by Prof. Watson Kirkconnell

CANADA is lacking in those literary shrines which an older civilization scatters so lavishly across its countryside. Ayr, Ecclefechan and Abbotsford, Grasmere, Stratford, Stoke Poges, and unnumbered other Old-World villages and towns, are honoured for their ghosts of literary association, an intangible accumulation of the fruitful centuries. When, in an era yet to come, a similar place-worship arises in Canada, a strong claim to recognition will be made by the little Albertan hamlet of Markerville, near which, for almost forty years; lived Stephan G. Stephansson, one of the greatest of all Icelandic poets, and, as an adopted Canadian, an author with an eminent place in our own literary annals.

Stephan Gudmundsson Stephansson was born on October 3, 1853, on a small farm named Kirkjuból, in the parish of Skagafjördur, on the north coast of Iceland. On the side of his father, Gudmundur Stephansson, he was related to the provost of the diocese of Holar, while through his mother, Gudbjörg Hannesdottir, he was cousin to the famous poet Benedikt Gröndal. He was educated in one of the elementary schools of the island, but did not proceed to a grammar school.

In 1873, as a lad of twenty, he emigrated to the United States, first working as a farm-hand near Milwaukee, and later pioneering on his own account in Shawano County, Wisconsin, and, after 1880, in Pembina County, North Dakota. During his Wisconsin period he married an Icelandic bride, Helga Jonsdottir, by whom he had three sons and three daughters. Finally, in 1889, he removed, with some other Dakotan settlers, to a new pioneering enterprise in Alberta, about eighty miles north of Calgary. At first there was no post-office within seventy miles, but the completion, in 1892, of the Calgary-Edmonton branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway gave them a market-centre at Innisfail, twelve miles distant. Still later, the little village of Markerville, with two stores, a creamery, a town-hall, and a few cottages, grew up about three miles from Stephansson's log-cabin homestead. In a brief poem, "My New Neighbourhood," he describes the region thus:*

Where the Red Deer River runs
From the Rockies towards the dawn,
Through Alberta's bellying hills,
Basin'd strath and grassy lawn,

Here the herdsmen have their home,
Haunt the hollows and the spurs;
Some drive shambling sheep; some, bulls—
Shameless, green-eyed murmurers.

Hell's retired henchmen here,
Heaven's lost servants, sullen, slow,
Lag like Greeks by Lethe stream,
Letting all commandments go.

*This and all other quotations in the article are my own English renderings from the original Icelandic. All names of poems and books have been turned from Icelandic into English, in order to accommodate the general reader.

With this district he identified himself for the rest of his life. He came to it a man of thirty-six, in the prime of his strength, with a family of little ones about his knees. Here, too, he died on August 10, 1927, a white-haired veteran of seventy-four, with a rich life-record behind him. He was one of the first organizers of the Markerville school-district; he took an active part in every constructive community enterprise; and he contributed generously out of his poverty in aid of every good cause. He considered himself categorically a Canadian, but in his heart he linked up that allegiance with an unfailing affection for the far-off island of his birth.

As to appearance, he was five feet seven inches in height, slender in build but very rugged and wiry. His eyes were a deep Nordic blue, very lustrous and very piercing, but the black hair of his earlier years indicated that blending of Celtic blood with the Scandinavian which tends to differentiate the typical Icelander from his Norwegian cousin. Stephansson wore a heavy moustache but no beard; his countenance was lean and lined; and wrinkles of good nature lurked at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

Since his claims to greatness rest upon his writings, the remainder of this article will be devoted to a summary of his output and an exposition of its character.

Dated poems of his composition go back to 1868, when he was fifteen years of age. Many of his fugitive poems were published in Framfari, the first Icelandic newspaper in North America, issued at Riverton, Manitoba, from 1877 to 1880, and still more in the Winnipeg papers, Heimskringla (founded in 1886) and Logberg (founded in 1888). His first volume of verse, Out in the Open Air, was published in Reykjavik in 1898, and a second volume, En Route, in the same city in 1900. He was immediately hailed as the foremost Icelandic poet in North America, and some thirty-four of his friends and admirers, both in Canada and in the United States, undertook to finance a collected edition of his poetry. This was set up by the Gutenberg Press, Reykjavik, in 1909 and 1910, and appeared in three large volumes, totalling 884 octavo pages. The Lay of Kolbeinn, an historical poem on the theme of a sixteenth-century folk-tale, was issued in Winnipeg in 1914.

