The Higher Kinship

William Wilfred Campbell 1860 (Newmarket) – 1918 (Ottawa)



Life is too grim with anxious, eating care
       To cherish what is best. Our souls are scarred
       By daily agonies, and our conscience marred
   By petty tyrannies that waste and wear.
   Why is this human fate so hard to bear?
       Could we but live with hill-lakes silver-starred,
       Or where the eternal silence leaneth toward
   The awful front of nature, waste and bare:

   Then might we, brothers to the lofty thought
       And inward self-communion of her dream,
   Into that closer kin with love be brought,
   Where mighty hills and woods and waters, wan,
   Moon-paved at midnight or godlike at dawn,
       Hold all earth's aspirations in their gleam.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

32 sec read
85

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABBAABXA CDCXXD
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 678
Words 108
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 8, 6

William Wilfred Campbell

William Wilfred Campbell (1 June ca. 1860 – 1 January 1918) was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott; he was a colleague of Lampman and Scott. By the end of the 19th century, he was considered the "unofficial poet laureate of Canada." Although not as well known as the other Confederation poets today, Campbell was a "versatile, interesting writer" who was influenced by Robert Burns, the English Romantics, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Tennyson. Inspired by these writers, Campbell expressed his own religious idealism in traditional forms and genres.  more…

All William Wilfred Campbell poems | William Wilfred Campbell Books

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