Page:Canadian poems of the great war.djvu/154

 Jesse Edgar Middleton

An Associate Editor of The News Toronto. Author of Sea Dogs and Men at Arms a popular book of war verse, published by G. P. Putnam s Sons, New York, and McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, Toronto. Born in the township of Pilkington, Wellington county, Ontario, November 3rd, 1872, son of Rev. H. Middleton (Methodist} an Englishman by birth, and Margaret Agar, a native of York county, Ontario.

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��THE CANADIAN

NEVER saw the cliffs of snow,

The Channel billows tipped with cream. The restless, eddying tides that flow

About the Island of my dream. I never saw the English downs

Upon an April day, The quiet, old Cathedral towns,

The hedgerows white with may.

And still the name of Hngland Which tyrants laugh to scorn

Can thrill my soul. It is to me A very bugle-horn.

A thousand leagues from Plymouth shore,

In broader lands I saw the light. I never heard the cannon roar

Or saw a mark of England s might; Save that my people lived in peace,

Bronzed in the harvest sun, And thought that tyranny would cease,

That battle-days were done.

And still the flag of Hngland Streamed on a friendly breeze,

And twice two hundred ships of war Went surging through the seas.

I heard Polonius declaim

About the new, the golden age,

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