Sarah Binks

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108she accept the responsibilities of her calling;Let no one say, when I have reached my ending, The poet find his balsam of relief In only joy and laughter for life's mending, And never throws a passing glance at grief:Art may be nothing but a thin chimera, To get us down, but still 'twere better said; "She wrote! Beneath this marble slab lies Sarah, A Poetess � and prematurely dead."For he whose brow would wear the jaunty laurel Must never let the lines of sorrow fade� Literature is mostly doleful choral, And grief the poets a steady stock in trade.but it was never for long. The Sarah who had passed through Darkest Africa, and had come out whole and with a horse-thermometer, could never again sink into real despondency, "Give me a line to fling at fame*, she cries with her next breath, "that deals not with k the woes of man". She will have none of it, a^p^ast none of it as written upon man's countenance, and least of all her own:Oivo me a line to fling at farse, That deals not with the woes of man, Whose troubles of the day and dame, Are writ in wrinkles on his pan; That furrowed story of his trials, And calendar of years on earth, May noble be m hut give me dials That split from ear to ear in mirth.Each winter's frost-bite, and the bug That greets the spring will leave it mark, As wail as sorrow on the mug Of infant youth, and patriarch � But all those records of this vale, And time, and life's enobling grief, Embossed in Gothic or in Braille, I'd leave to others, just as lief.All too little is known of UP PROM THE MAGMA, AND BACK AGAIN. It has never yet been read in its entirety. Of the canto written in Mound Builder only a few paragraphs are as yet available to the
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109reader in English. Always a difflcult language to translate, thework is proceeding slowly and with great caution so as not to losethe finer shades of meaning which Sarah iiinka intended to convey* Butalready it is becoming increasingly apparent that Sarah, with theinsight of genius, has called forth from Saskatchewans historic pastcharacters who speak to us across the years in words whioh never die.And from those living pages Vesuvius, the Mound Builder, steps forth,and his voice is the voice of Saskatchewan:My Friends.' You have heard Afflatus. You have heard Afflatus say to you, "Come and be my friends. We will build mounds, and yet more mounds. There will be work for all!" Four years ago you heard. Afflatus say these things. And again today. Has Afflatus built mounds? Yes. Some. Put what mounds! My friends, there is a big difference between building a mound and throwing up a heap of dirt. (Cheers) I say this to you about Afflatus; he will be building them upside-down next. (Loud laughter) And what about the roads! What about the mounds if there is no road to get to them! When I charged him with this, what said then the Honorable Afflatus? He said, "We build for posterity; let posterity worry about the roads." I have said to Afflatus, "Posterity is just around the corner." But did Afflatus build roads? Hell, no.' Afflatus was too busy riding around. Afflatus was too busy hiring comely maidens to keep the records of what he calls his administration. How many of these maidens actually work for Afflatus? It might be worth your while to ask. (Prolonged applause.)Vesuvius, Caesar, Eagle-Feather. Heroic figures these, which only Sarah could conceive. They tower as giants across the plains. But Sarah had too fine a sense of literary values to be always in the heroic mood. There are passages in THE MAGMA of lilting beauty as in NOW IT IS DONE. There are quiet pastoral scenes, as in OMNIS-CIENT PLAN. There are pictures of merry-making, as in THE SQUARE DANCE, of tho husbandman at work, as in HIAWATHAS MILKING. There is that touching tribute to motherhood, LITTLEPAPOOSE. There is above all that stupedduous blast of prairie wind, STORM AT SEA. As yet these are but fragments of the larger
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110picture which must still be pieced together. But What fragments.'Of those cantos of UP FROM THE MAGMA which have already beenread the best known is that dealing with the Red Brother of the plaine, CANTO IV,THE SKIN AGE Sarah, still shovelling,had by this and with theaid of harden and Rckbuster from whose text whole passages had been lifted bodily and Bet to Terse, exposed the whole geological structure of Saskatchewan. But geology, as we know, was to her only the background of the future. Already she had written,In schist, and schistose rocks are writ the bans, "For him whose eye can Runic read, and oast The other optic upward till it spans, In tortured gaze the future and the past: For such a one that panoramic view Shows rook to soil, and soil to groat and greens � Hay, such a one already smells the stew Of beet and barley bubbling with the beans.The inner eye, the inner noso � it matters little with what faculty the poet is most endowed. To divine the future or to recreate the past was, for Sarah, all in a days work. But in the case Of THE SKIN AGE she had at least one foot in the present. Here she was on something very close to the home grounds.Sixteen miles north of Willows lay the thriving town of Quagmire. Immediately north of Quagmire's own Railroad Avenue, and extending for half a mile into the open prairie, lay the hundred or more scatteredcabins of the Macdonalds and the Robideauxs, all that was left inSarah's experience of the Red Brother of the plains. But it was enough. Ole had been there, and �- in his younger days � her grandfather had been there quite often. Even Sarah, on the day of the Quagmire Agricultural Society Fair, had made it a point � since she had arrived in Quagmire that day even before the Midway Special train � to wander north of Railroad Avenue into what the Quagmire citizens
