of war,
Men dream of plenitude and peace.
For Europe's Middle Age is o'er,
And still her ways are undefined,
And darker seem the paths before
Than the dark paths which lie behind.

Perchance! but still I see them come—
Her uncouth peasants, seeking rest,
Sighing for sympathy, a home
And shelter in the peaceful West,
Where ancient foes in race and creed
May never more the tyrants see,
Who eat the bread of craft and greed,
And steal the wine of liberty.

Vain promise and delusive dreams
Which gloze the hidden, narrow heart;
Here man's own vile and selfish schemes
Will yet enact the tyrant's part.
Alas! for equal life and laws,
And Freedom 'neath the Western sun;
Here must they stand or fall—her cause
On these fresh fields be lost or won.

Still must she fight who long hath fought;
Still must she bleed who long hath bled;
There is no consecrated spot,
No clime where she alone doth tread.
Devise for her your “simple plan,”
Or “perfect system,” as of old;
They count not where insensate man
Spurns his own right to be controlled.