by Prof. Skuli Johnson

An address delivered at the unveiling of a monument and the dedication of a provincial park in his honour, at Markerville, Alberta, on September 4th, 1950.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am deeply conscious of the honour done me by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in inviting me to address you on this memorable occasion. It is one of importance in the history of Alberta, and indeed of Canada as a whole; assuredly it is unique in the annals of Icelandic men in America. But as an old Icelandic adage expresses it: a difficulty accompanies every distinction: the honour of participating in these proceedings puts on my shoulders a heavy responsibility.

Fortunately the reputation of the dead will not be permanently impaired by my remarks. There is further comfort in the reflection that no reasonable person will expect me to do justice to so vast a theme as Stephan G. Stephansson in the short time at my disposal.

But the brevity of time might cause me to make dogmatic assertions about the poet, and my enthusiasm for him both as an author and as a man might lead me to indulge in exaggerations. In order to guard against these faults, I shall throughout seek a footing in facts and illustrate the points I make by appeals to his poetry. Needless to say, my citations, though they are as adequate as I can make them, are insufficient for a complete picture: they present what the Romans would call the scattered limbs of a poet (disiecta membra poetae).

I.

There is nothing in the antecedents or in the circumstances of Stephan G. Stephansson to account for him. Of humble peasant origin, he was reared on a little farm-annex in northern Iceland, which was so poor that it long ago went back into wasteland. He had no formal education; his only reading was in borrowed sagas and in the family Bible. For sixteen years he laboured as a pioneer in Wisconsin and North Dakota and was little known. It was when he migrated to Canada to become a pioneer in Alberta that his poetic powers really matured. The prairie-land, the foothills and the Rockies made him a poet of national significance.

St. G. St. is essentially in the peasant-poet tradition of Iceland. He has a passion for the intricate forms that mark the native Ballad-poetry of the unlettered, and his love of the Icelandic quatrain in all its diversities is evidenced by his abundant output of this kind of verse. Of his six volumes perhaps a fourth is devoted to this literary genre. But St. G. St. steeped himself besides in the earlier lore and literature of his land, and for both matter and metre, he often goes back to the Eddas and the Scaldic poetry. His knowledge of the Saga-literature of Iceland is also amazing, and he is especially fond of delineating potent personages of the past who confronted difficulties or who broke new paths. Often too does he correlate an incident of the past with some vital problem of the present. He thus puts the precious ore that he has mined from the inexhaustible wealth of Iceland's culture to use for his contemporaries, not only in Iceland but also on this continent where he laboured so long and arduously. He has a firm footing in the past and in the present; he stands on Iceland and America; indeed in his intelligent interest in humanity, and his passionate advocacy of the solution of problems of world-wide importance, this bard-colossus bestrides the earth!

II.

St. G. St. however regarded himself as no world-figure but primarily as a pioneering farmer. He was proud to be a tiller:

I am a farmer; all I own
Is under sun and shower.

This idea influences much of his thought; indeed it colours his concept of life:

Life is a growth;
Progress is life's true happiness.
Barrenness of spirit is the worst fate
that he can wish for his enemies:
Send me for foemen persons who possess
A wintry spirit and hearts verdureless.

At times St. G. St. waxes lyrical over the precious imponderables which his farmer-soul enjoys:

What worth on fields and flocks you place?
What worth on dollars any
Against the wealth, the verse and grace
Of summer-ev'nings many?

Again and again St. G. St. calls to mind ideas familiar to us from the Ayrshire ploughman:

External sheen to rank extreme
Ne'er raised a man up, but
A kingly nature crowns supreme The crofter in his hut.

Nowhere does the poet put his evaluation of pioneering work more arrestingly than in his query:

Yet was not the Baptist
Greater than the Messiah?

nor his affection for creative energy more effectively than in his assertion to the Lord:

Happiest was, I know, for you
The week in which you made the world.

and St. G. St., the energetic farmer-poet, is confident that cherubims were not needed to stand guard at Eden's gate because no one would have the folly to enter into Eden's indolence of perfection. He is equally sure that the angel of the Lord will not for a long time be adequately rewarded for having driven man out "to till for himself a farmland, and to build him a hovel, and by his toil to work towards his hopes, and to sing songs of spring where it had been songless before."