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111tolerantly referred to as "the reservation." With suchfirst hand, or almost first hand experience of the Red Brother, someof them, to quote Jacob Binks, "pretty dam' 'pale," Sarah had littledifficulty in visualising the Ojibway-Cree at his romantic best.It is on the basis of Sarah's first hand experience of the BedBrother that we may dismiss at once the suggestion of P.S.Urchin-Smiththat Sarah would likely hare written CANTO IV, THE SKIN AGE in theoriginal Ojibway as she had written CANTO III In Mound-Builder, wereit not for the fact that the language of th Ojlbway-Cree had, withfar-sighted Intention, been so constructed that no two words wouldrhyme. Sarah would have rhymed it anyway. Her knowledge of the MoundBuilders is admittedly somewhat vague, and she employs the best medium in which to express herself, even as in her Darkest Africa her poetry becomes uncertain and confused � but still English. And where she has solid material to work on as in the case of the Red Brother, It is very definitely English. She could not have written CANTO IV in any other language than that in which her thoughts and experiences were framed.The SKIN AGE opens appropriately enough with a lyric to an Ojibway maiden � "a tone picture of infinite felicity" accordingl to Miss Rosalind Drool, "done in miniature."Patrick O'Neil O'Connell, Late of the Mounted Police, And Moon-in-the-Eyes Macdonald, Are blessed, but not by the priest;Urchin-Smith, Adventures in Philology, ASHCAN, No 6, Vol. 6.
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112For Patrick O'Neil in a glib way Has spoken to Moon-in-the-Eyes, And hex answers in English-Ojibway, Ware not what the padre advised;And although Moon would chose a cathedral, A blessing, a book, and a prayer � She's going to be dodecahedral, Since Patrick's a bit off the square.It is a charming little thing, and Miss Rosalid Drool has made much of it. Even Dr Taj Mahal has been attracted by its geometrical possibilities and declares that it needs figuring out.In writing THE SKIN AGE, in fact in writing THE MAGMA generally, Sarah must undoubtedly have received considerable inspiration from grandfather Thurnow, It was one thing to have visited Quagmire or to have observed the Brother on his occasional visits to Willows,but for their lore and romantic tradition she drew more often than not upon the unplumbed depths of the old man's memory. His was a bottomless reservoir of experience enriched with meditation and philosophical reflection � and turnipin. Only the poetic quality, the tender, the heroic, the lyrical, was lacking, and these Sarah, and only Sarah could supply. With EAGLE-FEATHER, "that gaunt shadow of valour summoned from Saskatchewan'a glorious past," she must have derived much of its material from her grandfather's � or perhaps even Ole's � frequent trips to Quagmire. But in LITTLE PAPOOSE. Sarah is definitely on her own. No account of either grandfather's or Ole's visits to "the reservation" could have suggested � quite the contrary, in fact � that sweat picture of motherhood. It is one of infinite charm. It shows the Algonquin mother singing. her infant daughter � undoubtedly a daughter � to sleep as the creeping twilight "draws its shadows across the skies." She sings, and as she sings,
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113she gives the child a little nourishment from time to time to induceslumber.Little Papoose, the twilight creeping Draws its shadows across the skies � Another hour and you'll be sleeping � Here's a pickle, close your eyes.Little Papoose, the daylight passes, And soon the night will be full of dreams � And you'll be full of bread and molasses, And stewd dried apples and tinned sordines.Little Papoose, the night grows blacker, And you'll be round as a young balloon, With two cups of tea, and fifteen crackers, And a double handfull of saskatoons.On the reservation or off it, Sarah never permits the Red XBrother to wander far from the farm. When he goes astray, as inWEST WIND, where Squawking-Hawk goes to town with his treaty moneyfor a bottle of lemon extract and "three of vanilla", she quicklybrings him home;" Blow him, West Wind, that his going, May be coming back to me, Speed him, West, or he'll be blowing All he's paid for being Cree."calls the Ojibway maiden to her lever, and he returns "swift as an arrow but not as straight." The same is true of HUNTERS MOON, wherethe Ojibway maiden calls her lover from his hunting,Red Brother, Red Brother, Sundering wild and free � Tonight its hunter's moon, Brother � How about hunting me!Hunter's moon is low, Brother, Hang up the bow of wood � And hunter's moon will show, Brother, Where the hunting's good.Hunter's moon is pale, Brother, But hark � from bush and nook, A wild voice calls, Brother, You wont have long to look.
