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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Lines In Memory Of Edmund Morris</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Dear Morris--here is your letter--<br>Can my answer reach you now?<br>Fate has left me your debtor,<br>You will remember how;<br>For I went away to Nantucket,<br>And you to the Isle of Orleans,<br>And when I was dawdling and dreaming<br>Over the ways and means<br>Of answering, the power was denied me,<br>Fate frowned and took her stand;<br>I have your unanswered letter<br>Here in my hand.<br>This--in your famous scribble,<br>It was ever a cryptic fist,<br>Cuneiform or Chaldaic<br>Meanings held in a mist.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Dear Morris, (now I'm inditing<br>And poring over your script)<br>I gather from the writing,<br>The coin that you had flipt,<br>Turned tails; and so you compel me<br>To meet you at Touchwood Hills:<br>Or, mayhap, you are trying to tell me<br>The sum of a painter's ills:<br>Is that Phimister Proctor<br>Or something about a doctor?<br>Well, nobody knows, but Eddie,<br>Whatever it is I'm ready.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">For our friendship was always fortunate<br>In its greetings and adieux,<br>Nothing flat or importunate,<br>Nothing of the misuse<br>That comes of the constant grinding<br>Of one mind on another.<br>So memory has nothing to smother,<br>But only a few things captured<br>On the wing, as it were, and enraptured.<br>Yes, Morris, I am inditing--<br>Answering at last it seems,<br>How can you read the writing<br>In the vacancy of dreams?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I would have you look over my shoulder<br>Ere the long, dark year is colder,<br>And mark that as memory grows older,<br>The brighter it pulses and gleams.<br>And if I should try to render<br>The tissues of fugitive splendour<br>That fled down the wind of living,<br>Will they read it some day in the future,<br>And be conscious of an awareness<br>In our old lives, and the bareness<br>Of theirs, with the newest passions<br>In the last fad of the fashions?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">* * * * *</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">How often have we risen without daylight<br>When the day star was hidden in mist,<br>When the dragon-fly was heavy with dew and sleep,<br>And viewed the miracle pre-eminent, matchless,<br>The prelusive light that quickens the morning.<br>O crystal dawn, how shall we distill your virginal freshness<br>When you steal upon a land that man has not sullied with his<br>intrusion,<br>When the aboriginal shy dwellers in the broad solitudes<br>Are asleep in their innumerable dens and night haunts<br>Amid the dry ferns, in the tender nests<br>Pressed into shape by the breasts of the Mother birds?<br>How shall we simulate the thrill of announcement<br>When lake after lake lingering in the starlight<br>Turn their faces towards you,<br>And are caressed with the salutation of colour?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">How shall we transmit in tendril-like images,<br>The tenuous tremor in the tissues of ether,<br>Before the round of colour buds like the dome of a shrine,<br>The preconscious moment when love has fluttered in the bosom,<br>Before it begins to ache?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">How often have we seen the even<br>Melt into the liquidity of twilight,<br>With passages of Titian splendour,<br>Pellucid preludes, exquisitely tender,<br>Where vanish and revive, thro' veils of the ashes of roses,<br>The crystal forms the breathless sky discloses.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The new moon a slender thing,<br>In a snood of virgin light,<br>She seemed all shy on venturing<br>Into the vast night.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Her own land and folk were afar,<br>She must have gone astray,<br>But the gods had given a silver star,<br>To be with her on the way.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">* * * * *</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I can feel the wind on the prairie<br>And see the bunch-grass wave,<br>And the sunlights ripple and vary<br>The hill with Crowfoot's grave,<br>Where he 'pitched off' for the last time<br>In sight of the Blackfoot Crossing,<br>Where in the sun for a pastime<br>You marked the site of his tepee<br>With a circle of stones. Old Napiw<br>Gave you credit for that day.<br>And well I recall the weirdness<br>Of that evening at Qu'Appelle,<br>In the wigwam with old Sakimay,<br>The keen, acrid smell,<br>As the kinnikinick was burning;<br>The planets outside were turning,<br>And the little splints of poplar<br>Flared with a thin, gold flame.<br>He showed us his painted robe<br>Where in primitive pigments<br>He had drawn his feats and his forays,<br>And told us the legend<br>Of the man without a name,<br>The hated Blackfoot,<br>How he lured the warriors,<br>The young men, to the foray<br>And they never returned.<br>Only their ghosts<br>Goaded by the Blackfoot<br>Mounted on stallions:<br>In the night time<br>He drove the stallions<br>Reeking into the camp;<br>The women gasped and whispered,<br>The children cowered and crept,<br>And the old men shuddered<br>Where they slept.<br>When Sakimay looked forth<br>He saw the Blackfoot,<br>And the ghosts of the warriors,<br>And the black stallions<br>Covered by the night wind<br>As by a mantle.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">* * * * *</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I remember well a day,<br>When the sunlight had free play,<br>When you worked in happy stress,<br>While grave Ne-Pah-Pee-Ness<br>Sat for his portrait there,<br>In his beaded coat and his bare<br>Head, with his mottled fan<br>Of hawk's feathers, A Man!<br>Ah Morris, those were the times<br>When you sang your inconsequent rhymes<br>Sprung from a careless fountain:</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">'_He met her on the mountain,<br>He gave her a horn to blow,<br>And the very last words he said to her<br>Were, 'Go 'long, Eliza, go.'_'</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Foolish,--but life was all,<br>And under the skilful fingers<br>Contours came at your call--<br>Art grows and time lingers;--<br>But now the song has a change<br>Into something wistful and strange.