Rejecting Evangeline

“Revenant à la Belle Acadie”—the words sang themselves over and over in my brain, but I could get no further than that one line, try as I might. I felt that it was the beginning of a song which, if only I could imprison it in my rhyme, would stick in the hearts of our men of Acadie, and live upon their lips, and be sung at every camp and hearth fire, as “à la Claire Fontaine” is sung by the voyageurs of the St. Lawrence. At last I perceived, however, that the poem was living itself out at that moment in my heart, and did not then need the half-futile expression that words at best can give.

But I did put it into words at a later day, when at last I found myself able to set it apart and view it with clear eyes; and you shall judge, maybe, when I come to put my verses into print, whether I succeeded 2in making the words rhyme fairly and the volatile syllables march at measured pace. The art of verse has never been much practised among us Acadians, and it is a matter of some pride to me that I, a busy soldier, now here at Grand Pré and anon at Mackinaw or Natchez, taking in my hand my life more often than a pen, should have mastered even the rudiments of an art so lofty and exacting.

So, for awhile, “Home again to Acadie the Fair” was all that I could say.

It was surely enough. I had come over from Piziquid afoot, by the upper trail, and now, having crossed the Gaspereau where it narrows just above tide-water, I had come out upon the spacious brow of the hill that overlooks Grand Pré village.

Not all my wanderings had shown me another scene so wonderful as that wide prospect. The vale of the Five Rivers lay spread out before me, with Grand Pré, the quiet metropolis of the Acadian people, nestling in her apple-bloom at my feet. There was the one long street, thick-set with its wide-eaved gables, and there its narrow subsidiary lane descending from the slopes upon my left. Near the angle rose the spire of the village church, glittering like gold in the clear flood of the sunset. And everywhere the dear apple-blossoms. For it was spring in Acadie when I came home.

3Beyond the village and its one black wharf my eyes ranged the green, wind-ruffled marshes, safe behind the sodded circumvallations of their dykes. Past the dykes, on either side of “the island’s” wooded rampart, stretched the glowing miles of the flats; for the tides of Minas were at ebb. How red in the sunset, molten copper threaded with fire, those naked reaches gleamed that night! Their color was like a blare of trumpets challenging the peace of the Five Rivers.

Past the flats, smooth and dazzling to the eye at such a distance, lay the waters of Minas. Well I knew how their unsleeping eddies boiled and seethed about the grim base of Blomidon. Such tricks does memory serve one that even across that wide tranquillity I seemed to hear the depredating clamour of those tides upon the shingle.

Though it was now two years since I had seen the gables and apple-trees of Grand Pré, I was in no haste to descend into the village. There came a sudden sinking at my heart, as my heart inquired, with unseasonable pertinence, by what right I continued to call Grand Pré “home”? The thought was new to me; and that I might fairly consider it I seated myself upon the broad stump of a birch-tree, felled the preceding winter.

By far the smaller portion of my life had been spent in the Acadian village—only my early boyhood, before the years of schooling at Quebec; 4and afterwards the fleeting sweetness of some too brief visits, that lay in my memory like pools of enchanted leisure in a desert of emulous contentions. My father, tenderest and bravest of all men that I have known, rested in an unmarked grave beside the northern wash of the Peribonca. My uncle, Jean de Mer, Sieur de Briart, was on the Ohio, fighting the endless battle of France in the western wildernesses. His one son, my one cousin, the taciturn but true-hearted Marc, was with his father, spending himself in the same quarrel. I thought with a longing tenderness of these two—the father full of high faith in the triumph of New France, the son fighting obstinately in what he held a lost cause, caring mainly that his father still had faith in it. I wished mightily that their brave hands could clasp mine in welcome back to Grand Pré. I thought of their two fair New England wives, left behind at Quebec to shame by their gay innocence the corruption of Bigot’s court. Kindred I had none in Grand Pré, unless one green grave in the churchyard could be called my kin—the grave wherein my mother’s girlish form and laughing eyes had been laid to sleep while I was yet a child.

Yes, I had no kinsfolk to greet me back to Grand Pré; no roof of mine that I should call it home. But friends, loyal friends, would welcome me, I knew. There was Father Fafard, the firm 5and gentle old priest, to whom, of course, I should go just as if I were of his flesh and blood. Then there were the De Lamouries—

Yes, to be sure, the De Lamouries. And here I took myself by the chin and laughed. I know that, for all my verses, I am in the main a soldier, yet I am so far a poet as to suffer myself to befool myself at times, and get a passing satisfaction out of it. But I always face the fact before I express it in act. I acknowledged to myself that I had been thinking of the De Lamouries’ pleasant farmhouse, and of somewhat that it contained, when I sang “Home again to Acadie the Fair.”