Lines In Memory Of Edmund Morris

Dear Morris--here is your letter--

Can my answer reach you now?

Fate has left me your debtor,

You will remember how;

For I went away to Nantucket,

And you to the Isle of Orleans,

And when I was dawdling and dreaming

Over the ways and means

Of answering, the power was denied me,

Fate frowned and took her stand;

I have your unanswered letter

Here in my hand.

This--in your famous scribble,

It was ever a cryptic fist,

Cuneiform or Chaldaic

Meanings held in a mist.

Dear Morris, (now I'm inditing

And poring over your script)

I gather from the writing,

The coin that you had flipt,

Turned tails; and so you compel me

To meet you at Touchwood Hills:

Or, mayhap, you are trying to tell me

The sum of a painter's ills:

Is that Phimister Proctor

Or something about a doctor?

Well, nobody knows, but Eddie,

Whatever it is I'm ready.

For our friendship was always fortunate

In its greetings and adieux,

Nothing flat or importunate,

Nothing of the misuse

That comes of the constant grinding

Of one mind on another.

So memory has nothing to smother,

But only a few things captured

On the wing, as it were, and enraptured.

Yes, Morris, I am inditing--

Answering at last it seems,

How can you read the writing

In the vacancy of dreams?

I would have you look over my shoulder

Ere the long, dark year is colder,

And mark that as memory grows older,

The brighter it pulses and gleams.

And if I should try to render

The tissues of fugitive splendour

That fled down the wind of living,

Will they read it some day in the future,

And be conscious of an awareness

In our old lives, and the bareness

Of theirs, with the newest passions

In the last fad of the fashions?

          *      *      *      *      *

How often have we risen without daylight

When the day star was hidden in mist,

When the dragon-fly was heavy with dew and sleep,

And viewed the miracle pre-eminent, matchless,

The prelusive light that quickens the morning.

O crystal dawn, how shall we distill your virginal freshness

When you steal upon a land that man has not sullied with his

    intrusion,

When the aboriginal shy dwellers in the broad solitudes

Are asleep in their innumerable dens and night haunts

Amid the dry ferns, in the tender nests

Pressed into shape by the breasts of the Mother birds?

How shall we simulate the thrill of announcement

When lake after lake lingering in the starlight

Turn their faces towards you,

And are caressed with the salutation of colour?

How shall we transmit in tendril-like images,

The tenuous tremor in the tissues of ether,

Before the round of colour buds like the dome of a shrine,

The preconscious moment when love has fluttered in the bosom,

Before it begins to ache?

How often have we seen the even

Melt into the liquidity of twilight,

With passages of Titian splendour,

Pellucid preludes, exquisitely tender,

Where vanish and revive, thro' veils of the ashes of roses,

The crystal forms the breathless sky discloses.

The new moon a slender thing,

In a snood of virgin light,

She seemed all shy on venturing

Into the vast night.

Her own land and folk were afar,

She must have gone astray,

But the gods had given a silver star,

To be with her on the way.

          *      *      *      *      *

I can feel the wind on the prairie

And see the bunch-grass wave,

And the sunlights ripple and vary

The hill with Crowfoot's grave,

Where he "pitched off" for the last time

In sight of the Blackfoot Crossing,

Where in the sun for a pastime

You marked the site of his tepee

With a circle of stones. Old Napiw

Gave you credit for that day.

And well I recall the weirdness

Of that evening at Qu'Appelle,

In the wigwam with old Sakimay,

The keen, acrid smell,

As the kinnikinick was burning;

The planets outside were turning,

And the little splints of poplar

Flared with a thin, gold flame.

He showed us his painted robe

Where in primitive pigments

He had drawn his feats and his forays,

And told us the legend

Of the man without a name,

The hated Blackfoot,

How he lured the warriors,

The young men, to the foray

And they never returned.

Only their ghosts

Goaded by the Blackfoot

Mounted on stallions:

In the night time

He drove the stallions

Reeking into the camp;

The women gasped and whispered,

The children cowered and crept,

And the old men shuddered

Where they slept.

When Sakimay looked forth

He saw the Blackfoot,

And the ghosts of the warriors,

And the black stallions

Covered by the night wind

As by a mantle.

          *      *      *      *      *

I remember well a day,

When the sunlight had free play,

When you worked in happy stress,

While grave Ne-Pah-Pee-Ness

Sat for his portrait there,

In his beaded coat and his bare

Head, with his mottled fan

Of hawk's feathers, A Man!

Ah Morris, those were the times

When you sang your inconsequent rhymes

Sprung from a careless fountain:

"_He met her on the mountain,

He gave her a horn to blow,

And the very last words he said to her

Were, 'Go 'long, Eliza, go.'_"

Foolish,--but life was all,

And under the skilful fingers

Contours came at your call--

Art grows and time lingers;--

But now the song has a change

Into something wistful and strange.