III.

St. G. St. with his vitality and urge for work could have become a well-to-do farmer. As it turned out, however, his entire life was spent in a struggle between the compulsions of duty and the claims of poetry. He had to work unremittingly to maintain himself and his family; his spirit of independence and his sense of manhood did not allow him to do otherwise. But he also had to be true to his poetic calling. His rare moments of inspiration he seldom attempts to describe:

There comes at times an hour
Unstaying, for so it must be,
When a sight, a secret bower,
A crevice is opened for me,
And I, in lightning flashes,
Can clearly see destiny.

but during all his life, with the devotion and the didacticism of a Wordsworth, he remained true to his inner vision. Never felt he more exalted than when he was composing his poetry, for

The longing for all that the loftiest was
Awakes when the verse-staves quiver.

and indeed when he warmed to his creative urge St. G. St. became in mood and mien like to one of his own characters:

Of knee he was bowed and in back he was bent,
And furrowed in palm and finger:
He seemed like a home-plant that hard-luck had sent
To heath-wastes, to wither or linger.

But when his mood warmed, he fair leafage obtained,
And, vital and venturing,
He gleaned him the glow by the gnarled boughs gained,
When burst out the buds in the spring.

In one of his melancholy moments the poet noted, no doubt with some reference to himself:

Whom daily life oppresses e'er
With chores and with delays,
He sinks into his sepulchre
With all his finest lays.

IV.

Very poignant is the poem in which St. G. St. acknowledges that his poetry is the product of his sleepless nights. In it he fancies the muse as upbraiding him for unfairness to her:

To toil you hallowed your day and your might:
To me you gave tempests, tiredness, night.

and the poet admits the charge for he knows full well that the poet's art should possess his soul undivided:

For the lord of your art Owns alone your whole heart;
When to duty bow you,
Then your faith turns untrue.

He sometimes feels that he fails in his task because his thought does violence to perfection in form:

A thought that's lofty, strong and free,
Invigorates and gladdens me,
But breaks through speech and prosody,
And piles up staves erroneously.

Excessive self- criticism was not however characteristic of the poet; he knew that lack of time for revision accounted for some of his lapses and sometimes in a lighter vein he could laugh at his own infelicities. Indeed he poked fun at the prolific verse with which he and his brother-bards had flooded the local weeklies.

In a more serious mood however St. G. St. desired to achieve the utmost skill in his art, in order to serve better by his verse the cause of humanity; to a prominent poet-contemporary in Iceland he rather ruefully wrote:

The art had yet not fared o'erseas
To freehold in our land;
We could thy verse-sword, whetted,
seize, And wield it in our hand.

V.

In his more ample western milieu St. G. St. did indeed wield his verse-sword as dexterously and as well as any modern man, in his fight for ideas and ideals. The strength of his combativeness lay essentially in two things: in his equipoise between thought and feeling, and in his sound common-sense. He was no visionary world-citizen:

A poor pretence is "cosmopolitan",
"World-patriotism" is for every man
Too great: to grasp it our
Short hands have not the power.

But he recognizes that human brotherhood will lead towards the ideal, the rule of intelligence and justice:

The first approach to equity and reason
Is found if men approve of brotherhood.

and he counsels men:

To think not in the years but in the ages
Nor ask in full at eve for each day's wages.

The poet was a lifelong advocate of the underlings, whether these were individuals or peoples. From this source emanated some of his most severe strictures on men and society. The poet felt a deep sympathy for labouring men everywhere, but he could not identify himself with their party, any more than he could with other formal organizations. Indeed his exacting nature was well aware that the masses often endorse mediocrity, and he knew that middling men never raise the multitude and that a people is readily reduced to a rabble, lose it language. The poet rests his hopes on the intelligent few:

Venture the faction of the few and free
To join, if you but know of three!

