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The Height Of Land

Here is the height of land:

The watershed on either

Goes down to Hudson

Or Lake Superior;

The stars are up, and far

The wind sounds in the wood,

Than the long Ojibwa

In which Potàn the

Declares the ills of

And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful

Of acquiescence.

The fires burn

With just sufficient

To light the flakes of ash that

At being moths, and flutter

To fall in the dark and die as ashes:

Here there is peace in the lofty air,

And Something comes by

Deeper than peace: —The spruces have retired a little

And left a field of sky in violet

With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.

Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;

There is no sound unless the soul can

The gathering of the waters in their sources.

We have come up through the spreading

From level to level, —Pitching our tents sometimes over a

Of roses that nodded all night,

Dreaming within our dreams,

To wake at dawn and find that they were

With no dew on their leaves;

Sometimes mid

Of bracken and dwarf-cornel, and

On a wide blueberry plain Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;

A rocky islet

With one lone poplar and a single

Of white-throat-sparrows that took no

But sang in dreams or woke to sing, —To the last portage and the height of land —:

Upon one

The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,

And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,

Glimmering all

In the cold arctic light;

On the other

The crowded southern

With all the welter of the lives of men.

But here is peace, and

That Something comes by

Deeper than peace, — a

Golden and

That gives the inarticulate

Of our strange being one moment of

That seems more native than the touch of time,

And we must answer in chime;

Though yet no man may

The secret of that

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

Breathes a pervasive sigh,

And the soul seems to

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

And echoes faintly like an inland

Ghost tremors of the spell;

Thought reawakens and is linked

With all the welter of the lives of men.

Here on the uplands where the air is

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

Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on

Until the tempest parts, and it

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

Whether the perfect beauty that

Is beauty of deed or thought or some high

Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:

Thus we have seen in the retreating

The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,

And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.

The ancient disturber of

Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,

And the dark

Is stifled with the pungent

Of charred earth burnt to the

That takes the place of air.

Then sudden I remember when and where, —The last weird lakelet foul with weedy

And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,

Skin of vile water over viler

Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,

And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,

Not to be urged toward the fatal

Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden

Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with

And terror.

It had left the portage-heightA tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,

Covered still with patches of bright

Smoking with incense of the fragment

That even then began to thin and

Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.'Tis overpast.

How strange the stars have grown;

The presage of extinction glows on their

And they are beautied with impermanence;

They shall be after the race of

And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,

Entangled in the meshes of bright words.

A lemming stirs the fern and in the

Eft-minded things feel the air change, and

Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.

How often in the autumn of the

Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be

With deeper meaning!

Shall the poet then,

Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,

Brood on the welter of the lives of

And dream of his ideal hope and

In the blush sunrise?

Shall he base his

Upon a more compelling law than

As Life's atonement; shall the

Of noble deed and noble thought

Seem as uncouth to him as the

Scratched on the cave side by the

To us of the Christ-time?

Shall he

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

Once on a morn of storm and laid

Memorious with strange immortal memories?

Or shall he see the sunrise as I see

In shoals of misty fire the

Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,

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

Turn the rich lands and inundant

To the flushed color, and hear as now I

The thrill of life beat up the planet's

And break in the clear susurrus of deep

That echoes and reëchoes in my being?

O Life is intuition the measure of

And do I stand with heart entranced and

At the zenith of our wisdom when I

The long light flow, the long wind pause, the

Influx of spirit, of which no man may

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.

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Duncan Campbell Scott

Duncan Campbell Scott CMG FRSC (August 2, 1862 – December 19, 1947) was a Canadian bureaucrat, poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts,…
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