And one asks with a touch of ruth

What became of the youth

And where did Eliza go?

He met her on the mountain,

He gave her a horn to blow,

The horn was a silver whorl

With a mouthpiece of pure pearl,

And the mountain was all one glow,

With gulfs of blue and summits of rosy snow.

The cadence she blew on the silver horn

Was the meaning of life in one phrase caught,

And as soon as the magic notes were born,

She repeated them once in an afterthought.

They heard in the crystal passes,

The cadence, calling, calling,

And faint in the deep crevasses,

The echoes falling, falling.

They stood apart and wondered;

Her lips with a wound were aquiver,

His heart with a sword was sundered,

For life was changed forever

When he gave her the horn to blow:

But a shadow arose from the valley,

Desolate, slow and tender,

It hid the herdsmen's chalet,

Where it hung in the emerald meadow,

(Was death driving the shadow?)

It quenched the tranquil splendour

Of the colour of life on the glow-peaks,

Till at the end of the even,

The last shell-tint on the snow-peaks

Had passed away from the heaven.

And yet, when it passed, victorious,

The stars came out on the mountains,

And the torrents gusty and glorious,

Clamoured in a thousand fountains,

And even far down in the valley,

A light re-discovered the chalet.

The scene that was veiled had a meaning,

So deep that none might know;

Was it here in the morn on the mountain,

That he gave her the horn to blow?

          *      *      *      *      *

Tears are the crushed essence of this world,

The wine of life, and he who treads the press

Is lofty with imperious disregard

Of the burst grapes, the red tears and the murk.

But nay! that is a thought of the old poets,

Who sullied life with the passional bitterness

Of their world-weary hearts. We of the sunrise,

Joined in the breast of God, feel deep the power

That urges all things onward, not to an end,

But in an endless flow, mounting and mounting,

Claiming not overmuch for human life,

Sharing with our brothers of nerve and leaf

The urgence of the one creative breath,--

All in the dim twilight--say of morning,

Where the florescence of the light and dew

Haloes and hallows with a crown adorning

The brows of life with love; herein the clue,

The love of life--yea, and the peerless love

Of things not seen, that leads the least of things

To cherish the green sprout, the hardening seed;

Here leans all nature with vast Mother-love,

Above the cradled future with a smile.

Why are there tears for failure, or sighs for weakness,

While life's rhythm beats on? Where is the rule

To measure the distance we have circled and clomb?

Catch up the sands of the sea and count and count

The failures hidden in our sum of conquest.

Persistence is the master of this life;

The master of these little lives of ours;

To the end--effort--even beyond the end.

          *      *      *      *      *

Here, Morris, on the plains that we have loved,

Think of the death of Akoose, fleet of foot,

Who, in his prime, a herd of antelope

From sunrise, without rest, a hundred miles

Drove through rank prairie, loping like a wolf,

Tired them and slew them, ere the sun went down.

Akoose, in his old age, blind from the smoke

Of tepees and the sharp snow light, alone

With his great grandchildren, withered and spent,

Crept in the warm sun along a rope

Stretched for his guidance. Once when sharp autumn

Made membranes of thin ice upon the sloughs,

He caught a pony on a quick return

Of prowess and, all his instincts cleared and quickened,

He mounted, sensed the north and bore away

To the Last Mountain Lake where in his youth

He shot the sand-hill-cranes with his flint arrows.

And for these hours in all the varied pomp

Of pagan fancy and free dreams of foray

And crude adventure, he ranged on entranced,

Until the sun blazed level with the prairie,

Then paused, faltered and slid from off his pony.

In a little bluff of poplars, hid in the bracken,

He lay down; the populace of leaves

In the lithe poplars whispered together and trembled,

Fluttered before a sunset of gold smoke,

With interspaces, green as sea water,

And calm as the deep water of the sea.

There Akoose lay, silent amid the bracken,

Gathered at last with the Algonquin Chieftains.

Then the tenebrous sunset was blown out,

And all the smoky gold turned into cloud wrack.

Akoose slept forever amid the poplars,

Swathed by the wind from the far-off Red Deer

Where dinosaurs sleep, clamped in their rocky tombs.

Who shall count the time that lies between

The sleep of Akoose and the dinosaurs?

Innumerable time, that yet is like the breath

Of the long wind that creeps upon the prairie

And dies away with the shadows at sundown.

          *      *      *      *      *

What we may think, who brood upon the theme,

Is, when the old world, tired of spinning, has fallen

Asleep, and all the forms, that carried the fire

Of life, are cold upon her marble heart--

Like ashes on the altar--just as she stops,

That something will escape of soul or essence,--

The sum of life, to kindle otherwhere:

Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,

Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,

Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart,

And looses a gold kernel to the mould,

So the old world, hanging long in the sun,

And deep enriched with effort and with love,

Shall, in the motions of maturity,

Wither and part, and the kernel of it all

Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes

Where the appearance, throated like a bird,

Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,

Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.