By this time, critical opinion in Iceland was unanimous in regarding him as unsurpassed by any other poet since the Middle Ages. In 1917, on the joint initiative of the government and the Young League, he was invited to Iceland as the guest of the nation. He spent the entire summer in a triumphal progress through all the towns and villages of the island, and was feted with especial honour in the capital and in his native districts of the North. The poetic outcome of this visit was Homeward Bound, published in Reykjavik later in 1917. A strongly pacifistic book of poems, The Trail of War (Reykjavik, 1920), lost him many friends at the time, but did not lessen his poetic reputation. In 1923, the Heimskringla Press, Winnipeg two large supplementary volumes of collected totalling over 600 pages. This, apart from Ascending Glacier (Winnipeg, 1918), a little prose pamphlet o reminiscences, and Motes, a series of symbolic and speculative sketches in prose, which appeared in Heimskringla in the 1890's, constitutes his published output. A formidable amount of posthumous material remains, however, in the hands of his literary executor, Dr. Rognvaldur Pétursson of Winnipeg, and will be published as commercial circumstances permit. There is enough additional poetry to bring the total of his collected verse to over 2,000 octavo pages; there will be two volumes of letters; and there is a final volume of prose sketches, essays, and short stories.

In sheer bulk of output, no other Canadian poet is comparable to Stephan G. Stephansson. He has lished more verse than Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Wilson MacDonald combined. As for his quality, the attitude of Icelandic critics, a most dour and jealous fraternity, towards this colonial poet, is itself a striking vindication of his greatness. To be rated every whit as great as Bjarni Thorarensen, Matthias Jochumsson, Jonas Hallgrimsson, Thorsteinn Erlingsson, and Einar Benediktsson, is to occupy a place in modern Scandinavian literature which no Anglo-Canadian yet enjoys in modern English literature.

Stephansson's range is best indicated by a brief analysis of the five volumes of his collected poetry. These volumes were carefully subdivided by him into sections classified according to subject-matter, while the individual poems record in most cases the year of composition.

Volume I, published in 1909, is organized into four parts. The first, Caught from the Clear Sky, comprises one hundred lyrics and epigrams, mostly brief deliverances on human life and experience. Some titles are: "The Poet's Art," "Christ and Christian," "Weltmacht," and "The Visitation of Ghosts." The second part, Out in Windy Weather, comprises twenty-six longer poems, descriptive of the more boisterous aspects of nature. Among these poems are "Winter," "First Snow," "Season in Alberta," "Easter," "Autumn Mood," and "Thunderstorm." The third part, Toasts to Land and People, consists of sixty-one poems, mostly either elaborate odes for Canadian or Icelandic public occasions, or more familiar toasts in verse to individuals. Typical titles are "Toast to Alberta," "Our Mother-tongue," "Icelandic-Canadians," "Skagafjordur," "Toast to Canada," "Toast to Iceland," "The Pioneer's Wife," "Address to the Norsemen." Part four, At Home, contains forty-one poems, meditative, intimate, or urbanely conversational in tone, dealing with such varied topics as "Christmas Eve," "At Flood-tide," "Last Will and Testament," "Jehovah," and "At Twilight."

The second volume, also published in 1909, falls into three parts. The opening section, Out in the Open Air, contains forty-six poems, most of them magnificent specimens of nature poetry, running through the whole gamut of the Canadian .scene. Titles include, "The Rockies," "The Flood," "The Prairie Fire,"' "Summer Evening in 'Alberta," "A Clearing Sky," "In a Land of Wide Prospect," "Lingering Snow," and "The Northern Lights." The second part, From Tales and Sagas, comprises thirty poems on themes from history and literature, chiefly those of the Norsepeoples, e.g.,"Norna-Gestur," "From Ossian," "The Fire of Surtur," "The Snow-king's Daughter," "The Genie of the Lamp," and "'At Stiklestad." In the third part, Dreamt concerning Coming Events, there are thirty-two poems, many of them lengthy ruminations on the' Boer War, the Dreyfus Affair, and the revolutionary movement in Russia in 1905.

