Page:Canadian poems of the great war.djvu/208

 Richard Scrace

Richard Scrace is the pen-name of Mrs J. B. Williamson ef Guelph, Ontario. England, My Dreamland, was first published m The Queen, London, England; and Venice in The Globe.

ENGLAND, MY DREAMLAND

YOU call from your chalk cliffs! But I am in a garden green, And a wide sea between, England, my dreamland!

To me your hedge flowers, daffodils

Remote as fairy gold; and yet,

The kinship-sense, that in me lives

A life unchecked by earth s regret,

Has found its closest touch with kin

Beside some ivied manor-wall.

I tread the roads of centuried dust

And dew-distilled enchantments fall.

All songs your poets sang, I hear.

In fields by undaunted legions won

I see their splendour, as the dawn

Shows my unwondering eyes the sun.

In war s sonorous litanies

I help the priest and people chant:

And on my cheek a chilly wind

Blows and the flaming candles slant. . ..

learned your story when my world Was compassed by the pasture bars: Learned as I learned the names of flowers And conned the mythics of the stars.

The fighting men! again they come Up from the plains of mystery: &quot;hey watch above your castle heights, The passion of the world to see.

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