The Book of the Native

By

Charles G. D. Roberts

Boston—New York—London

Lamson, Wolffe and Company

The Copp, Clark Company, Limited

Toronto

MDCCCXCVI

Copyright, 1896,

By Lamson, Wolffe and Company.

All rights reserved

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

[Pg 3]

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many of the poems in this collection have already appeared in the pages of English, American, or Canadian periodicals. For kind courtesies in regard to the reprinting of such poems my grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of Harper’s Magazine, The Century, The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, The Cosmopolitan, Massey’s Magazine, The Yellow Book, Harper’s Weekly, The Independent, Munsey’s Magazine, The Chap-Book, The Outlook, The Youth’s Companion, Harper’s Bazar, St. Nicholas, Truth.

C. G. D. R.

Fredericton, N.B., August, 1896.

[4] [5]

To

Goodridge Bliss Roberts

The kindly strength of open fields,

The faith of eve, the calm of air,

They lift my spirit close to thee

In memory and prayer.

[6] [7]

I The Book of the Native

[10] [11]

Kinship

Back to the bewildering vision

And the border-land of birth;

Back into the looming wonder,

The companionship of earth;

Back unto the simple kindred—

Childlike fingers, childlike eyes,

Working, waiting, comprehending,

Now in patience, now surprise;

Back unto the faithful healing

And the candor of the sod—

Scent of mould and moisture stirring

At the secret touch of God;

Back into the ancient stillness

Where the wise enchanter weaves,

To the twine of questing tree-root,

The expectancy of leaves;

Back to hear the hushed consulting

Over bud and blade and germ,

As the Mother’s mood apportions

Each its pattern, each its term;

Back into the grave beginnings

Where all wonder-tales are true,

Strong enchantments, strange successions,

Mysteries of old and new;

Back to knowledge and renewal,

Faith to fashion and reveal,

Take me, Mother,—in compassion

All thy hurt ones fain to heal.

Back to wisdom take me, Mother;

Comfort me with kindred hands;

Tell me tales the world’s forgetting,

Till my spirit understands.

Tell me how some sightless impulse,

Working out a hidden plan,

God for kin and clay for fellow,

Wakes to find itself a man.

Tell me how the life of mortal,

Wavering from breath to breath,

Like a web of scarlet pattern

Hurtles from the loom of death.

How the caged bright bird, desire,

Which the hands of God deliver,

Beats aloft to drop unheeded

At the confines of forever:

Faints unheeded for a season,

Then outwings the furthest star,

To the wisdom and the stillness

Where thy consummations are.

[16]

Origins

Out of the dreams that heap

The hollow hand of sleep,—

Out of the dark sublime,

The echoing deeps of time,—

From the averted Face

Beyond the bournes of space.

Into the sudden sun

We journey, one by one.

Out of the hidden shade

Wherein desire is made,—

Out of the pregnant stir

Where death and life confer,—

The dark and mystic heat

Where soul and matter meet,—

The enigmatic Will,—

We start, and then are still.

Inexorably decreed

By the ancestral deed,

The puppets of our sires,

We work out blind desires,

And for our sons ordain,

The blessing or the bane.

In ignorance we stand

With fate on either hand,

And question stars and earth

Of life, and death, and birth.

With wonder in our eyes

We scan the kindred skies,

While through the common grass

Our atoms mix and pass.

We feel the sap go free

When spring comes to the tree;

And in our blood is stirred

What warms the brooding bird.

The vital fire we breathe

That bud and blade bequeathe,

And strength of native clay

In our full veins hath sway.

But in the urge intense

And fellowship of sense,

Suddenly comes a word

In other ages heard.

On a great wind our souls

Are borne to unknown goals,

And past the bournes of space

To the unaverted Face.

[19]

An April Adoration

Sang the sunrise on an amber morn—

“Earth, be glad! An April day is born.

“Winter’s done, and April’s in the skies.

Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes!”

Putting off her dumb dismay of snow,

Earth bade all her unseen children grow.