In order however to improve the lot of the many the poet is prepared to acquiesce in the desecration of nature: a waterfall, for instance, may be harnessed:

To lift a load a thousand could not heave
So hands o'ertaxed and tired, rest receive.

On the other hand the assertion of mastery over men is repugnant to him: indeed the tyrant merely debases himself:

More like a thrall than thralls will be
The thralls' house-master finally.

and the poet takes some comfort in the thought that such tyranny must often in the end make way before a more gentle power:

Than German might will prove more strong
The Danish mothers' cradle-song.

Indeed to his soul animated by sympathy and understanding violence in any form was an utter anathema.

VI.

As a sociologist St. G. St. felt a deep sense of personal responsibility for all that goes awry in human society, whether it was internationally by way of wars, or internally, in the malpractices of individuals. He asserts that the guilt of the transgressor is somehow partly his:

And oft meseems that I a share
In an offender's fault must bear,
Albeit innocent am I,
And nowise to the crime was nigh.

This deep sense of responsibility, this unyielding strictness with himself and his abiding honesty condition his entire outlook on life. One must face things as they are:

What good is his who dusk as brightness deems?
He stays the lighting which all men require.
To know that dusk is dark more blest meseems:
It wakens in me for the dawn desire.

The poet cannot accept orthodox Christianity because to him it irrationally removes from man his responsibility: That I believe this folly, friend, think you, That I my earlier debts can wipe away With the performance of duty new? No kindly acts the older sins repay.

Indeed the poet asserts that for him disbelief brought the light of understanding and emancipation from the gloom of death:

She came like a gleam to the grave's darkness cold,
And with her sheen shining did all things enfold.
It seemed to me that through the ages she glowed,
And to me the world's meaning transparent showed.

St. G. St. is very laudatory of the eloquent Unitarian Ingersoll, yet he is at pains to point out that he is not his subject nor his disciple, but only his less vigorous and younger brother. The poet is essentially a rationalist; "chance" is for him merely "a cause unknown" and the gods of men down through the ages have been moulded by "humanity's outlook of the moment".

.

If one were to single out a poem in which some of the basic ideas of the poet are expressed, perhaps the best choice would be the one entitled Evening. In this piece, St. G. St. after saying much in the pessimistic mood of a Matthew Arnold, ends with lines that may recall the invincible optimism of a Robert Browning:

When I in the twilight alone am become,
And trappings have tossed from me,
And Earth has pursued herself out of the sun,
So that in the shade is she,
And talk turns drowsy to canine yelps
And slumbers presently,

And life's care, that livelong day's watch, at my door
Downdrooping, asleep does sit; —
(She frightened up all of my light-winged lays,
So from me they songless flit;
She wing-broke each thought of mine soaring on high,
Intending the heav'ns for it.) —

How sore-fain I'd settle with all and forget
All too if I freely might
Have dreams, in the stillness and dusk, of the land
Which day has ne'er lit with light,
Where hopes out of wreckage, and bards' errant aims
May ever on shore alight.

The land in which naught the subventions high
Of heav'n need ever emend,
Where nobody's weal is another man's woe,
Nor might is the highest end,
Where vict'ry wounds none, where ordinance first
Is fairness, to which all bend.

But then comes the wakefulness, dreadful and wan,
That drives off my peace and rest,
And then me assail the lost souls who betrayed
The good that they had possessed,
And then loudly wail the wraith-outcasts of earth:
The powers that died suppressed.

And then I see opened deep agonies' depths,
With toil on bended knees,
While indolent pelf-quest on poverty thrives,
Like rot in the living trees:

The few the mad multitude's senses and will
Bewilder and sway with ease.

For ever men's dealings are dubious all,
And doubtful their amity,
As he finds, who caught is by night, nigh a band
Bivouaced for robbery,
And, who with his eyes closed, can hear the foes are
Approaching him stealthily.

