The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse
A Canadian GalahadWilliam Wilfred Campbell (18611918)
River, while trying to save Miss Blair)
W
And laud the heroes of ensanguined war,
Rearing in granite memory of men
Who build the future, recreate the past,
Or animate the present dull world’s pulse
With loftier riches of the human mind.
And yet so human in its simple worth,
That any spirit plodding its slow round
Of social commonplace and daily moil,
Might blunder on such greatness, did he hold
In him the kernel sap from which it sprung.
Heroic, lofty, whereof earth will ring,
A world onlooking, and the spirit strung
To high achievement at the cannon’s mouth,
Or where fierce ranks of maddened men go down.
Of life’s slow action, stumbling on the brink
Of sudden opportunity, he chose
The only noble, godlike, splendid way,
And made his exit, as earth’s great have gone,
By that vast doorway looking out on death.
No hero of a hundred victories;
Nor iron moulder of unwieldy states,
Grave counsellor of parliaments, gold-tongued,
Standing in shadow of a centuried fame,
Drinking the splendid plaudits of a world.
Unostentatious, like the average man
Of average duty, walked the common earth,
And when fate flung her challenge in his face,
Took all his spirit in his blinded eyes,
And showed in action why God made the world.
Oblivion-clouded, to the common goal;—
And all unmindful moves the dull world round,
With baser dreams of this material day,
And all that makes man petty, the slow pace
Of small accomplishment that mocks the soul.
That under all the brutish mask of life,
And dulled intention of ignoble ends,
Man’s soul is not all sordid; that behind
This tragedy of ills and hates that seem
There lurks a godlike impulse in the world,
And men are greater than they idly dream.