"Oh, curses on you hand and head, Like the rains in this wild weather The guilt of blood is swift and dread, Your sisters face is cold and dead, Ye may not part whom God would wed And love hath knit together."
Frederick George Scott was for the first part of his life an Anglican priest and a Canadian poet to whom the Canadian literary establishment gave the epithet "Poet of the Laurentians." He was associated with Canada's Confederation Poets, and wrote 13 books of Christian and patriotic poetry, often using the natural world to convey deeper spiritual meaning.
"Growing to full manhood now, With the care-lines on our brow, We, the youngest of the nations, With no childish lamentations, Weep, as only strong men weep, For the noble hearts that sleep, Pillowed where they fought and bled, The loved and lost, our glorious dead."
"How slayeth Sin? First, God is hid, And the heart within By its own self chid; Then the maddened brain Is scourged by pain To sin as before And more and more, For evermore."
"Is Sin, then, fair? Nay, love, come now, Put back the hair From his sunny brow; See, here, blood-red Across his head A brand is set, The word — Regret."
"It sleeps among the thousand hills Where no man ever trod, And only natures music fills The silences of God."
"Like some grey warder who, with mien sedate And smile of welcome, greets the throngs who pour Between the portals of a wide-thrown door, stands guardian at our water gate, And watches from her battlemented state The great ships passing with their living store Of human myriads coming to our shore, Expectant, joyous, resolute, elate."
"Clay was I; the potter Thou With Thy thumb-nail smoothdst my brow, Rolltdst the spittle-moistened sands Into limbs between Thy hands. [...] Strong Thou madst me, till at length All my weakness was my strength; Tortured am I, blind and wrecked, For a faulty architect."