And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
R. HERRICK
‘But the harsh times, the terrible times came when we needed not the reassurances of love but these stern reminders of what the essential character of a man ought to be. Then we turned to those oaklike definitions of how a true Englishman should behave in adversity; poems that sound like bugle calls at night with barbarians at the gate. My heart elates as I recall them.’
CXXIV
How sleep the Brave who sink to rest
By all their Country’s wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow’d mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.
By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung:
There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell a weeping hermit, there!
W. COLLINS
LXXI
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul
more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,—
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?
I fondly ask:—But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies; God doth not need
Either man’s work, or His own gifts: who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best: His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:—
They also serve who only stand and wait.
J. MILTON
LXXIII
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make Man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night—
It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.
B. JONSON
CCXLVI
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
P.B. SHELLEY
LXXXIII
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
COLONEL LOVELACE
‘And then there was that little song by the master voice of our tongue. Its words were simple and some lines almost comic, but they bespoke the pure joy of being alive. We treasured them, reciting them often to one another when temperatures plunged.’
XXVII
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tuwhoo!
Tuwhit! tuwhoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl—
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tuwhoo!
Tuwhit! tuwhoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
W. SHAKESPEARE
Lord Luton introduced the Trevor Blythe fragments from his proposed poem sequence Borealis with this appropriate disclaimer: ‘We must remember that these are the introductory attempts of a young poet striving to find his way. He had already proved at Oxford that he could write the traditional three-verse rhymed lyric, and his sonnets won him prizes, but later he felt obligated, and properly so, to experiment with forms, length of line, rhyme and blank verse. What he would have kept and what discarded we cannot conjecture; but obviously some of his attempts succeed much better than others.
‘He began under the influence of the standard elegy, sixteen lines of fairly competent unrhymed iambic pentameter’:
Hark! From the distant village tolls the bell
Summoning to prayer all those who feel the need
Of more than mortal sustenance. These rites
Can be discharged by those who hear the cry
Of brass on brass to speed the well-worn prayer,
To bless the child newborn or ease the gray
And palsied head to its eternal rest.
I hear a sterner call: the road untrod,
The heathen who has never seen the light,
The passage through dark seas uncharted still,
The desert that they claim no man can pass,
The virgin mountain peaks ne’er stepped upon,
The lure of gold still hiding in the ground,
The call, the call from some untended Grail:
‘Find me! Rescue me before I tarnish!
And yours shall be the shout of triumph …’
‘The long middle portion of the poem,’ explained Luton, ‘had not been attempted, and although Blythe must have contemplated how it would develop, he left no notes. However, he did leave on two pages unattached to the longer poem, but obviously intended to be a part, a lyrical passage celebrating his adventures on the Mackenzie during the days when all was proceeding on schedule.’
Broad Mackenzie helped to speed us
Caribou came down to feed us
Arctic winds could not defeat us
Ravens came to guide and greet us.
Endless nights were not oppressive
For our minds flared forth in wonder
Never mean nor small-possessive
As we talked our world asunder.
Blizzards whistled in but spared us
Challenge tempted us and dared us.
Borealis explodes in the night
Leaping and twisting in tortured forms
Conflagrations of shimmering light
Heavens ablaze in celestial storms.
Arcs in the sky
Tumble and tremble
Teasing the eye
With forms they resemble.
There leaps a bridge to the moon
Here drops a chasm to hell
Soars high that silver balloon
Borealis ablaze and all’s well.
Patterns tremendous
Clashes stupendous
Behold that vast fire as it rages
Then fades to pastel as it ages
And drifts from the sky all too soon
Borealis asleep and all’s well.
Spring days bring cheer
No cold to fear
New sun to warm
Nothing to harm
Arctic gods sat on our shoulder
Whisp’ring to us ‘Bolder, bolder!’
We became the lords of winter
Brushing off the icy splinter
Dangling from our frozen portal
Till the cry came ‘You are mortal.’