Then the sound of growing in the air

Rose to God a liturgy of prayer;

And the thronged succession of the days

Uttered up to God a psalm of praise.

Laughed the running sap in every vein,

Laughed the running flurries of warm rain,

Laughed the life in every wandering root,

Laughed the tingling cells of bud and shoot.

God in all the concord of their mirth

Heard the adoration-song of Earth.

[21]

An Oblation

Behind the fateful gleams

Of Life’s foretelling streams

Sat the Artificer

Of souls and deeds and dreams.

Before him April came;

And on her mouth his name

Breathed like a flower

And lightened like a flame.

She offered him a world

With showers of joy empearled;

And a Spring wind

With iris wings unfurled.

She offered him a flight

Of birds that fare by night,

Voyaging northward

By the ancestral sight.

She offered him a star

From the blue fields afar,

Where unforgotten

The ghosts of gladness are.

And every root and seed

Blind stirring in the mead

Her hands held up,—

And still he gave no heed.

Then from a secret nook

Beside a pasture brook,—

A place of leaves,—

A pink-lipped bloom she took.

Softly before his feet,

Oblation small and sweet,

She laid the arbutus,

And found the offering meet.

Over the speaking tide,

Where Death and Birth abide,

He stretched his palm,

And strewed the petals wide;—

And o’er the ebbing years,

Dark with the drift of tears,

A sunbeam broke,

And summer filled the spheres,

[25]

Resurrection

Daffodil, lily, and crocus,

They stir, they break from the sod,

They are glad of the sun, and they open

Their golden hearts to God.

They, and the wilding families,—

Windflower, violet, may,—

They rise from the long, long dark

To the ecstasy of day.

We, scattering troops and kindreds,

From out of the stars wind-blown

To this wayside corner of space,

This world that we call our own,—

We, of the hedge-rows of Time,

We, too, shall divide the sod,

Emerge to the light, and blossom,

With our hearts held up to God.

[27]

Afoot

Comes the lure of green things growing,

Comes the call of waters flowing,—

And the wayfarer desire

Moves and wakes and would be going.

Hark the migrant hosts of June

Marching nearer noon by noon!

Hark the gossip of the grasses

Bivouacked beneath the moon!

Hark the leaves their mirth averring;

Hark the buds to blossom stirring;

Hark the hushed, exultant haste

Of the wind and world conferring!

Hark the sharp, insistent cry

Where the hawk patrols the sky!

Hark the flapping, as of banners,

Where the heron triumphs by!

Empire in the coasts of bloom

Humming cohorts now resume,—

And desire is forth to follow

Many a vagabond perfume.

Long the quest and far the ending

Where my wayfarer is wending,—

When desire is once afoot,

Doom behind and dream attending!

Shuttle-cock of indecision,

Sport of chance’s blind derision,

Yet he may not fail nor tire

Till his eyes shall win the Vision.

In his ears the phantom chime

Of incommunicable rhyme,

He shall chase the fleeting camp-fires

Of the Bedouins of Time.

Farer by uncharted ways,

Dumb as Death to plaint or praise,

Unreturning he shall journey,

Fellow to the nights and days:—

Till upon the outer bar

Stilled the moaning currents are,—

Till the flame achieves the zenith,—

Till the moth attains the star,—

Till, through laughter and through tears,

Fair the final peace appears,

And about the watered pastures

Sink to sleep the nomad years!

[31]

Where the Cattle come to Drink

At evening, where the cattle come to drink,

Cool are the long marsh-grasses, dewy cool

The alder thickets, and the shallow pool,

And the brown clay about the trodden brink.

The pensive afterthoughts of sundown sink

Over the patient acres given to peace;

The homely cries and farmstead noises cease,

And the worn day relaxes, link by link.

A lesson that the open heart may read

Breathes in this mild benignity of air,

These dear, familiar savours of the soil,—

A lesson of the calm of humble creed,

The simple dignity of common toil,

And the plain wisdom of unspoken prayer.

[32]

The Heal-All

Dear blossom of the wayside kin,

Whose homely, wholesome name

Tells of a potency within

To win thee country fame!

