I Am The Dwindled Son

This is a poem from an eclectic poetry book I had growing up, Poems of a Snow-Eyed country. All the poems were by Canadian poets, divided in chapters by geographical region. It has a pleasantly ramshackle vibe that I could never find in other poetry compilations. The book itself was a reject from an Etobicoke library, and at this point is filled with cryptic scribblings that I wrote in there in middle school.

Anyway, a lot of my favourite poems are in this book. One day I had the urge to read I Am The Dwindled Son, so I tried looking it up online. I'm used to finding Rabbie Burns poems with a quick Google search. But Dwindled Son wasn't online. At least, not yet. Besides the work of some of the more well-known poets like Leonard Cohen, I bet a lot of the poems in that book aren't online.

Ultimately the preservation of a lot of niche things comes down to individuals. Trash archivists, as I call them; not because what we archive is trash, but rather because the hoity-toities think that high culture is the only thing worth preserving. High culture will not survive the apocalypse. Besides maybe clowns. Street clowns are the true vanguard of anarchism, I will die on this hill.

Without further rambling, said poem:




I Am the Dwindled Son
by Alfred Desrochers

I am the dwindled son of a race of supermen,
The violent, strong, adventurous; from this strain
I take the northland homesickness which comes
With the grey days that autumn brings again.

All the fierce past of those coureurs de bois-
Hunters and trappers, raftsmen, lumberjacks,
Merchant-adventurers, labourers on hire-
Bids me to seek the North for half the year.

And I dream of going there as my fathers did:
I hear within me great white spaces crying
In the wastes they roamed, haloed by hurricanes:
And, as they did, I hate a master's chains.

When the tempest of disasters beat upon them,
They cursed the valley and they cursed the plain;
They cursed the wolves which robbed them of their wool:
Their maledictions dulled their pain.

But when the memory of a distant wife
Brusquely dispelled the scenes that faced these men,
They brushed their eyelids with the back of their sleeve
And their mouths chanted A la claire fontaine.

So well repeated to the echoing forests
This simple lay (where the wood-warbler tunes
On the highest branches his own plaintive song),
It mingles with my own most secret thoughts:

If I bend my back beneath invisible burdens
In the hubbub of bitter leavetakings,
And if, when thwarted or constrained, I feel
That urge to strike which clenched their massive fists;

If from these men, who never knew despair
And died even while they dreamed of conquering nature,
I take this sickly instinct for adventure
Beneath whose spell I sometimes fall, at night-

In this degenerate age of ours, I am like
The beech whose living sap was never drawn,
And I am leafed around by dead desires,
Dreaming of going forth as my fathers did.

But the faint words emitted by my voice
Remain: a rosebush, branches and a spring,
An oak, a warbler in a sheen of leaves;
And, as it did in my forefather's day,
In the mouth of him who was coureur de bois,

My joy or sorrow sings the landscape still.