Poets From Canada

"Dignity is a tin god in the temple of bunk."

"The world is full of scribbling Nobodies who think they’re scribbling Somebodies."

"Marriage is a bachelor’s punishment for his sins"

"I count each day a little life, With birth and death complete; I cloister it from care and strife And keep it sane and sweet."

"Oh it is good to ride and run, To roam the reenwood wild and free; To hunt, to idle in the sun, To leap into the laughing sea"

"And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow. It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why; And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky."

"Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code."

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee."

"But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true, That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew."

"I wonder will death be much lonelier than life. Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You can live close against other people yet your lives never touch. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even coming and going."

"Our fathers died for England at the outposts of the world; Our mothers toiled for England where the settlers' smoke upcurled; By packet, steam and rail, By portage, trek and trail, They bore a thing called Honour in hearts that did not quail, Till the twelve great winds of heaven saw the scarlet sign unfurled. And little did they leave us of fame or land or gold; Yet they gave us great possessions in a heritage untold; For they said, 'Ye shall be clean, Nor ever false or mean, For God and for your country and the honour of your Queen, Till ye meet the death that waits you with your plighted faith unsold'."

"There paused to shut the door A fellow called the Wind, With mystery before, And reticence behind."

"Here’s to the day That wondrous May, A-roaming through the heather, When her little shoes And my big boots Were out on the hills together. And here’s to the night Of our delight, That held the stars in tether, When her little shoes And my big boots Were under the bed together."

"The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man."

"The glad indomitable sea, The strong white sun."

"Here's to the day when it is May And care as light as a feather, When your little shoes and my big boots Go tramping over the heather."

"When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you."

"Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell."

"If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets."

"God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image."

"My neighbour doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied."

"And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground, When reading in these treatises some weird Miracle, I turned a leaf and found A white hair fallen from my father's beard."

"Where are the braves, the faces like autumn fruit, who stared at the child from the coloured frontispiece?"

"This is a grassy ghetto, and no home."

"For the tourist's brown pennies scattered at the old church door, the ragged papooses jump, and bite the dust."

"The animals pale, the shine of the fur is lost, bleached are their living bones. About them watch as through a mist, the pious prosperous ghosts."

"There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are."

"And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?"

"Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which."

"In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement."

"He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village."

"In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl."

"There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful passage of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right."

"The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it."

"Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass."

"But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink."

"How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him."

"For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts."

"What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"

"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell."

"The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico."

"There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word."

"Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué."

"Christ," he remarked, puzzled, "this is a dingy way to die."

"What for you lie?" the Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. "You say your name is Black. No es Black." He shoved him backwards toward the door. "You say you are a wrider." He shoved him again. "You no are a wrider." He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. "You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Méjico."

"How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying."

"I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes."

"I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand."

"God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light."

"Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygènée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal . . ."