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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=373460" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Height of Land</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Here is the height of land:<br>The watershed on either hand<br>Goes down to Hudson Bay<br>Or Lake Superior;<br>The stars are up, and far away<br>The wind sounds in the wood, wearier<br>Than the long Ojibwa cadence<br>In which Potàn the Wise<br>Declares the ills of life<br>And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound<br>Of acquiescence. The fires burn low<br>With just sufficient glow<br>To light the flakes of ash that play<br>At being moths, and flutter away<br>To fall in the dark and die as ashes:<br>Here there is peace in the lofty air,<br>And Something comes by flashes<br>Deeper than peace: --<br>The spruces have retired a little space<br>And left a field of sky in violet shadow<br>With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now the Indian guides are dead asleep;<br>There is no sound unless the soul can hear<br>The gathering of the waters in their sources.<br>We have come up through the spreading lakes<br>From level to level, --<br>Pitching our tents sometimes over a revel<br>Of roses that nodded all night,<br>Dreaming within our dreams, <br>To wake at dawn and find that they were captured<br>With no dew on their leaves;<br>Sometimes mid sheaves<br>Of bracken and dwarf-cornel, and again<br>On a wide blueberry plain <br>Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;<br>A rocky islet followed<br>With one lone poplar and a single nest<br>Of white-throat-sparrows that took no rest<br>But sang in dreams or woke to sing, --<br>To the last portage and the height of land --:<br>Upon one hand<br>The lonely north enlaced with lakes and streams,<br>And the enormous targe of Hudson Bay,<br>Glimmering all night<br>In the cold arctic light;<br>On the other hand<br>The crowded southern land<br>With all the welter of the lives of men.<br>But here is peace, and again<br>That Something comes by flashes<br>Deeper than peace, -- a spell<br>Golden and inappellable<br>That gives the inarticulate part<br>Of our strange being one moment of release<br>That seems more native than the touch of time,<br>And we must answer in chime;<br>Though yet no man may tell<br>The secret of that spell<br>Golden and inappellable.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now are there sounds walking in the wood,<br>And all the spruces shiver and tremble,<br>And the stars move a little in their courses.<br>The ancient disturber of solitude<br>Breathes a pervasive sigh,<br>And the soul seems to hear<br>The gathering of the waters at their sources;<br>Then quiet ensues and pure starlight and dark;<br>The region-spirit murmurs in meditation,<br>The heart replies in exaltation<br>And echoes faintly like an inland shell<br>Ghost tremors of the spell;<br>Thought reawakens and is linked again<br>With all the welter of the lives of men.<br>Here on the uplands where the air is clear<br>We think of life as of a stormy scene, --<br>Of tempest, of revolt and desperate shock;<br>And here, where we can think, on the brights uplands<br>Where the air is clear, we deeply brood on life<br>Until the tempest parts, and it appears<br>As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:<br>A Something to be guided by ideals --<br>That in themselves are simple and serene --<br>Of noble deed to foster noble thought,<br>And noble thought to image noble deed,<br>Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,<br>Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt<br>Whether the perfect beauty that escapes<br>Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing<br>Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:<br>Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest<br>The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,<br>And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The ancient disturber of solitude<br>Stirs his ancestral potion in the gloom,<br>And the dark wood<br>Is stifled with the pungent fume<br>Of charred earth burnt to the bone<br>That takes the place of air.<br>Then sudden I remember when and where, --<br>The last weird lakelet foul with weedy growths<br>And slimy viscid things the spirit loathes,<br>Skin of vile water over viler mud<br>Where the paddle stirred unutterable stenches,<br>And the canoes seemed heavy with fear,<br>Not to be urged toward the fatal shore<br>Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden roar<br>Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with light<br>And terror. It had left the portage-height<br>A tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,<br>Covered still with patches of bright fire<br>Smoking with incense of the fragment resin<br>That even then began to thin and lessen<br>Into the gloom and glimmer of ruin.<br>'Tis overpast. How strange the stars have grown;<br>The presage of extinction glows on their crests<br>And they are beautied with impermanence;<br>They shall be after the race of men<br>And mourn for them who snared their fiery pinions,<br>Entangled in the meshes of bright words.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A lemming stirs the fern and in the mosses<br>Eft-minded things feel the air change, and dawn<br>Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces.<br>How often in the autumn of the world<br>Shall the crystal shrine of dawning be rebuilt<br>With deeper meaning! Shall the poet then,<br>Wrapped in his mantle on the height of land,<br>Brood on the welter of the lives of men<br>And dream of his ideal hope and promise<br>In the blush sunrise? Shall he base his flight<br>Upon a more compelling law than Love<br>As Life's atonement; shall the vision<br>Of noble deed and noble thought immingled<br>Seem as uncouth to him as the pictograph<br>Scratched on the cave side by the cave-dweller<br>To us of the Christ-time? Shall he stand<br>With deeper joy, with more complex emotion,<br>In closer commune with divinity,<br>With the deep fathomed, with the firmament charted,<br>With life as simple as a sheep-boy's song,<br>What lies beyond a romaunt that was read<br>Once on a morn of storm and laid aside<br>Memorious with strange immortal memories?<br>Or shall he see the sunrise as I see it<br>In shoals of misty fire the deluge-light<br>Dashes upon and whelms with purer radiance,<br>And feel the lulled earth, older in pulse and motion,<br>Turn the rich lands and inundant oceans<br>To the flushed color, and hear as now I hear<br>The thrill of life beat up the planet's margin<br>And break in the clear susurrus of deep joy<br>That echoes and reëchoes in my being?<br>O Life is intuition the measure of knowledge<br>And do I stand with heart entranced and burning<br>At the zenith of our wisdom when I feel<br>The long light flow, the long wind pause, the deep<br>Influx of spirit, of which no man may tell<br>The Secret, golden and inappellable?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Duncan+Campbell+Scott">Duncan Campbell Scott</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=373460" data-title="The Height of Land de Duncan Campbell Scott" data-description="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
..."></div>
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