It seems on earth wayless, the 'wildering night
Drags woefully on and on,
As if the shades still had not thinned, and advance
Were falsehood — so faint its dawn —
For even of old mounted men's minds as high,
And where then is aught that's won?

More widely for aye is Enlightenment borne,
By each age a little brought. —
She deepens not, mounts not, but lengthens her way,
Like daylight is longer wrought,
But man's lifetime brief, which the moment but marks,
Yet knows of that diff'rence naught.

But even to shepherds in solitude she
Comes, calm as the dayspring bright,
And gleams in their souls, though the glow is unseen —
So silently comes her light,
And I — who can sing to a Stygian world,
Such staves on a sleepless night,

And climb can serenely the ultimate couch,
From which I will part not me,
Am sure that survives, with its warmth and its light,
My every exspectancy,
And that what was best in my own soul lives, and
The sunlight at least will be!

I.

The poet clearly had no hope of personal immortality. Hence when he is confronted with the death of one dear to him, he finds his only refuge in manly endurance. An excellent instance of this is found in the concluding poem of a series of four which he composed, over several years, for a much-beloved boy which he lost in childhood. The piece is marked by unaffected simplicity and a courageous close:

Good-bye to summer. Autumn, I greet thee,
Upon the hill that is the boundary.

Behind me lies the region summer-long,
With sunny mornings and soft plover's song.

In front a region nowise wide there shows,
For on its midmost slope the sunset glows.

But think thou not in sorrow bowed
I stand, Though sink the sun to ev'ning's shadow-land.

With that land's lord I made my peace of yore,
And him I trust, for we have met before.

My farewell sure to my departed friend
Is: It is well with you where'er you wend.

And these exactly were my words when I
The last time bade my little boy good-bye.

But liefer to my mind became this ground,
And its dust dearer, since he rest here found.

Though quail the heart in grief-filled breast to go
The way that homewards leads it unto woe,

Yet for the man, who shrank not, it is sure
That grief unmended manhood makes endure.

IX.

As is natural, St. G. St. is much preoccupied with Iceland. In one of his greatest Iceland-poems, written under the caption In Defence of the Land, the poet begins with a picturesque exordium on the maid of the mountains:

Of rhymes and runes thou Outgarth's warden fairest,
Ocean's queen, set in either hemisphere,
Who mantle green and wind-blown
headgear wearest,
Our land of mountains, mother-island dear.

In another celebration-piece he tells his audience that every Icelandic memory is a tablet of gold; here he avails himself of the theme of the greatest of the Eddie poems, The Sibyl's Prophecy.

You recall how it went, with antiquity flown,
And the Anses' world burnt, and the
Flame-fiend o'erthrown,
And our earth laid in ruins,—the heavens nine too, —

So the world and the sun had to wax up anew:
Yet saved there was something on
which not the fire Could make any headway: gold tablets
entire.

—Here, Canada, lapped in the sheltering lea
Of summer, on sward warmed by sunlight, sit we,
With similar gain: each remembrance we hold
Of Iceland is for us a tablet of gold.

In the celebration-piece, which has become the cherished possession of Icelandic men wherever they are, St. G. St. asserts that every son of Iceland will ever bear in his mind and mien the features of his beloved land; for him it will be his heart's ideal:

Though all lands in long travels,
You should lay 'neath your feet,
In your mind and your heart yet
Your old homeland's marks meet!
You volcano and ice-sea,
Fall and geyer-fount bore!
Bred nigh scree-height and ling-heath!
Heir to skerry and shore!

O'er all earth and the heavens,
In your thoughts you may fare,
Still your falls and your fell-slopes
All your Future's lands bear!
Near Eternity's sea-rim
Your dear isle doth abide,
Like a world of spring nightless,
Where the outlook is wide.

