The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #112655   Message #2404921
Posted By: Charley Noble
04-Aug-08 - 11:55 AM
Thread Name: Songs That Mention Canadian Places
Subject: RE: Songs That Mention Canadian Places
There are several dozen Cicely Fox Smith poems, some of which have been recently adapted for singing, that mention towns and landmarks in British Colombia, where she was in residence from 1904 to 1913. Here's one which is a fond remembrance of Victoria Harbour:

Pacific Coast

Half across the world to westward there's a harbour that I know,
Where the ships that load with lumber and the China liners go, —
Where the wind blows cold at sunset off the snow-crowned peaks that gleam
Out across the Straits at twilight like the landfall of a dream.

There's a sound of foreign voices — there are wafts of strange perfume —
And a two-stringed fiddle playing somewhere in an upstairs room;
There's a rosy tide lap-lapping on an old worm-eaten quay,
And a scarlet sunset flaming down behind the China Sea.

And I daresay if I went there I should find it all the same,
Still the same old sunset glory setting all the skies aflame,
Still the smell of burning forests on the quiet evening air, —
Little things my heart remembers nowhere else on earth but there.

Still the harbour gulls a-calling, calling all the night and day,
And the wind across the water singing just the same old way
As it used to in the rigging of a ship I used to know
Half across the world from England, many and many a year ago.

She is gone beyond my finding — gone forever, ship and man,
Far beyond that scarlet sunset flaming down behind Japan;
But I'll maybe find the dream there that I lost so long ago —
Half across the world to westward in a harbour that I know —
Half across the world from England many and many a year ago.


Notes:

From Sea Songs and Ballads 1917-22, edited by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, US, © 1924, pp. 96-97; previously published in Ships and Folks, © 1920, pp. 65-66.

May be sung to the traditional forebitter "Rolling Home."

Cheerily,
Charley Noble