The Iceberg

THE ICEBERG CHARLES G. D. RoBERTS I WAS spawned from the glacier, A thousand miles due north Beyond Cape Chidley; And the spawning, When my vast, wallowing bulk went under, Emerged and heaved aloft, Shaking down cataracts from its rocking sides, With mountainous surge and thunder Outraged the silence of the Arctic sea. Before I was thrust forth A thousand years I crept, Crawling, crawling, crawling irresistibly, Hid in the blue womb of the eternal ice, While under me the tortured rock Groaned, And over me the immeasurable desolation slept. Under the pallid dawning Of the lidless Arctic day Forever no life stirred. No wing of birdOf ghostly owl low winnowing Or :fleet-winged ptarmigan :fleeing the pounce of death,No foot of backward-glancing fox Half glimpsed, and vanishing like a breath,No lean and gauntly stalking bear, Stalking his prey. Only the white sun, circling the white sky. Only the wind screaming perpetually. 77 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY And then the nightThe long night, naked, high over the roof of the world, Where time seemed frozen in the cold of space,Now black, and torn with cry Of unseen voices where the storm raged by, Now radiant with spectral light As ·the vault of heaven split wide To let the flaming Polar cohorts through,·And close-ranked spears of gold and blue, Thin scarlet and thin green, Hurtled and clashed across the sphere And hissed in sibilant whisperings, And died. And then the stark moon, swinging low, Silver, indi.fferent, serene, Over the sheeted snow. But now, an Alp afloat, In seizure of the surreptitious tide, Began my long drift south to·a remote And unimagined doom. Scornful ofstorm,· Unj arred by thunderous buffeting of seas, Shearing the giant floes aside, Ploughing the wide-flung ice-fields in a spume That smoked far up their ponderous flanks, Onward I fared, My ice-blue pinnacles rendering back the sun In darts of sharp radiance; My bases fathoms deep in the dark profound. And now around me Life, and the frigid waters all a-swarm. The smooth wave creamed With .tiny capelin and the small pale squid,78 THE ICEBERG So pale the light struck through them. Gulls and gannets screamed Over the feast, and gorged themselves, and rose, A clamour of weaving wings, and hid Momently my face. The great bull whales With cavernous jaws agape, Scooped in the spoil, and .slept, Their humped forms just a-wash, and rocking softly, Or sounded down, down to the deeps, and nosed Along my ribbed and sunken roots, And in the green gloom scattered the pasturing cod. And so I voyaged on, down the dim parallels, Convoyed by fields Of countless calving seals Mild-featured, innocent-eyed and unforeknowing The doom of the red flenching knives. I passed the storm-racked gate Of Hudsqn Strait, And savage Chidley where the warring tides In white wrath seethe forever. Down along the sounding shore Of iron-fanged, many watered Labrador Slow weeks I shaped my course, and saw Dark Mokkowic and dark Napiskawa, And came at last off lone Belle Isle, the bane Of ships and snare of bergs. Here, by the deep conflicting currents drawn, I hung, And swung, The inland voices Gulfward calling me To ground amid my peers on the alien strand And roam no more. 79 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY But then an off shore wind, A great wind fraught with fate, Caught me and pressed me ·back, And I resumed my solitary way. Slowly I bore South-east by bastioned Bauld, And passed the sentinel light far-beaming late Along the liners' track, And slanted out Atlanticwards, until Above the treacherous swaths of fog Faded from view the loom of N ewfound.land. Beautiful, ·ethereal In the blue sparkle of the gleaming day, A soaring miracle Of white immensity, I was the cynosure of passing ships That wondered and were gone, Their wreathed smoke trailing them beyond the verge. And when in the night they passedThe night of stars and calm,Forged up and passed, with churning surge And throb of huge propellers, and long drawn Luminous wake behiad, And sharp, small lights in rows, I...