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114Not all the verses are being quoted here. Miss Rosalind Drool, who is officially credited with its discovery in THE MAGMA, has permitted her sweeping admiration of this poem to carry her beyond the reading of it into the addition of several verses of her own, and this fact has made it difficult, according to Professor Marrowfat, "to decide which is Binks and which is Drool."In HIAWATHA'S MILKING, the Red Brother, no longer wandering, is back at his chores. Sarah, who generally contents herself with the more simple quatrains , here breaks into a new verse pattern, more, it is a said to puzzle her critics as to its source than for any need of new literary form. This is unlikely. Sarah was only too well aware that the milking of a Saskatchewan cow falls always for new forms of expression. On this occasion she uses trochaics:HIWATHA HIAWATHA'S MILKING.Give me of your milk, oh moo-cow, Of your pure white juice, oh do, cow, Reasonably white, and not too blue, cow Give me rich white milk, oh Flossie, She whom men sometimes call Bossy, She whom men sometimes call Co-boss, Sometimes So-boss, sometimes Whoa-boss, Kick not me, nor pail, I pray, cow, Or I'll bust you one from here to Cracow:And the cow, whom men call Co-boss, Sometimes So-boss, sometimes Whoa-boss, Shuddering in all its branches, Trembling like the wild Comanches, Turned upon him eyes of doleful, Eyes of sadness, eyes of soulful, Breathing deeply to inhale full, Kicked him neatly in the pail-full, Slapped him 'cross the face with tail-full, Saying with a sigh of sorrow, "Take the milk, oh Hi, tomorrow, Take my milk, oh Hiawatha, Try and get it Hiawatha"
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115There is action here, but it is subdued. Co-boss alone appears to hold the stage, and Hiawatha plays a more or lees passive role. His is more in the nature of an invocation, a hope expressed � and crushed. Sarah sensed this and shared in his defeat. Even Co-boss seems to sense it; "Eyes of doleful, eyes of soulful,* is not mere rhetoric An age was passing, a culture was going; down. Slowly the page of history was being turned upon the Red Brother and all he stood for. The long paths � "the uncharted, paths" � were the way of his feet, and although he might yet stand for a passing day, even as stood Eagle Feather, in the end Sarah must needs salute that heroic figure with a tear.EAGLE FEATHER.Salute with a tear the great departed, Give solemn thoughts and a sigh for them � And For Eagle Feather, on paths uncharted, Sing appropriate requiem: Sing the nook where he had his hour, Sing the Eagle, his best and worst mm Here's where he stood like the leaning tower, Lost in his thoughts mm and his cosmic thirst;Sing that impassive face of leather � Silent, inscrutable, Eagle Feather.'Gone from his quoin 'till his days are counted, Carried away to a new frontier � He mixed it up with the North-West Mounted � Eagle Feather has got a year mm A year and a day � but a day worth telling � With the surge of battle deep within � Mothers screaming � fathers yelling � Somebody gave him a quart of gin � Sing that day � and his year � together � Back on the war-path � Eagle Feather.'Back to the war-whoop, shrill and throaty, Back to the buffalo � back to the plains � Chase, and be chased, by 'the wild coyote � Plug the pale-face � scalp the remains � Back to the bow � and the covered waggon � Back � The Eagle � Chief for the day � And back to the Joy of the white man's flaggon � Eagle Feather has been put away:Here's where he stood, in wind and weather � Gone from his haunts is; Eagle Feather.
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116EAGLE FEATHER is true to the finest traditions of the West.Sarah, keenly aware of this, gave it everything she had � suspense, dramatic intensity, action � above all action, quickened and sustained by "Somebody gave him a quart of gin.* Por one brief momentthe page of history is again lifted, and. across it stalks EagleFeather, splendid, confident, arrogant, a symbol of Saskatchewans most glorious past. Nor has Saskatchewan failed to recognize its greatness. Year after year, with unfailing re^larity it has been placed on the List of Supplementary fading for the Schools.With the closing of CANTO IV, Tin-- SKIN AGE, Sarah took a day off. She was feeling faintly unwell.Concerning the other nine cantos of UP FROM THE MAGMA TOGETHERtogether with the Prologue, the Epilogue, the Index, and the full page illustration of the thirteen Schwantzhacker sisters, little can be said. Certainly no coherent literary account can as yet be given. They have not been read. The scholars of literature can not be called strictly to account. After all, to read a full cubic foot of closely written manuscript and to translate one complete canto from Mound-Builder into English, is no light task. Sarah's manuscript also presents an additional difficulty in that her thought or verse is frequently carried over to the other side of the page, where � except to the most earnest and dedicated scholar � it tends to become lost among the domestic confusion of the articles which are being put up for auction. Moreover, there are some splendid bargains in TaxSales and under Chattel Mortgage Forclosures, and these, emphasizedby the unvarying succession of four or five hundred pages before changing to several hundred pages of an even better bargain, must be regarded as no inconsiderable factor in the literary scholars' also taking a day off.
