Poem by Maude Abbott, 1909

Poem Renascence written by Maude Abbott during a train trip from Dalhousie to Halifax, published in the women’s edition of the Montreal Daily Witness on May 15, 1909. The poem reads as follows:

Renascence

(From a train window.)

Through a long stretch of deep New Brunswick forest

Where tall dark fir, poplar, and sombre pine,

And birches, gleaming ghostly in the shadows,

Crowded each other out of shape and line.

Through long flat tracks which fire’s destroying finger

Has touched, through stretches where no stately tree

Raises its head above young stunted saplings,

I speed along, alone, my thoughts with me.

Behind me, smile the valleys and the hillsides

Of settled districts, know and dear to me;

Before me-lies a city full of strangers,

Beside the breaking of the restless sea.

A sense of desolation comes upon me

As silently I watch the wasted land.

It seems so lonely, fruitless, without brightness

Yearning in vain for man’s redeeming hand

To prune it into beauty. But the sunshine

Touches the treetops with its charm at last

And as I look, I feel a stronger beauty

Lies in the forests than in meadows passed.

Tree presses tree in, contest of keen vigor,

Close round their trunks the strong young creepers cling,

And clustering treetops to the far horizon

A wavering plain vast extension fling.

And here, where all forest trees have fallen

Where the cleared land’ breaks on the eye again

Where only bare gray tree trunks break the landscape

And rotting stumps dot all the altered plain.

Here lies the richest promise : for the verdure

Spring up luxuriant over all the plain

The myriad budding saplings soon creating

A greater forest than the old again.

And watching all the force of life, and vigor

In the rich growth, I understand at length,

The glory of the forest is its promise,

Our country’s latent strength.

Maude E. Abbott

Dalhousie to Halifax, Aug.19.