'Tis mid dream-haunts Icelandic
That your heart-hopes e'er dwell,
Wherein thawed is each glacier,
And enflowered each fell!
You volcano and ice-sea,
Fall and geyer-fount bore!
Bred nigh scree-height and ling-heath!
Heir to skerry and shore!

And in one of his rare allusions to the classics, the poet yearns for the power of Orpheus to charm our western cornfields and woodlands overseas, to adorn the barren heaths of the homeland:

This no one knows as well as we,
That we at times desire
To win with art of witchery
From Orpheus his lyre,
So we to eastward o'er the sea,
To Iceland's moors had power
To charm our grain and greenery
Of woods, the wastes to dower.

But the poet on the other hand is certain that men of Icelandic lineage have precious gifts to bestow on the land of their adoption. Nowhere does he express this idea more vigorously than in one of his celebration-poems addressed to America:

Though so it prove that silenced be our lay
'Bout burg and steadings, and though no one may
Our tongue remember, to oblivion swept,
Yet something there will evermore be kept
And cherished in your bosom's fost'ring care,
Which will of mind Icelandic witness bear.
So much you need to earn you excellence,
So many things, too, of a competence
To match the profits of prosperity
And men's aggressive urge of energy.
Though granted be that gold have worth indeed,
And that a people numbers large may need,
Of assets for a nation to acquire
The fairest are: the saga and the lyre.

X.

It was however to Canada that St. G. St. felt the deepest loyalty. To this fosterland he dedicated, as he himself asserts, his toil, and here stood, he declares, the cradle of his children. Few if any have written more felicitously of our Canadian west. Beauties of phrase and figure abound in his descriptions of the country from the Red River valley to the Rockies. At times he is arrestingly concise as when he speaks of "a sand-storm by sward-ropes bound", or leisurely and pictorical as for instance in his travel sequence En Route. Here is its opening stanza:

O'er prairies and marshes the engine us took
the pathway that northwards e'er led.
Mid silt on our left, there meandered along
the muddy and haven-calm Red,

That lifts ne'er a foot o'er a channel or fall,
for strength of e'en streams dies away,
If wander they ever with water-arms filled
by prairie-land's murkiest clay.
All featureless was the whole outlook to view,
save where the wood-goddesses' hands,
On flats, along waterways' verges had laid
their leaf-woven, clustering bands.
The region itself like a limitless board,
all knotless, there was to be seen,
Which Nature had tilted a trifle on edge,
and planed, and then painted in green.

At a later stage the description of the train rushing along in the night is even more striking. Here the poet identifies the engine with the Doomship of the Eddie mythology (Nail-Farer):

The train into space and the darkness its way
circuitous, indistinct, dashed,
And never more quick was its coursing than then:
it spurted, and hurtled and flashed.
But out from me, straight and unstaying, on high
each star in the firmament raced;
The engine spewed embers, in breath-spasms deep,
whose sparks there up-eddied and blazed;
The prairie, becalmed, floated, pitch-dark, about —
a deluge, wave-void, unverged —
And over that calm sea of shadows our train,
like Nail-Farer, flame-freighted, surged.

But it was not the region of the Red nor of the Saskatchewan (of which he wrote also) that commanded the poet's main attention, but rather, as was natural, that of the Red Deer and the Rockies. The opulent majesty of his poem on the latter which at once made The Bard of the Rockies a synonym for him in all places in which Icelandic speech is spoken unfortunately defies translation: it is a veritable metrical tour de force. What St. G. St. did with mountain scenery is readily seen, on a smaller scale, in his lines on Mount Lone-Dweller:

So high o'er the lowly Mount Lone-Dweller towers,
That ling-tufts in wonderment gaze on his bowers,
And bushes turn dizzy so high up to crawl,
And crag-blooms can find them no toe-hold at all.
Albeit the blast that his summit all bare
Oft harries, must cold be, retreats he yet ne'er:
The hallowed image of hardihood and
Of frankness from fell chiselled there does he stand.