Stephansson's third volume, published in 1910, is subdivided into four sections. The first part, En Route, opens with a long narrative poem of .56 pages. This poem, which is probably his greatest single achievement, is made up of vivid glimpses of travel throughout Western Canada. Some of its sub-sections are "Northern Prairie," "The Mining Town," "The Day after the Thaw," "Evening Shadows," "Waggon on the Road," "The Accident," and "Neither Do I Condemn Thee." The same division of the volume also contains thirty-nine shorter poems— lyrics and epigrams. The second part, Execution of the Revolutionist, consists of three long poems, "The Czar," "The Champion of Freedom," and "The Prisoner," all centring around a painting by the Russian artist Vereschagin, and philosophizing on the tyranny of the czarist régime. In the third part, Moving into the New House, are thirty-four poems inspired by the family's removal from the original log-cabin on the Markerville farm to a new frame-built farm-house. Some titles are: "Joyful Anticipation," "Village and Market-town," "The Korse Deal," and "Old Trails." The fourth part consists of a single philosophical poem, The Deaconess, setting forth his religious ideals of humble life and sacrificial service.

The fourth volume, published in 1923, is arranged in four parts. The first part, Weathervanes, consists of twenty-two brief poems, descriptive of nature, e.g., "Snowy Weather," "Warm Wind," "Calm Water," "The Surf," and "Spring Twilight." In the second part, entitled Year-books, are grouped together twenty-one poems, miscellaneous in subject-matter, which he had contributed to various Icelandic annuals. The third part, Stirrup-cups, contains sixty-eight poems, mostly presented, like the ancient stirrup-cup, to friends who were leaving him after a visit. The concluding section, Worn Paths (i.e., "familiar themes"), is very extensive, consisting' as it does of one hundred and sixty-one poems of varying lengths and on the most diverse topics: "Old Loves," "New-Year's Night," "Tithes," "The Fashion Magazine," "Concert," "The Sick-bed," "Conscription," and "Smart Dealing."

In the fifth and final volume, published in 1923, there are five main sub-divisions. The opening section, Saga-tales, contains twenty poems based on themes from the .Icelandic sagas. In the second section, Long Stays, arc four long poems, narrative and dramatic, viz.: "Help on the Cliff," "The Lay of Kolbeinn," "Christmas Blizzard," and "The Hill of Sense." The third division, The Trail of War, comprises thirty-eight poems written in condemnation of the waste and misery of war. Among the titles are: "Ahashuerus," "A Dream of Justice," Armistice," "When Christ was Army-chaplain,", and "The Protest of the Unknown Soldier." The fourth part, entitled Wrestlings, contains one hundred and ten poems, most of them quite brief, in which he "wrestles" with his critics. The titles are often pungent: "Said the Blind to the Blind," "Police Case and Gospel," "The Land of Learned Men," and "Priestly Politics." In the concluding section, Homeward Bound, are forty-two poems inspired by his visit to Iceland in 1917. The titles are largely self-explanatory: "The Eastward Road," "Sea Ice," "Toast to the Ladies,"' "Thingvellir Ode," and "Reykjavik."

The mind that begot this teeming progeny of verse was largely self-trained. Stephansson received scarcely any education beyond that of the elementary schools in Iceland, but his poetic efforts and his diligent self-instruction in language and literature were continuous from boyhood to old age. He was master of Icelandic, old and modern, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and English, and saturated himself in the poetries of these languages. He also had a reading knowledge of German. His greatest attention was given to a study of the poetic resources of the Icelandic language, based on a tireless examination of the diction of the Saga period and of the relatively unhandselled dialects of North Iceland. His deliberate building up of a poetic vocabulary that was copious, varied and sometimes archaic, resembled the practice of Spenser and met with the same sort of criticism from his contemporaries. Against Stephansson, the censure had much more weight, for all-too-often his verses give the impression of weird, sullen masses of frozen granite chiselled by sheer brute force into the semblance of poetry. Much of his work far surpasses even Browning's last style in obscurity and in lack of singing quality. The Icelandic poet Gudmundur Fridjonsson thus characterizes Stephansson's style in a brief epigram:

Twain are the tongues that Stephan G.
Tunes in his lines. One seems to me
Vague and as void of gainful toil
As vicious herbs from sour soil.
Wise the other, with warmth of merit—
Wine of verse and fire of spirit.

