The Height Of Land

Here is the height of land:

The watershed on either hand

Goes down to Hudson Bay

Or Lake Superior;

The stars are up, and far away

The wind sounds in the wood, wearier

Than the long Ojibwa cadence

In which Potàn the Wise

Declares the ills of life

And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound

Of acquiescence. The fires burn low

With just sufficient glow

To light the flakes of ash that play

At being moths, and flutter away

To fall in the dark and die as ashes:

Here there is peace in the lofty air,

And Something comes by flashes

Deeper than peace: —

The spruces have retired a little space

And left a field of sky in violet shadow

With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.

Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;

There is no sound unless the soul can hear

The gathering of the waters in their sources.

We have come up through the spreading lakes

From level to level, —

Pitching our tents sometimes over a revel

Of roses that nodded all night,

Dreaming within our dreams,

To wake at dawn and find that they were captured

With no dew on their leaves;

Sometimes mid sheaves

Of bracken and dwarf-cornel, and again

On a wide blueberry plain

Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;

A rocky islet followed

With one lone poplar and a single nest

Of white-throat-sparrows that took no rest

But sang in dreams or woke to sing, —

To the last portage and the height of land —:

Upon one hand

The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,

And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,

Glimmering all night

In the cold arctic light;

On the other hand

The crowded southern land

With all the welter of the lives of men.

But here is peace, and again

That Something comes by flashes

Deeper than peace, — a spell

Golden and inappellable

That gives the inarticulate part

Of our strange being one moment of release

That seems more native than the touch of time,

And we must answer in chime;

Though yet no man may tell

The secret of that spell

Golden and inappellable.

Now are there sounds walking in the wood,

And all the spruces shiver and tremble,

And the stars move a little in their courses.

The ancient disturber of solitude

Breathes a pervasive sigh,

And the soul seems to hear

The gathering of the waters at their sources;

Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark;

The region-spirit murmurs in meditation,

The heart replies in exaltation

And echoes faintly like an inland shell

Ghost tremors of the spell;

Thought reawakens and is linked again

With all the welter of the lives of men.

Here on the uplands where the air is clear

We think of life as of a stormy scene, —

Of tempest, of revolt and desperate shock;

And here, where we can think, on the brights uplands

Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on life

Until the tempest parts, and it appears

As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:

A Something to be guided by ideals —

That in themselves are simple and serene —

Of noble deed to foster noble thought,

And noble thought to image noble deed,

Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,

Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt

Whether the perfect beauty that escapes

Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing

Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:

Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest

The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,

And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.

The ancient disturber of solitude

Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,

And the dark wood

Is stifled with the pungent fume

Of charred earth burnt to the bone

That takes the place of air.

Then sudden I remember when and where, —

The last weird lakelet foul with weedy growths

And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,

Skin of vile water over viler mud

Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,

And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,

Not to be urged toward the fatal shore

Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden roar

Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with light

And terror. It had left the portage-height

A tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,

Covered still with patches of bright fire

Smoking with incense of the fragment resin

That even then began to thin and lessen

Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.

'Tis overpast. How strange the stars have grown;

The presage of extinction glows on their crests

And they are beautied with impermanence;

They shall be after the race of men

And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,

Entangled in the meshes of bright words.

A lemming stirs the fern and in the mosses

Eft-minded things feel the air change, and dawn

Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.

How often in the autumn of the world

Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be rebuilt

With deeper meaning! Shall the poet then,

Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,

Brood on the welter of the lives of men

And dream of his ideal hope and promise

In the blush sunrise? Shall he base his flight

Upon a more compelling law than Love

As Life's atonement; shall the vision

Of noble deed and noble thought immingled

Seem as uncouth to him as the pictograph

Scratched on the cave side by the cave-dweller

To us of the Christ-time? Shall he stand

With deeper joy, with more complex emotion,

In closer commune with divinity,

With the deep fathomed, with the firmament charted,

With life as simple as a sheep-boy's song,

What lies beyond a romaunt that was read

Once on a morn of storm and laid aside

Memorious with strange immortal memories?

Or shall he see the sunrise as I see it

In shoals of misty fire the deluge-light

Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,

And feel the lulled earth, older in pulse and motion,

Turn the rich lands and inundant oceans

To the flushed color, and hear as now I hear

The thrill of life beat up the planet's margin

And break in the clear susurrus of deep joy

That echoes and reëchoes in my being?

O Life is intuition the measure of knowledge

And do I stand with heart entranced and burning

At the zenith of our wisdom when I feel

The long light flow, the long wind pause, the deep

Influx of spirit, of which no man may tell

The Secret, golden and inappellable?

Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date.Form: irregularly rhyming, with couplets and quatrains.7. Ojibwa: a native people living north of Sault St. Marie between eastern Lake Superior and northeastern Georgian Bay.8. Potà\;n the Wise: unidentified.10. Chees-que-ne-ne: unidentified.33. bracken: large fern.dwarf-cornel: dwarf honeysuckle, cornus herbacea.40. portage: carrying of canoe across land from one lake or river to another.43. targe: shield.121. Eft-minded: like a newt or small lizard.133. pictograph: prehistoric rock-wall painting or drawing.140. romaunt: ancient tale, usually courtly or chivalric.150. susurrus: whisper.