The sterile hillocks are thy home,

Beside the windy path;

The sky, a pale and lonely dome,

Is all thy vision hath.

Thy unobtrusive purple face

Amid the meagre grass

Greets me with long-remembered grace,

And cheers me as I pass.

And I, outworn by petty care,

And vexed with trivial wrong,

I heed thy brave and joyous air

Until my heart grows strong.

A lesson from the Power I crave

That moves in me and thee,

That makes thee modest, calm, and brave,—

Me restless as the sea.

Thy simple wisdom I would gain,—

To heal the hurt Life brings,

With kindly cheer, and faith in pain,

And joy of common things.

[35]

Recompense

To Beauty and to Truth I heaped

My sacrificial fires.

I fed them hot with selfish thoughts

And many proud desires.

I stripped my days of dear delights

To cast them in the flame,

Till life seemed naked as a rock,

And pleasure but a name.

And still I sorrowed patiently,

And waited day and night,

Expecting Truth from very far

And Beauty from her height.

Then laughter ran among the stars;

And this I heard them tell:

“Beside his threshold is the shrine

Where Truth and Beauty dwell!”

[37]

An Epitaph for a Husbandman

He who would start and rise

Before the crowing cocks—

No more he lifts his eyes,

Whoever knocks.

He who before the stars

Would call the cattle home,—

They wait about the bars

For him to come.

Him at whose hearty calls

The farmstead woke again

The horses in their stalls

Expect in vain.

Busy, and blithe, and bold,

He laboured for the morrow,—

The plough his hands would hold

Rusts in the furrow.

His fields he had to leave,

His orchards cool and dim;

The clods he used to cleave

Now cover him.

But the green, growing things

Lean kindly to his sleep,—

White roots and wandering strings,

Closer they creep.

Because he loved them long

And with them bore his part,

Tenderly now they throng

About his heart.

[40]

The Little Field of Peace

By the long wash of his ancestral sea

He sleeps how quietly!

How quiet the unlifting eyelids lie

Under this tranquil sky!

The little busy hands and restless feet

Here find that rest is sweet;

For sweetly, from the hands grown tired of play,

The child-world slips away,

With its confusion of forgotten toys

And kind, familiar noise.

Not lonely does he lie in his last bed,

For love o’erbroods his head.

Kindly to him the comrade grasses lean

Their fellowship of green.

The wilding meadow companies give heed,—

Brave tansy, and the weed

That on the dyke-top lifts its dauntless stalk,—

Around his couch they talk.

The shadows of his oak-tree flit and play

Above his dreams all day.

The wind, that was his playmate on the hills,

His sleep with music fills.

Here in this tender acre by the tide

His vanished kin abide.

Ah! what compassionate care for him they keep,

Too soon returned to sleep!

They watch him in this little field of peace

Where they have found release.

Not as a stranger or alone he went

Unto his long content;

But kissed to sleep and comforted lies he

By his ancestral sea.

[43]

Renewal

Comrade of the whirling planets,

Mother of the leaves and rain,

Make me joyous as thy birds are,

Let me be thy child again.

Show me all the troops of heaven

Tethered in a sphere of dew,—

All the dear familiar marvels

Old, child-hearted singers knew.

Let me laugh with children’s laughter,

Breathe with herb and blade and tree,

Learn again forgotten lessons

Of thy grave simplicity.

Take me back to dream and vision

From the prison-house of pain,

Back to fellowship with wonder—

Mother, take me home again!

[45]

The Unsleeping

I soothe to unimagined sleep

The sunless bases of the deep.

And then I stir the aching tide

That gropes in its reluctant side.

I heave aloft the smoking hill;

To silent peace its throes I still.

But ever at its heart of fire

I lurk, an unassuaged desire.

I wrap me in the sightless germ

An instant or an endless term;

And still its atoms are my care,

Dispersed in ashes or in air.

I hush the comets one by one

To sleep for ages in the sun;

The sun resumes before my face

His circuit of the shores of space.

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,

They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.

Time, like a flurry of wild rain,

Shall drift across the darkened pane.