<br>And one asks with a touch of ruth<br>What became of the youth<br>And where did Eliza go?<br>He met her on the mountain,<br>He gave her a horn to blow,<br>The horn was a silver whorl<br>With a mouthpiece of pure pearl,<br>And the mountain was all one glow,<br>With gulfs of blue and summits of rosy snow.<br>The cadence she blew on the silver horn<br>Was the meaning of life in one phrase caught,<br>And as soon as the magic notes were born,<br>She repeated them once in an afterthought.<br>They heard in the crystal passes,<br>The cadence, calling, calling,<br>And faint in the deep crevasses,<br>The echoes falling, falling.<br>They stood apart and wondered;<br>Her lips with a wound were aquiver,<br>His heart with a sword was sundered,<br>For life was changed forever<br>When he gave her the horn to blow:<br>But a shadow arose from the valley,<br>Desolate, slow and tender,<br>It hid the herdsmen's chalet,<br>Where it hung in the emerald meadow,<br>(Was death driving the shadow?)<br>It quenched the tranquil splendour<br>Of the colour of life on the glow-peaks,<br>Till at the end of the even,<br>The last shell-tint on the snow-peaks<br>Had passed away from the heaven.<br>And yet, when it passed, victorious,<br>The stars came out on the mountains,<br>And the torrents gusty and glorious,<br>Clamoured in a thousand fountains,<br>And even far down in the valley,<br>A light re-discovered the chalet.<br>The scene that was veiled had a meaning,<br>So deep that none might know;<br>Was it here in the morn on the mountain,<br>That he gave her the horn to blow?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">* * * * *</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Tears are the crushed essence of this world,<br>The wine of life, and he who treads the press<br>Is lofty with imperious disregard<br>Of the burst grapes, the red tears and the murk.<br>But nay! that is a thought of the old poets,<br>Who sullied life with the passional bitterness<br>Of their world-weary hearts. We of the sunrise,<br>Joined in the breast of God, feel deep the power<br>That urges all things onward, not to an end,<br>But in an endless flow, mounting and mounting,<br>Claiming not overmuch for human life,<br>Sharing with our brothers of nerve and leaf<br>The urgence of the one creative breath,--<br>All in the dim twilight--say of morning,<br>Where the florescence of the light and dew<br>Haloes and hallows with a crown adorning<br>The brows of life with love; herein the clue,<br>The love of life--yea, and the peerless love<br>Of things not seen, that leads the least of things<br>To cherish the green sprout, the hardening seed;<br>Here leans all nature with vast Mother-love,<br>Above the cradled future with a smile.<br>Why are there tears for failure, or sighs for weakness,<br>While life's rhythm beats on? Where is the rule<br>To measure the distance we have circled and clomb?<br>Catch up the sands of the sea and count and count<br>The failures hidden in our sum of conquest.<br>Persistence is the master of this life;<br>The master of these little lives of ours;<br>To the end--effort--even beyond the end.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">* * * * *</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Here, Morris, on the plains that we have loved,<br>Think of the death of Akoose, fleet of foot,<br>Who, in his prime, a herd of antelope<br>From sunrise, without rest, a hundred miles<br>Drove through rank prairie, loping like a wolf,<br>Tired them and slew them, ere the sun went down.<br>Akoose, in his old age, blind from the smoke<br>Of tepees and the sharp snow light, alone<br>With his great grandchildren, withered and spent,<br>Crept in the warm sun along a rope<br>Stretched for his guidance. Once when sharp autumn<br>Made membranes of thin ice upon the sloughs,<br>He caught a pony on a quick return<br>Of prowess and, all his instincts cleared and quickened,<br>He mounted, sensed the north and bore away<br>To the Last Mountain Lake where in his youth<br>He shot the sand-hill-cranes with his flint arrows.<br>And for these hours in all the varied pomp<br>Of pagan fancy and free dreams of foray<br>And crude adventure, he ranged on entranced,<br>Until the sun blazed level with the prairie,<br>Then paused, faltered and slid from off his pony.<br>In a little bluff of poplars, hid in the bracken,<br>He lay down; the populace of leaves<br>In the lithe poplars whispered together and trembled,<br>Fluttered before a sunset of gold smoke,<br>With interspaces, green as sea water,<br>And calm as the deep water of the sea.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">There Akoose lay, silent amid the bracken,<br>Gathered at last with the Algonquin Chieftains.<br>Then the tenebrous sunset was blown out,<br>And all the smoky gold turned into cloud wrack.<br>Akoose slept forever amid the poplars,<br>Swathed by the wind from the far-off Red Deer<br>Where dinosaurs sleep, clamped in their rocky tombs.<br>Who shall count the time that lies between<br>The sleep of Akoose and the dinosaurs?<br>Innumerable time, that yet is like the breath<br>Of the long wind that creeps upon the prairie<br>And dies away with the shadows at sundown.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">* * * * *</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=373432" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">What we may think, who brood upon the theme,<br>Is, when the old world, tired of spinning, has fallen<br>Asleep, and all the forms, that carried the fire<br>Of life, are cold upon her marble heart--<br>Like ashes on the altar--just as she stops,<br>That something will escape of soul or essence,--<br>The sum of life, to kindle otherwhere:<br>Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,<br>Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,<br>Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart,<br>And looses a gold kernel to the mould,<br>So the old world, hanging long in the sun,<br>And deep enriched with effort and with love,<br>Shall, in the motions of maturity,<br>Wither and part, and the kernel of it all<br>Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes<br>Where the appearance, throated like a bird,<br>Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,<br>Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Duncan+Campbell+Scott">Duncan Campbell Scott</a></strong></div>