‘At this point,’ Luton wrote, ‘Trevor was prepared to deal with the death of his friend and companion, Philip, but only eight unsatisfactory lines in an unusual meter remain of what he certainly planned as an extended threnody’:
Mighty Mackenzie, enraged at our boldness,
Drew from the lakes she hid high in her mountains
Torrents of water locked up in the coldness
Sent it cascading in perilous fountains.
Ice blocks as big as an emperor’s palace
Gouged out whole forests and left the trees bending
Lurking to snatch at young men unattending
Eager to drown them in hideous malice.
‘Obviously dissatisfied with the meter though pleased with the words, he crossed them out, pencilling the caution: “Graver, much graver rhythm!” Then he turned to the closing, the lines that had won praise from Harry Carpenter’:
… the fault was mine.
I visualized the Grail a shining light,
Perceptible from any vale in which
I and my helpers struggled. It would be
A constant beacon, milestone in the sky,
Signalling far
Calling to goal.
I did not comprehend that it could function
Only by flashing back light from me. Its gleam
Existed, but in partnership with mine,
And I had launched the search a blind man,
Nothing within myself to guide the way,
No silver in my soul to match the blaze
Of what I sought, nor did I test the peaks
That would forever bar me from my goal
Till I broke through with force and fortitude
To conquer them and in my victory
Conquer myself as well.
I see my fellow seekers lost in darkness
And know that I have failed to lead the way.
Mountains engirt us, rivers swirl, we lose
Our trail and cry: ‘Reluctant Paladins we,
Who seek our Golden Grail by fleeing from it.’
TREVOR BLYTHE
The Arctic Circle
Belated spring 1898
The major part of this small and valued publication reappeared later in Luton’s highly regarded An Englishman in the Far Corners, published in 1928, by which time he had become ninth Marquess of Deal, aloof and white-haired but still slim and erect.
REFLECTIONS
THIS SHORT NOVEL came into being because of a photograph I first saw years ago. It captivated me from the moment I came upon it, and it now appears inside the front cover of this book.
It was taken in the studio of a professional photographer working in the tiny Northwest frontier town of Edmonton during the frenzied gold rush of August 1897. I had been doing casual research on the Alaskan portion of that rush, and had, at that time, no interest whatever in the preposterous madness in Edmonton, whose historical importance was unknown to me. But this photograph was so evocative of the thousands of amateurs streaming north that it registered profoundly, becoming for me the symbol of that period.
It is a little masterpiece, still in first-class condition, and shows a young woman gold-seeker, perhaps thirty years old, dressed in heavy boots, a kind of hunting uniform with shoulders excessively puffed out, and the sauciest cap you ever saw. Her sensible-looking, no-nonsense head is tilted slightly, and she stares at us with a resolute, almost defiant set to her lower jaw, her mouth pulled in at the corners. Her hair has been bobbed, I believe, in preparation for the long trek north. And her image has haunted my memory during all the years since I first saw her.
I was unable to learn her name or place of origin, for she might have been either a Canadian from some place like Ontario or an American from Michigan or one of her sister states. I could not even determine by what route she tried to reach Dawson, but I have always supposed she tried the overland one, and if she did, I fancy she may have died during the first terrible autumn when, miles from Edmonton, she awakened to the terrifying fact that she was never going to make it to Dawson and that she was too far from Edmonton to scurry back. She may have starved to death on the bank of some turbulent mountain stream she was powerless to ford.
On the other hand, her portrait is that of a determined young woman, a realist, and there is a chance, I think, that when the realities of this great delusion became clear she turned her back on the folly and returned to Edmonton, from where she quickly departed for her former home in Michigan or Ontario. Or, being the resolute woman she seems, she could well have gone down the Mackenzie, over the mountain divide, and on to her destination.
In the original version of Journey, I had no place for a heroine, but she went every step of the way with me nonetheless. She was my guide, my muse, my touchstone, and was so indelible that she kept fighting her way back onto my pages.
