PATRIOTIC VOICES OF CANADA: True North Songs, Poems & Stories

Patriotic voices…

Patriotic Voices: We were living in Post-War Yorkshire then.

It had been a few months since we’d moved from Canada, but my memories of that forevergreen land were strong and I missed it.

I had started school outside Mirfield, just turned age 5. When Dad saw I wasn’t being taught much about our native land, he gave me his treasured copy of THE VOICE OF CANADA: Canadian Prose & Poetry, Selected by A M Stephen. It had been Dad’s favourite school book growing up in Nova Scotia (his sisters were his teachers).

Printed in 1927, it was a little blue hardcover edition with gold lettering and filled with songs, poems, short stories, scraps of national history — and wonderful black ink illustrations.

Its opening line was this: “The real builders of our Canadian Commonwealth are its writers and artists.” A sentiment I took to heart at an early age. For those who think I never learned anything from a school textbook, here’s proof that I did, eh?

The first section in VOICE is called LOVE OF COUNTRY. And begins with all four verses of R Stanley Weir’s O CANADA. Bet you won’t find a modern school reader with a patriotic opening like that!

Patriotic Voices: The Unnamed Lake

After all these years, these decades, my favourite poem from this book remains “The Unnamed Lake” by Frederick George Scott, which reads (in part):

It sleeps among the thousand hills
Where no man ever trod,
And only nature’s music fills
The silences of God.

Great mountains tower above its shore,
Green rushes fringe its brim,
And o’er its breast for evermore
The wanton breezes skim.

‘Twas in the grey of early dawn,
When first the lake we spied,
And fragments of a cloud were drawn
Half down the mountain side.

Along the shore a heron flew,
And from a speck on high,
That hovered in the deepening blue,
We heard the fish-hawk’s cry.

Among the cloud-capt solitudes,
No sound the silence broke,
Save when, in whispers down the woods,
The guardian mountains spoke.

Through tangled brush and dewy brake,
Returning whence we came,
We passed in silence, and the lake
We left without a name.

Patriotic Voices: True North Songs, Poems & Stories

Other Voices called to me.

E Pauline Johnson, for instance: “Among the lonely lakes I go no more, for she who made their beauty is not there; the paleface rears his tepee on the shore, and says the vale is fairest…”

Ernest Thompson Seton: “A prairie wolf howled, the pony pricked up his ears and, walking nearer to me, stood with his head down. Then another prairie wolf howled, and another. There I lay prone and helpless on the ground, the iron jaws of trap No. 3 closed tight on my left foot…”

And Bliss Carman, Marjorie L C Pickthall, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Charles G D Roberts, Lieut.-Col. John McCrae, Duncan Campbell Scott, Ethelwyn Wetherald, Laura Goodman Salverson, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Thomas Chandler Haliburton.

And W D Lighthall: “All day through the paleface city, silent, selling beaded wares, I have wandered with my basket, lone, excepting for their stares. They are white men; we are Indians; what a gulf their stares proclaim!”

And William Henry Drummond: “You bad leetle boy, not moche you care, how busy you’re kipin’ your poor gran’pere. Tryin’ to stop you ev’ry day, chasin’ de hen around de hay…”

Canadian Voices. Mostly forgotten Voices…

I’ve moved around a bunch since those Yorkshire days. Misplaced more than a few favourite books (including a trunkload of comic books). But THE VOICE OF CANADA still sits right here on my writing desk. A true inheritance. Thanks, Dad.