CANADIAN PATRIOTIC VOICES True North Songs, Poems & Stories

Canadian patriotic songs…

Our stories.

 

CANADIAN PATRIOTIC VOICES: True North Songs, Poems & Stories

 

Canadian 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, 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 Canadian patriotic opening like that!

Canadian Patriotic Voices: The Seafarers

There Huguenots and cassocked priests,
And noble-born and sons of toil,
Together worked the barren soil,
And shared each other’s barren feasts.

Spring came at last, and o’er the waves,
The welcome sail of Pontgravé.
But half the number silent lay,
Death’s pale first-fruits, in western graves.

Sing on, wild sea, your sad refrain
For all the gallant sons of France.
Whose songs and sufferings enhance
The witchery of the western main…

“L’île Sainte Croix” [1]
A W H Eaton

 

Canadian 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.

 

Canadian 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, 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.

Marjorie L C Pickthall (The Collision in the Fog): “The mysterious doors of the mist opened. They heard the beat of the engines plainly. Garroch said, ‘If we could but get some way on her! They’re very near. They’re…’
‘Right on us!’ screamed the boy.”

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 Patriotic Voices. Mostly forgotten Voices…

 

Canadian Patriotic voices – One Canadian writer…

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

“Live Free, Mon Ami!” – Brian Alan Burhoe

 

[1] When I first read “L’île Sainte Croix” I didn’t know the story behind it. Later I learned that Eaton was describing an epic moment in the birth of Canada.

Established in June 1604, the L’île Sainte-Croix settlement (present-day Maine/New Brunswick border) was the first European try at year-round colonization of the North Atlantic coast since the Vikings. Almost half those French settlers (“noble-born and sons of toil”) died from the dreaded scurvy.

Their returned sailing ship moved them to the mainland. There, they built a settlement they called Port-Royal (in modern day Nova Scotia). They were befriended by the local Mi’kmaq people, who taught them how to brew a tea from evergreen needles and bark.  That tea, rich in Vitamin C, saved the settlers from scurvy’s scourge.

 

To Hear More Canadian Voices, You Have Gotta See GREATEST WRITERS OF MOUNTIE FICTION Top 10 Authors Canadian Mounted Police

 

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IMAGE SOURCES: Coloured and Black & white illustrations on this page by E Wallcousins.  Painting of sailing ship from PIONEERS IN CANADA by Sir Harry Johnston, Blackie & Son, London, 1912.  Line drawings from THE VOICE OF CANADA, Selected by A M Stephen, J M Dent & Sons, Toronto, London, reprinted (with corrections) 1927.

TAGS: Canadian patriotic, E Pauline Johnson, E Wallcousins, Ernest Thompson Seton, Voice of Canada

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

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