The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #104619   Message #2145976
Posted By: Jim Dixon
10-Sep-07 - 08:28 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Deep Dark River (Lloyd Roberts)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Chaudiere, canoe
Google Book Search finds this poem in 3 anthologies:

Our Canadian literature; representative verse, English and French, by Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce, Toronto, The Ryerson press [1935]

New harvesting; contemporary Canadian poetry, 1918-1938, by Ethel Hume Bennett, Toronto: Macmillan, 1938, page 146.

Canadian poetry in English, by Bliss Carman, Lorne Pierce, and V B Rhodenizer; Toronto : Ryerson Press, [1954], page 232.

These books are available online only in "snippet view," but I was able to piece together several snippets to make the following text. (It seems to have something missing at the beginning.).

Sorry, I wasn't able to figure out the title or author:

And from the portage trail below Deschênes
The pulse of paddles and A la Claire Fontaine.

I hear the ghost waves lapping on a million beaches,
I hear the ghost laughter of loons down lonely reaches,
The sighing of spent winds in the matted spruce
And the sudden honk and splash of arrow-stricken goose.

And always I hear the stir of men slipping
Down the Chaudière, their thin blades dripping,
Catch the long low wraith of a bark canoe
And the wild sweet chansons of a phantom crew.

Strange smells are loosed by the hurrying prows—
Wood-smoke, trade rum, dried balsam boughs;
Strange smells steeped from the drip of years
And dyed with the stuff of dead dreams and tears.

Into the wash and waste of thy brave debris
Drifting through the dark night toward a dark sea,
Into thy silent keeping receive from me
The gleam of one more broken dream, O Ottawa!