No Canadian poet is more deeply responsive to the wide reaches of our west. For St. G. St. the open spaces of Alberta are essential for the freedom of men in the New World. This he puts most emphatically in the closing stanza of one of his admirable Alberta poems:

You I love, West's wild-land,
Lea of life and nurture,
With exspanse extensive,
Rooming hopes unnumbered,
For without you nowhere
Would be fort 'gainst thraldom,
And the Western freedom
Be romance and falsehood.

Indeed with the poet's eye St. G. St. observes and with the artist's impulse delineates all the seasonal changes, all the miens and moods, of his cherished home-region. It is under such influences, he asserts that his "weather-sensitive mind" moulds its verse.

XI.

Nowhere does St. G. St. express more felicitously than in the poem called At Toil's Close, the complete harmony between the poet's soul and his surroundings. Though it was written before he migrated to Canada, it may, in a sense, be regarded as the peaceful farewell of the farmer-poet.

When sunny slopes, on summer's eve, enswathed are
The shadows by,
And mid the branches of the trees the moon hangs
Her half-shield high,
And my perspiring brow begins to freshen
Eve's breath-cool breeze,
And, after day's work, each worn power welcomes
The night-tide's peace;

When out afield the flocks' bells tinkle clearly
And quietly,
And in the woods a bird's eve-song sounds singly
And plaintively,
And in a half-stave seems the breeze to lisp when
Most loud is she,
And laughter lief of bairns by brook's marge playing
Is borne to me;

But like spots moonlit shine the fields of grain 'gainst
The azure ground,
And haze light-gray the hollows fills, and fills too
Each dell and sound,
And lowest to the east the golden stars through
The branches gleam,
Then in the eve's calm sit I outside under
My gable's beam.

For full my heart is then of rest and joy,
Of peace my soul;
And then meseems that blitheness love and beauty
Be world's words sole,
And that all things are blessing me and for me
My pray'rs impart,
And that the earth and heaven are at rest on
The eve's kind heart.

All thy praises hundred-fold.
Be thou not rich, my heart
Sings out that such than art:
Destitute joyed I
Thy fells and fields anigh.
This then is verdict thine:
Thou wert delight of mine.
Far off if from thy side,
Out to the World's haunts wide,
Were I to migrate, I
Would for thy sunlight sigh,

And miss thy sleet-storms, land
Bare, and upbuilded land,
Storm-land and shelter-land,
Land of both dell and height,
Dusk's land, and land of light,
Land to which is hallowed
My toil, my children's cradle-stead!

(2) A translation of a few lines of humorous verse entitled The Potent Poets:

'Tis noised now, as greatest news, in whispers low,
That potent poets in the Westland do not grow.
But, brothers, we shall show the world our competence,
For actions are irrefutable evidence.

But we who Logberg filled with verses mire-fraught,
And made the ditties that Heimskringla drove distraught,
We have, I think, the charge against us put to flight,
Though we have not as yet employed half our might.
And they their papers treble may, if they but dare,
For everything will nonetheless the same way fare.

(3) The following entire passage was interpolated: —
It is sometimes asserted that St. G. St. was rather cold and indeed deficient in affection. In several passages the poet expresses his awareness of this charge and indicates that he has no desire to win with his verse the love of a maiden with her first novel on her lap. Yet such poems as those entitled Kurly and The Pretty Eyes clearly show the poet's feeling for girlhood and womanhood. Indeed in his poem called Amatory Verses to Iceland he explicitly asserts that he delights in everything that is beautiful wheresoever it be "even", he slyly adds, "on the face of a maiden", for he does not believe that "it is at all more unseemly to admire a lovely lass than it is to admire a beautiful bud". Nowhere does St. G. St. show better his insight into the imaginative mind of a maiden than in his simple rural piece entitled The Errand-Lass.

"Run out to the strait", to the maiden said I
"And fetch me my Gray, and now speedily fly!"
And lightfooted ran she, as fleet as the hind,
But her return tarried. I waited, my mind
Kept count of the hours recalling for me
So much about human degeneracy,
But when at last, the day done, the accounting
To end is brought,
And at whatever worth the world may value
The work I've wrought,
In such a calm I fain would be to fashion
A feeling lay, And give the world a reconciling hand-clasp
At close of day.

XII.

St. G. St. appears to have been little influenced by English poetry; indeed of modern English verse he had a rather poor opinion. His only poem on an English writer is a peculiar one on Shakespeare entitled The Robber. He also wrote a fragmentary piece called An Epilogue to Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

From English or any other language St. G. St. translated very little; he was too original and too independent a poet to indulge in the restatement of the ideas of others. It should however be observed in passing that the few versions he made are extremely well executed. He evidently selected them because they were congenial to his feelings and his philosophy. Representative pieces are: Ingersoll's verse on death, Tennyson's lines on honest doubt (In Mem. 96, 11-12), Longfellow's The Village Blacksmith, Kipling's If, Robert Service's The Stretcher Bearer, and The Last Leaf and The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

On the other hand very little has as yet been done by learned Canadians to bring this great Icelandic-Canadian poet to the attention and the knowledge of their fellow-citizens. It is to be hoped that today and its proceedings here may stimulate men's interest in this man and his works. In the near future there will be inaugurated at the University of Manitoba, a Department of Icelandic Language and Literature. It will, I take it, be one of the primary tasks of the prospective incumbent of this chair, to interpret for Icelandic-Canadians, and for their fellow citizens as well, the mind and art of Stephan G. Stephansson, whose significance both Alberta and Canada at large are on this occasion so signally recognizing for all times to come.

With necessary alterations this address on Stephan G. Stephansson was given again in Winnipeg on September 18 th, under the auspices of the Jon Sigurdson Chapter of the I.O.D. E. in aid of its fund for the Chair in Icelandic at the University of Manitoba. The speaker took the opportunity of enlarging somewhat the scope of his former remarks. The principal additions were the following matters:

(1). A translation of the poem The Fosterland which was read in the original Icelandic at the ceremony in Markerville by Ófeigur Sigurdsson, a friend of St. G. St. of long standing:

Land to which is hallowed
My toil, my children's cradle-stead!
Put have I in lay and line
Mid thy grasses poems mine;
Later will thy grass for me
Make o'er my head poetry.
With thee as home my mind
And heart are intertwined.
I do not in millions measure
At how much thy worth I treasure,
Nor do I in verse enfold

And powers judicial, and judgments and laws,
That I turned a pamphlet of ethical saws,
Of punishment and about vengence sure,
And I like a synod's committee was dour.
So finally when to the home-field she led
My horse, I ran hurriedly up, and I said,
As I the rein snatched from her,
"You will receive A thorough good whipping, my girlie, this eve".
"For heedlessness", added I harshly to her,
"Does punishment which it has earned it incur".
But startled at this, to herself did she say:
"Ah, sunrise, you did my returning delay".

I off my guard was, and a smile gave thereat,
Yet brusquely I queried: "In what way was that?"
"In this way it chances", she answered me,
"When The sun is bright-shining I many things then
Behold in the world that are novel: night's dew
Seems silver and gold, and with sea-vapour blue,
The vales all are filled, and the fell-tops upbear
More black, as if tarred ships were voyaging there.
The tree's crests uploom like to crag-bands at sea;
A hunting-place seems yonder heath-bush to be,
With silken nets spread out, the branches between,
All shining like silver, and ever so clean.

A throng is astir by the school-house's thatch:
The swallows there flying are having a match.
'Tis likely their national festival; they
At any rate are not forbidden to play."
She ended her story' — I did not hear how —
But I her hair curly brushed back from her brow.
The bard-maiden's morn-lay, so moving, did melt
The mood of revenge that my spirit had felt.

Nowhere does St. G. St. combine more felicitously affection for a maiden and his feeling for nature than in his lyric A Love Poem (Mansóngur): how dexterously the poet identifies the qualities of his charmer with the characteristics of the springtide!