His personal library was that of a scholar. Its main strength lay in two directions: (I) standard works in Scandinavian literature, languages, and history, in the —collection of which he was greatly assisted by Hjartar Thordarson, a well-to-do merchant in Chicago, who had _been a fellow-immigrant in. youth and remained a loyal life-long friend; and (2) general works in philosophy, history, and economics. The Stephansson farm-house was probably unique in Alberta in having a separate room devoted solely to its master's studies and poetic labour. By evening lamp-light in that snug sanctum, after the day's farm tasks" were done and he had washed and changed his clothes, he would sit at his table far into the night, blissfully unaware of the passage of time as he wrought with the materials of his poetic art. His beloved books were at his elbow, and all the ages were brought to one imaginative focus of experience as he lived through another instalment of creative exaltation. In the earlier, log-cabin years, however, this studious privacy was not available; and some of his best poems were even composed in the railway construction camps where he sometimes toiled in order to enable the family to survive stark poverty.

In an analysis of Stephansson's poetry, three qualities emerge: imaginative force, emotional power, and a Dominant intellectuality.

The vividness of his imagination and its fertile capacity for invention are most striking in his descriptive poetry. No other Canadian poet in any language presents a comparable picture of Western Canada. The epic of the Western pioneer is built up in a long series of unforgettable pictures, drawn from life by a poet who himself lived through the terrific toil of frontier colonization. But far more important than his first-hand experience was his capacity for interpreting what he saw. Consider, for example, the following description of the first prairie level in Manitoba:

By prairie and sleugh-side the train that we rode
Drove ever relentlessly north.
To our left the great River lay turbid and red
And sprawled itself sullenly forth.
Its breast never quickened in rapid or fall.
Its dull, heavy waters were fain
To waddle forever with arms full of mud
And the slummocky clay of the plain.
But the land itself lay like an infinite board,
Unslivered, unknotted, and clean,
As if all of the stuff of Creation were planed
And stained an ineffable green.

Different, but equally vivid, is the following sketch of an early winter morning in the Foothills:

At dawn, when we woke, there were- blankets enough
On the couch where we lay in a row,
For blizzards of midnight upon us had spread
A foot of soft, eider-down snow;
While Providence, kind to the simply devout,
Had buried the Irishman deep,
And drifted above him with evident care
The warmth of the mightiest heap.
But the air was as bitter as death, while the sun
Rose slowly, with shivering ire;
The cold scorched our throats, it was flame to our flesh,
And burned in our lungs like a fire.
The bluish-white tide of the snow had engulfed
Each hillock and hollow as well,
And the frost-haggard trees were like pallid gray ghosts
From the pale frozen forests of hell.
On the western horizon, dim billows of night
Ebbed still in cold surges of gray;
The sky leaned and clung to the glacial earth
As if frozen at last to its clay;
And a dark shadow-mouth in the firmament gaped
So swart in the calm, cloudless height
That a black door seemed opening, far up in space,
Upon darkness, blank nothing, and night.

Some of his most arresting effects are gained by evoking the conceptions of Old Norse mythology, as in the following comparison of a train crossing the prairies at midnight to the mythological Doomship on which the forces of hell sail the abyss to attack Asgard at the catastrophic end of time:

On through the vastness and darkness the train
Kept ever its shadowy way,
With no halt in the heat of its thunderous haste,
No hesitant falter or stay. . . .
But the prairie flowed by like an ebony sea
Of boundless and billowless black,
Where our train, a long Doomship with belly of fire,
Sought Asgard with death in its track.

The foregoing extracts from En Route give some hint, even in translation, of his imaginative force. His potency of emotion is likewise notable. Sometimes it is the heat of indignation made incandescent by the constraining limits of a four-line Icelandic epigram. Such a quatrainpoem, comparable to the Persian rubai or the Greek epigram in its compression, is his savage outburst, "In War-time:"

In Europe's reeking slaughter-pen
They mince the flesh of murdered men,
While swinish merchants, snout in trough,
Drink all the bloody profits off!

More typical of Stephansson is his warmth of affection for his many friends and for the two countries, Canada and Iceland. The 'Icelanders of Western Canada celebrate the second of August each year as a national holiday, reaching its climax of festivity in toasts, both in prose and in verse, to Canada and to Iceland. It is an occasion comparable to the Welsh eisteddfod, and poets vie with one another, in their eloquent odes. In this genre, Stephansson, who was deeply devoted to both countries, was facile princeps, and made a profound impression during visits to the Icelandic communities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. His tribute to Iceland in the following lines, for example, is the most widely known Icelandic poem yet written in Canada:

REMEMBRANCE

Though you have trodden in travel
All the wide tracts of the earth;
Bear yet the dreams of your bosom
Back to the land of your birth,
Kin of volcano and floe-sea!
Cousin of geyser and steep!
Daughter of downland and moorland!
Son of the reef and the deep!