Space, in the dim predestined hour,

Shall crumble like a ruined tower.

I only, with unfaltering eye,

Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

[48]

Recessional

Now along the solemn heights

Fade the Autumn’s altar-lights;

Down the great earth’s glimmering chancel

Glide the days and nights.

Little kindred of the grass,

Like a shadow in a glass

Falls the dark and falls the stillness;

We must rise and pass.

We must rise and follow, wending

Where the nights and days have ending,—

Pass in order pale and slow

Unto sleep extending.

Little brothers of the clod,

Soul of fire and seed of sod,

We must fare into the silence

At the knees of God.

Little comrades of the sky

Wing to wing we wander by,

Going, going, going, going,

Softly as a sigh.

Hark, the moving shapes confer,

Globe of dew and gossamer,

Fading and ephemeral spirits

In the dusk astir.

Moth and blossom, blade and bee,

Worlds must go as well as we,

In the long procession joining

Mount, and star, and sea.

Toward the shadowy brink we climb

Where the round year rolls sublime,

Rolls, and drops, and falls forever

In the vast of time;

Like a plummet plunging deep

Past the utmost reach of sleep,

Till remembrance has no longer

Care to laugh or weep.

[52]

Earth’s Complines

Before the feet of the dew

There came a call I knew,

Luring me into the garden

Where the tall white lilies grew.

I stood in the dusk between

The companies of green,

O’er whose aerial ranks

The lilies rose serene.

And the breathing air was stirred

By an unremembered word,

Soft, incommunicable—

And wings not of a bird.

I heard the spent blooms sighing,

The expectant buds replying;

I felt the life of the leaves,

Ephemeral, yet undying.

The spirits of earth were there,

Thronging the shadowed air,

Serving among the lilies,

In an ecstasy of prayer.

Their speech I could not tell;

But the sap in each green cell,

And the pure initiate petals,

They knew that language well.

I felt the soul of the trees—

Of the white, eternal seas—

Of the flickering bats and night-moths

And my own soul kin to these.

And a spell came out of space

From the light of its starry place,

And I saw in the deep of my heart

The image of God’s face.

[55]

Two Spheres

While eager angels watched in awe,

God fashioned with his hands

Two shining spheres to work his law,

And carry his commands.

With patient art he shaped them true,

With calm, untiring care;

And none of those bright watchers knew

Which one to call most fair.

He dropped one lightly down to earth

Amid the morning’s blue—

And on a gossamer had birth

A bead of blinding dew.

It flamed across the hollow field,

On tiptoe to depart,

Outvied Arcturus, and revealed

All heaven in its heart.

He tossed the other into space

(As children toss a ball)

To swing forever in its place

With equal rise and fall;

To flame through the ethereal dark,

Among its brother spheres,

An orbit too immense to mark

The little tide of years.

[58]

The Stillness of the Frost

Out of the frost-white wood comes winnowing through

No wing; no homely call or cry is heard.

Even the hope of life seems far deferred.

The hard hills ache beneath their spectral hue.

A dove-gray cloud, tender as tears or dew,

From one lone hearth exhaling, hangs unstirred,

Like the poised ghost of some unnamed great bird

In the ineffable pallor of the blue.

Such, I must think, even at the dawn of Time,

Was thy white hush, O world, when thou lay’st cold,

Unwaked to love, new from the Maker’s word,

And the spheres, watching, stilled their high accord,

To marvel at perfection in thy mould,

The grace of thine austerity sublime!

[59]

A Child’s Prayer at Evening

(Domine, cui sunt Pleiades curae)

Father, who keepest

The stars in Thy care,

Me, too, Thy little one,

Childish in prayer,

Keep, as Thou keepest

The soft night through,

Thy long, white lilies

Asleep in Thy dew.

[60] [61]

II Lyrics

[62] [63]

The Frosted Pane

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leaned

Against my window-pane.

In the deep stillness of his heart convened

The ghosts of all his slain.

Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth,

And fugitives of grass,—

White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth,

He drew them on the glass.