Journey is a narrative which depicts the courage that men and women can exhibit when dealing with adversity, even that which they have brought upon themselves. The realization of this tale has been a unique, revelatory experience for me, for I, too, learned about dreams and determination.
Although it now stands as a fully conceived novel in its own right, with which I am well pleased, Journey had its genesis as part of another work. Therefore, how the story of five men’s tragic journey across Canada to the Klondike gold fields came to be written and then published deserves explanation.
It starts with my lifelong interest in Canada which began with a summer spent on Lake Muskoka in 1929. Canoeing into the wilderness north of there, I caught a glimpse of the essential Canada: open, majestic, wild, challenging, and filled with fine people and a commanding life. It was an unequaled introduction to a land of manifold beauties.
I followed it up through the years whenever an opportunity presented itself, with visits to various parts of the country: Halifax, the coast of Newfoundland, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, never in an orderly way, and perhaps more enjoyable because of the arbitrary nature of my travel. However, my main interest stemmed from my belief that every incident in Quebec’s struggle for recognition of its distinct language and culture would one day be repeated in the southern United States, with Spanish in our country replacing the role of French in Canada. Canada thus became of vital interest, and I followed with a microscope the twists and turns of how this nation of two languages sought to apply intelligent answers to the problem.
I remember two incidents which epitomized the situation for the visiting observer. At a sports meeting in Montreal, where everyone on the panel had already demonstrated his command of English, an agitated member of the audience rose, pointed out that the meeting was being held in Quebec and was therefore obliged to obey Quebec’s new language law, and warned that if the words of the speakers were not also translated into French, he would summon the police. Cowed by his threat, we sat through an afternoon of speech-translation-speech-translation when everyone present knew that this was both unnecessary and an irritation.
Later, on the same trip, I was in Toronto talking with businessmen of that city, one of the finest in North America, about how they had opted to close down their Montreal headquarters and seek refuge in Toronto, even though they had been happy in Quebec and did not want to leave. This seemed so preposterous that I asked for an explanation, and they informed me that under
Quebec’s language law all businesses in that province now had to keep their records in French, and the extra work this required had made conducting business there impossible.
After these two introductions to the friction between the two language groups, and with my conviction that sooner or later a similar movement for language rights would germinate in our Hispanic communities, I followed with the closest attention the implementation of official bilingualism in Canada and became, as a result, moderately informed on life north of the border.
Yet, like many Americans, who are poorly informed about Canada, I tended to perceive Canada for the most part through its expatriates: those Canadians who have met with outstanding success in the United States—Saul Bellow, John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Jennings, Senator Sam Hayakawa—and whose achievements have led to a great respect in America for Canadians as a whole. I have admired, too, the successes of those who chose to remain and work in Canada, not least my fellow writers Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Morley Callaghan.
I did have one other contact with Canada, but it was personal. Once at a countryside picnic in Pennsylvania, where the Micheners of the world convened to celebrate the glories of their supposedly distinguished past, I met by accident my cousin the Right Honourable Roland Michener, the governor general of Canada, and we locals felt a bit puffed up.
My interest in things Canadian never diminished, and whenever I came upon someone in my travels who was familiar with the country, I engaged in long conversations about political changes, life in the western provinces and especially adventures in the arctic. So it was inevitable that when I began seriously to contemplate a novel on Alaska, I would spend considerable time pondering how to fit in a Canadian contribution. And, of course, there was always the vivid memory of that woman gold-seeker in Edmonton.
When I began constructing the intellectual outline of my novel Alaska, I had three special desires beyond the obvious ones that would have to be treated in any fictional work on that region. I wanted to help the American public to think intelligently about the arctic, where large portions of future international history might well focus; I wanted to remind my readers that Russia had held Alaska for a longer period, 127 years (1741 through 1867 inclusive), than the United States had held it, 122 years (1867 through 1988); and I particularly desired to acquaint Americans with the role that neighboring Canada had played and still does play in Alaskan history.