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117Under ouch handicaps there must always be a certain amount of surmize and speculation. And just what Sarah Binks had in mind when she entitled the next canto, THE ROMAN OCCUPATION, we do not fully know. Scholars are agreed that It may be necessary to read the entire canto before we do. The suggestion has been made that Sarah's attendance at the billows school was frequently interrupted by the extra chores following Ole's own attendance at political meetings of national importance, and that Sarah may easily have been at school on those days in which British history was being taught while under the impression that it was still Canadian. It is a common error, and the suggestion may not readily be dismissed. But even though we Tant the possibility of Sarah having her two histories nixed, it seems odd that .she should have placed the Soman Occupation after the Ojibway-Cree in point of time. A somewhat plausible explanation offered by Taj Mahal is that Sarah got not her histories but the numbering of her pages mixed. This would be unusual for Sarah. She may have been weak in history, but as the daughter of Jacob Binks she could certainly count.Sarah, after all, was writing not a history but a literature. And regardless of 'here she put, or perhaps intended to put the Roman Occupation, in a way it meant digging Saskatchewan out all overagain, leaving regard for her ov;n collection in the back yard to put Saskatchewanians back into an age of pottery shards, which for her meant "broken flower pots and cups without handles mixed with ashes," and bronze coins "withwhich you cant buy anything in this country," was hardly what the her sense of the dramatic unities called for. Sarah was not going to do all that shovelling for nothing. She therefore slurs over this aspect of the Roman occupation, and it is quite possible that had her
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118grandfather been able to help her with the language us he hud. done with the Mound-Builder, she could have written this canto in Roman.What had captured Sarah's immagination was the Romans themselves. She caw them always in terms of dignity md greatness. It had been no indifferent compliment to the Premier to hare cast him in the role of Cincinnatus, or to have given the Hired Man "knees, like Hercules'. And the entrance of Caesar Into Saskatchewan, together with the admiring chorus of the bystanders as to his rank and privilege, is attended with all the pomp and splendor of the Honorable Grafton Tabernackle at the opening of the Quagmire Agricultural Society Fair:Here comes Caesar! Pound the drums! Blow the bagpipes! Caesar comes! Crowd the platform! Pull up tight! That's him -- the Honorable Caesar, alright! The one with the badge, and the bag of fixtures, Yep, that's Caesar � just like his pictures! Hia are the cares, and the joys of state � A good man to know � and to emulate.Chorus;Caesar is Caesar, for all that's in it, A job on the census, a seat in the senate, An office East, a farm on the prairie, A pass on the train with his secretary, A yacht on the bay, a band like Sousa's, And a suite full of starry-eyed lallapaloozos.What Sarah meant by the "bag of fixtures" we again do not know. That it "began to leak", we are told in the second verse Just after the line,Some kid gives him a bunch of pansies, but no one can be sure. Sarah has a disconcerting habit of using a term in some unusual or special sense in her treatment of the Romans, and
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119sometimes she herself Is not sure of their meaning, and admits it. "What ho, lictor, whatever that is," she declares franklyin LICTOR, CLEAR THE WAY. Evidently by the time this fragment waswritten the Roman occupation was well under way.LICTOR, CLEAR THE WAY.What ho, lictor, whatever that is, Clear the way with mattock, saw, Slash the scrub where the lurking rat is, Catamount, out-worm , courriere de bois, Lay out streets, perspiring hewer, Level them off with scoop and claw, Point the way for a road and sewer, A legislature, and Roman law.Wo one seems seems to find out exactly what lictor or lictor's Job is* in this development, but he is a hard worker and Sarah keeps him at it. Saskatchewan rust have been booming again at that time.* An Interesting comment which thrown some light on the possible meaning of the word lictor. comes from on of the retired old-timers of Quagmire, Josiah Sweetings, who for years was associated with the development of Regina. When LICTOR, CLEAR THE WAY, was first read to him by press representative, he is reported to have said;"Roman law is right! It must have been back in 1911 or 1912. A group of us had formed a small syndicate to take up where the, Romans left off. Cut-worms didn't bother us none, and this develpment wasn't out far enough to run into courriere de bois. But catamounts! Boy! There was one in particular whom the men used to call Rosie. And was she a hell-cat, or was she a hell-cat.' This was supposed to be high close residential stuff, and we had to buy her out � goodwill and all. Looking back I'd say that Rosie was the only one who ever ma made any money out of that development. I sometimes wonder who was lictor and who was licked in that whole game. Certainly not one of us has a damn cent now

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