If true it is, as oft is said,
That all the grave does not find room,
But traces are here of the dead,
And some light shade eludes the tomb,
Which, staying on the outer side
Of the grave's gateway closed, does bide.

If true it is! Then sure am I
That in the clammy cemet'ry,
In dusk, mine will not wand'ring hie,
But goodly, jolly girl, seek thee,
And with thee, cherished maid, each morn
Out mid the spring and light be borne.

But still suspicion seizes me
Which had my mind beguiled so long,
That spring beloved embodied thee
And that, to rouse the bard to song,
Thy outward semblance had the spring
Assumed, to give him theme to sing.

So seems it I did not behold,
Amid thy tresses' amber-gleam,
The sheen that shines from springtide's gold,
Which makes in May the woodlands beam,
When on the boughs the leaves that first
Had come to life, at noon out-burst.

The youthful look that is upon
Thy brow, so high and broad and fair,
Derives from distant eastern dawn,
When soft and warm is all the air.
It bears the dawning's beauteous light,
But back of it are beams more bright.

The dark eyes 'neath thy dusky brow,
So deep and bright with morn's blithe beam,
With light seemed all things to endow,
So dewy leaves in sunlight gleam,
When out of rain-clouds dark their glow
At dawn, the rising sun's rays show.

And woven deemed I in thy mien
Were joy of spring, reliance sure,
And blitheness frank, and there was seen
About thy form the fairness pure
Which from the growth-bestowing rains
The green and slender sapling gains.

And though a fall-like gust is felt
A little while thy mood to chill,
Immediately does it melt,
For stubborn is not spring in will,
Though o'er the highest heights it strow
At times, by chance, the crystal snow.

And ever deemed I brought to light
Thy words a world of beauty sheer;
Then did the old all sink from sight,
And an horizon new appear.
So changes springtide fields and trees,
And widens the world's boundaries.

'Twas as if in the mind of me
Thou fixed hadst inmost eyes of thine,
And as if something guided thee
To goodliest of verses mine.
So springtide finds the flower-blade
Which bides in solitude and shade.

That still is something that is true
Can no one doubt who thee is nigh;
That life is young, and gladsome too,
Deem all who did thee hear or eye.
So spring the whole mind gives new might,
And spurs to verse and winged flight.

From this I know, if true it be
That shades of men bide here, when glow
The gleams of springtide cheerfully,
On lengthy days with thee I'll go.
I'll come in light, a kiss I'll seize,
And sing to thee in summer's breeze.
Does superstition me beguile,
And folly, that though to
His side The Lord me snatch, a little while
Some thought of mine behind may bide,
And that my little lay of thee
Outlive may in this manner me?

(4) In conclusion the speaker referred to his pilgrimage to the poet's old home and to the poet's grave, to which he was accompanied by the surviving offsprings of the bard and by others. As he stood before the memorial cairn raised in the family plot by admiring and loving Icelandic friends, there came to his mind a quotation from the Roman poet Propertius which gives in a measure an inkling of the emotion he felt. The idea of the Latin lines may be thus expressed:

Just as we may,
In statues high, not touch the head, and lay
Here at their feet our wreath, so, lacking might
To mount in measures to thy merit's height,
We give to thee our common frankincense,
In offerings of our poor competence.

And as the speaker drove away from the countryside in which the bard had laboured for such a large portion of his life, he repeated to himself a stanza about a great scholarly son of Iceland which seemed to him to be equally appropriate to the unlettered poetic genius of Stephan G. Stephansson. The meaning of the verse is this:

While the aged peaks of Iceland
Rise from out the depths of ocean,
And while folk in northern regions
Speak Icelandic speech unsullied,
His name ever will in honour
Raised be o'er the barrow's blackness,
And his works, while men have wisdom,
Hold the folk's fame high through ages.

The Icelandic Canadian, Winter 1950.

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