High over heaven and landscape,
Haunting your thought as it strays,
Torrents and towering summits
Tremble once more to your gaze.
Far in the outermost ocean
The isle of your heart is awake,
Shining in shadowless summer,
Showered with light for your sake.

Vivid that Icelandic vision
Viewed in your dreams as they run—
Granite rocks growing with flowers,
Glaciers warm in the sun,
O kin of volcano and floe-sea,
Cousin of geyser and steep,
Daughter of downland and moorland,
Son of the reef and the deep.

On the other hand, he can be equally moving in his love for Canada, as in the following "Toast to Alberta:"

Ah, holy in the hills' embrace,
Our hardy foster-mother!—
The sunrise seals thy bosom's grace
As seemly as That Other;
With running rivers, silver-clear,
With radiant peak and prairie,
And green, high spruce-slopes groping sheer
To the glittering ice-crag's eyry.

Thy glorious valleys widen down
Through straths and shining passes,
By shelter-belts of forest brown
And hollows warm with grasses,
To a mighty plain of green, that wakes
In a wind that laughs and quivers,
Fringed with a hundred azure lakes,
Embroidered bright with rivers.
Here veils of Northern Light are drawn
On high as winter closes,
And hoary dews at summer dawn
Adorn the wild red roses.
Sometimes the swelling clouds of rain
Repress the sun's caresses;
But soon the mountains smile again
And shake their icy tresses.

Young mother, like thy circling hills,
Watch ever, free and tender',
Over an exiled life that thrills
A foster-love to render;
But let thy mountain-guards advance,
Let ice like steel assure thee
Against the rich man's arrogance
And poverty's pale fury.

Only on the erotic side do his emotions seem deficient. In all of Stephansson's extensive work, real love-poetry is virtually unknown, and one searches his lines in vain for evidences of the quickening impulse of its passion. Dominating all other qualities in Stephansson's poetry is a vigorous masculine intellectuality. He was one who believed with Dante that "poetry and the language proper for it are an elaborate and painful toil;" and his conscious aim was objectivity and perfection of form. Sentiment and emotion rarely threatened the supremacy of the brain that planned and executed the work of art. Indeed, his worst temptation was the more intellectual one of interrupting his poem, in Chaucer's vein, to utter a sly jest and then "torne to his tale agayn." A good instance is to -be found in the foregoing description of a winter morning in the Foothills, where he pauses to remark that Providence had rewarded the Irishman's piety with an extra blanket of snow.

Towards sentimentality of any kind, he was remorseless. When, after the War, tributes to the Unknown Soldier became, as he felt, a sort of sentimental fad with one country after another, he wrote a stinging poem, "The Protest of the Unknown Soldier," in which these lines appear:

In Paris was my burial Number One;
My Second was in London; and now vex'd
By vaunting hands, I'm lugg'd to Washington.
—Where next, O Lord, where next?

While hostile towards intemperate emotion, Stephansson was tolerant towards the ideas of others. He himself, especially in youth, was a radical in economics and a Unitarian in religion. While rationalistic in his philosophy, however, he was yet nothing of the agitator or the doctrinaire, and as he grew older he became more and more notable for his genial tolerance towards men and opinions. In the perspective of eternity, the minor arguments dividing mankind seemed scarcely worth a frown.

His intellectuality manifested itself last of all in his mastery of the great literary tradition of the North. Of the Mediterranean, or Graeco-Roman, tradition, he knew nothing at first hand; but his mind was steeped in all of the surviving literature, mythology, and history of the Norse past. That fact makes a full appreciation of his achievement impossible to those not similarly familiar with the legacy of Scandinavia, and will always be an obstacle to recognition by the English or French Canadian. His most vivid allusions and figures appeal to deaf ears and unseeing eyes. Absolutely considered, however, his breadth of literary knowledge, his historical sense, and his philosophical wisdom, all give him an assured place in modern Scandinavian literature and a permanent claim on the regard of Canadians. Comparative valuation may be premature and unprofitable, but it is quite possible that he will some day be acknowledged as the earliest poet of the first rank, writing in any language, to emerge in the national life of Canada.

University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 2, January 1936.

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