[64]

The Brook in February

A snowy path for squirrel and fox,

It winds between the wintry firs.

Snow-muffled are its iron rocks,

And o’er its stillness nothing stirs.

But low, bend low a listening ear!

Beneath the mask of moveless white

A babbling whisper you shall hear

Of birds and blossoms, leaves and light.

[65]

Beside the Winter Sea

As one who sleeps, and hears across his dream

The cry of battles ended long ago,

Inland I hear the calling of the sea.

I hear its hollow voices, though between

My wind-worn dwelling and thy wave-worn strand

How many miles, how many mountains are!

And thou beside the winter sea alone

Art walking, with thy cloak about thy face.

Bleak, bleak the tide, and evening coming on;

And gray the pale, pale light that wans thy face.

Solemnly breaks the long wave at thy feet;

And sullenly in patches clings the snow

Upon the low, red rocks worn round with years.

I see thine eyes, I see their grave desire,

Unsatisfied and lonely as the sea’s;—

Yet how unlike the wintry sea’s despair!

For could my feet but follow, thine, my hands

But reach for thy warm hands beneath thy cloak,

What summer joy would lighten in thy face,

What sunshine warm thine eyes, and thy sad mouth

Break to a dewy rose, and laugh on mine!

[67]

The Quest of the Arbutus

For days the drench of noiseless rains,

Then sunshine on the vacant plains,

And April with her blind desire

A vagrant in my veins!

Because the tardy gods grew kind,

Unrest and care were cast behind;

I took a day, and found the world

Was fashioned to my mind.

The swelling sap that thrilled the wood

Was cousin to my eager blood;

I caught the stir of waking roots,

And knew that life was good.

But something in the odors fleet,

And in the sap’s suggestion sweet,

Was lacking,—one thing everywhere

To make the spring complete.

At length within a leafy nest,

Where spring’s persuasions pleaded best,

I found a pale, reluctant flower,

The purpose of my quest.

And then the world’s expectancy

Grew clear: I knew its need to be

Not this dear flower, but one dear hand

To pluck the flower with me.

[70]

The Jonquil

Through its brown and withered bulb

How the white germ felt the sun

In the dark mould gently stirring

His Spring children one by one!

Thrilled with heat, it split the husk,

Shot a green blade up to light,

And unfurled its orange petals

In the old Enchanter’s sight.

One step more and it had floated

On the palpitating noon

Winged and free, a butterfly

Soaring from the rent cocoon.

But it could not leave its earth,

And the May-dew’s tender tears,—

So it wavers there forever

’Twixt the green and azure spheres.

[72]

The Trout Brook

The airs that blew from the brink of day

Were fresh and wet with the breath of May.

I heard the babble of brown brooks falling,

And golden-wings in the woodside calling.

Big drops hung from the sparkling eaves;

And through the screen of the thin young leaves

A glint of ripples, a whirl of foam,

Lured and beckoned me out from home.

My feet grew eager, my eyes grew wide,

And I was off by the brown brook’s side.

Down in the swamp-bottom, cool and dim,

I cut me an alder sapling slim.

With nimble fingers I tied my line,

Clear as a sunbeam, strong and fine.

My fly was a tiny glittering thing,

With tinselled body and partridge wing.

With noiseless steps I threaded the wood,

Glad of the sun-pierced solitude.

Chattered the kingfisher, fierce and shy,

As like a shadow I drifted by.

Lurked in their watery lairs the trout,

But, silver and scarlet, I lured them out.

Wary were they, but warier still

My cunning wrist and my cast of skill.

I whipped the red pools under the beeches;

I whipped the yellow and dancing reaches.

The purple eddy, smooth like oil,

And the tail of the rapid yielded spoil.

So all day long, till the day was done,

I followed the stream, I followed the sun.

Then homeward over the ridge I went,

The wandering heart of me well content.

[75]

A Wake-up Song

Sun’s up; wind’s up! Wake up, dearies!

Leave your coverlets white and downy.

June’s come into the world this morning.

Wake up, Golden Head! Wake up, Brownie!