Celebrating the harvest — with Sandburg

Thanksgiving begins in Canada
Compilation and editing by Carolyn Bennett

Days of thanksgiving in Canada originated in the colonial period, arising from European traditions of gratitude for safe journeys, peace, and bountiful harvests. The earliest celebrations were reportedly held in 1578 when Seaman Martin Frobisher held a ceremony in what is today Newfoundland to give thanks for a safe arrival in the New World. The Parliament in 1879 established a national Thanksgiving Day on November 6. The date varied over the years and since 1957, Thanksgiving Day has been celebrated in Canada on the second Monday of October [Britannica note].

Carl Sandburg’s poetic thoughts seem apt tribute to autumn, to those who sow and who bring the harvest, to Thanksgiving and to those who labored so that 33 Chilean miners trapped 65 days in the collapsed San José mine might soon be free. Because I like Carl Sandburg’s work.

(1)

Under the harvest moon—
When the soft silver

Drips shimmering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers

Under the summer roses —

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk

Of the wild red leaves,

Love, with little hands,

Comes and touches you

With a thousand memories,

And asks you

Beautiful, unanswerable questions

(2)

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of —

I heard it in the air of one night when I listened

To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry

in the darkness.

(3)

A lone gray bird,

Dim-dipping, far-flying,

Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults

Of night and the sea

And the stars and storms.

Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,

Out into the gloom it swings and batters,

Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,

Out into the pit of a great black world,

Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown,

Love of mist and rapture of flight,

Glories of chance and hazards of death

On its eager and palpitant wings.

Out into the deep of the great dark world,

Beyond the long borders where foam and drift

Of the sundering waves are lost and gone

On the tides that plunge and rear and crumble.

(4)

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.

(5)

Stuff of the moon

Runs on the lapping sand

Out to the longest shadows.

Under the curving willows,

And round the creep of the wave line,

Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters

Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

(6)

I asked a gypsy pal

To imitate an old image

And speak old wisdom.

She drew in her chin,

Made her neck and head

The top piece of a Nile obelisk

     and said —

Snatch off the gag from thy mouth, child,

And be free to keep silence.

Tell no man anything for no man listens,

Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

Sources and notes


Martin Frobisher
English navigator and early explorer of Canada’s northeast coast, Martin Frobisher was born circa 1535, Yorkshire, England and died November 22, 1594, Plymouth, Devon. Frobisher went on voyages to the Guinea coast of Africa in 1553 and 1554, and during the 1560s preyed on French shipping in the English Channel under a ‘privateering’ license from the English crown; he was arrested several times on charges of piracy but never brought to trial.… Frobisher is credited with being one of the ablest seamen of his time but lacked the capacity for patient factual investigation as an explorer.

Newfoundland
This island named by 15th-century explorers the New Found Land lies diagonally to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is separated from Labrador by the narrow Strait of Belle Isle and from Nova Scotia, to the southwest, by Cabot Strait. Labrador is bordered to the west and south by the province of Quebec.


Newfoundland is a province of Canada composed of the island of Newfoundland and a larger mainland sector, Labrador, to the northwest. It is Canada’s newest province, having joined the confederation only in 1949; its name was officially changed to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001.


Newfoundland and Labrador is the most eastern part of North America. Its position on the Atlantic gives it strategic importance in transportation and communications. Its capital city, St. John’s (on Newfoundland) is closer to the coast of Ireland than it is to Canada’s Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Sandburg's poems
(1) “UNDER THE HARVEST MOON,” Carl Sandburg, Poets’ Corner, http://theotherpages.org/poems/sandb02.html
(2) “HOME,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(3) “FROM THE SHORE,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(4) “THEME IN YELLOW,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(5) “NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(6) “GYPSY,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt

Carl Sandburg
CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967) wrote poetry, biography, autobiography, fiction and newspaper articles. He was a lecturer and folk-singer as well. His newspaper coverage of social unrest in 1919 resulted in a book called The Chicago Race Riots. The stories he invented for his three daughters became The Rootabaga Stories. When he was 70, he published his first and only novel, Remembrance Rock.

CARL SANDBURG THE FOLK SINGER
Beginning in 1903, Sandburg spent a lot of time traveling around the country to lecture to school and college audiences and to the American public at large. He played the guitar and sang, read his poetry aloud, and talked about his dreams for America. Because he loved the language of the ordinary American, he collected sayings, slang and folk lore; stories and songs people shared with him in the small towns, cities, and farms he visited.


BOOKS BY CARL SANDBURG
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (one-volume ed.)
Always the Young Strangers
The American Songbag
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg
Harvest Poems: 1910-1960
Honey and Salt
The People, Yes
Remembrance Rock
Selected Poems
The Carl Sandburg Historic Site Galesburg, Illinois, http://home.grics.net/sandburgsite/sandbio.htm
http://home.grics.net/sandburgsite/
American poet, historian, novelist, and folklorist Carl Sandburg was burn January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois and died July 22, 1967, in Flat Rock, N.C.


CHICAGO POEMS by Carl Sandburg, New York: Henry Holt And Company. Copyright 1916 by Henry Holt and Company, Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg; digitized by Cardinalis Etext Press, C.E.K.; posted to Wiretap June 1993, as chicago.txt — Text in the Public Domain. PREFATORY NOTE: Some of these writings were first printed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Chicago. Permission to reprint by courtesy of that publication, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt






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