Sarah Binks

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120It may be that Sarah's spelling is sometimes at fault. Just as she had previosly used the word, balsam, where she probably meant balm, so in BALBUS WILL PLUCK A GRAPE, she uses the Roman word for corn, frumentum, where the context clearly calls for the English, fermentum. The context here appears to be a Roman festival or picnic celebrating the first ripening of the native fruits of Saskatchwean. Sarah probably got the recipe for the frumentum from her grandfather.BALBUS WILL PLUCK A GRAPEBalbus will pluck a grape! My Friends, This ceremony marks the season's turning: We gather here to greet the day that end A Iong protracted drought and inner yearning-For lo, the year has rolled, and once again Balbus selects the first symbolic berry � In this great cornucopia of plain, Nature at least is lavish in choke-cherry.Once more will flow the sweet, at new, prairie wine In over-proof of eighty five percentum � Potato, saskatoon, and dandelion, And rhubarb have been blended in frumentum � And these � with cherry � give a mixture which Is guaranteed to kill at forty rods � Or free, in all-time high of sound and pitch, A song in praise of bacchus and the gods. ** A rather curious note in connection with this poem comes from Urchin-Smith, (Adventures in Philology, Loc. Cit.) Ho points out that in spelling Bacchus with a small b, Sarah may have had not a person but a place in mind. Intriguing!
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121With "A legislature and Roman law" Saskatchewan had finally come into its own. Sarah, no doubt, pays it fitting tribute. She must have, or she could not have written all those other cantos. But UP FROM THE MAGMA is still the unopened treasure house of Saskatchewan literature. Sooner or later it will be read completely and there is no doubt that some of Sarah's finest work still lies buried among the Tax Sales and Mortgage forclosures. Even pacing quickly through them, soy a hundred or two hundred pares at a time, the readers attention is arrested by lines of lilting beauty or vivid action. Taking it more slowly, say fifty or even twenty fire pages at a time, one cores across quiet pastoral scenes or poems of deep reflective powereand insight. Only a few can be quoted here. The unopened treasure house � Marrowfat calls it "untapped" must wait its real day. As yet the tendency is to go through it five hundred to a thousand pages at a time.Such eagerness does a dis-service to Sarah. Literature must be savored, not gulped. Sarah herself took a whole winter to write THE MAGMA, and for once in her experience it was a winter of content. True, she had shovelled � and it had been hard. But in the end she had uncovered that hidden good � and more. For literature it was Saskatchewan for herself � above all for herself � it was mastery, it was judgement, it was achievement, She sums it all up, both for Saskatchewan and for herself in those amazing lines � thos shining lines �The man whose tile has almost reached its ending, Whose coat is gone, and vest beyond repair,Whose stately pantaloons are long past mending,And shirt and undershirt admit the air;The man whose shoes have lost their first new splendorAnd � gaping � mock the passer-by with toe �Such man has difficulty to engenderThe confidence of those who run the show:
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122But let him to his home � and on the morrow Adorn himself In lavender una spat, And cover up his pantaloons, and borrow From neighbors a Prince Albert and a hat � Then show himself, and if so bo his nature To stand and talk within the public marts � They gladly send him to the legislature, Or mark him jud^e and critic of the arts.And who can help but feel for Sarah � and for Saskatchewan! Not all THE MAGMA is of such reflective power and deep insight. SQUARE DANCE, (about a hundred pages at a time) is as light and fanciful �"full of lilt and tilt," according to Miss Drool � as anything Sarah had ever written. It is almost as if she were harking back to the Grizzleykick Symphony, but nothing there, not even HI SOOKEY, approaches it in swing and swish. It sis said that Sarah had Mathilda and Ole go through the steps on the kitchen floor while her grandfather played the mouth-organ and "called", while she herself dashed off the poem keeping time with her foot. If so, it could only have been to recall a larger setting. The poem is too crowded with character for such a small kitchen, We know for certain that there was a dance in Willows that winter, and Sarah probably attended in her usual capacity as observer. She was never one to enter actively into the social life � no poet is. If she had been there might have been enough partners to go around and the obliging Kalarty, "with a handkerchief tied to his wing," would have slipped out t* the livery stable and surrendered his place in literature to Sarah who certainly had no use for it by this time.SQUARE DANCE.*The dicovery of SQUARE DANCE has been credited to James Cordite Bantam; (Folk Lore and Folk Dances of the Submarginal Areas of Western Canada., Bulletin 46, Adult Education Series, Manitoba, 1940)
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123Sing ho, for the dance, To shuffie and prance, Sing "Ladies, do-si-do!" And fiddles engage, With "Bird-in-the-cage" , Sing, "Eleben-left! " � Sing ho! Give me the square, When harmonicas blare. And the ladiea are set for the owing � And Squiffy Malarty Has made up the party, With a handkerchief tied to his wing:Swing Olga, swing Lena,Swing Kate and Katrlna,Owing Gudrun, and Bjorg, and Gertrude,Swing heavy, swing hearty,Swing Squiffy Malarty,The life of the party � and stewed.And stewedGive me the dance,Where the girls take a chance,With seam and with button and string,And swing them up higher,Before they retire --Sing ho, heigh-ho, for the swing;Sing ho, for the swirls,And the breathless girls,With the swimming delight in their eyes �Come smaller or taller,Take off the collar �Sing ho, for the exercise;Swing Daisy, swing; Betty,Swing Maisie and Letty,Swing Mirabel, Margie, and Joy,Swing Mrs McGinty,Six feet and squinty,Two hundred and twenty � and coy.Sarah was not unsocial. But the poet cannot both observe the stream of life and swim in it. This is at once his tragedy and his reward. He is conscious of an inner integrity, but aware too that this integrity must, in its very nature, be an integrity of isolation. Having its roots in the social body, the poetic spirit mustnevertheless stand apart from it, longing to enter in but she
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124but unable to do so.* And the poet thus torn but seeking always a universality, turns as often as not to nature for his solace. What he finds there depends upon the intensity of an inner conflict whose issues may not even be explicitely stated in awareness. And Sarah, "Sarah, the Woman," but every inch the poetess, may have had such an attack following SQUARE DANCE. Only thus can we explain, STOP: I AT SEA, in which for one brief moment in her whole literary career she sees nature in its harshest aspect � hostile, savage, cruel.STORM AT SEAA hail, for the sailor who puts to sea, When the wind is right, and the sky is free; But shed a tear for his sweetheart true, If he isn't home in a month or two � But shed more tears for the sailor lad, 7/hen the wind is east � and the weather's bad; Then its, into your woolies And heave, my bullies, And wind up the sails, And pull on the pullies, And shout together, Ship Ahoy � Its going to blow � and boy, oh boy.'* This point is repeatedly emphasized in the writings of the "Regina School" of poets, as witness Wraitha Dovecotes, THE POET'S PRAYER. (Republished by permission of the Editors of PLUSH.)Oh Lord, who holdest in thy hand The sift of triolet and ode, Or sonnet none can understand, And rhymeless lines of current mode, Whose reservoir of thought still brims With bright ideas when mine are spent --Guard Thou the rondels and the hymns, Of me, Thy humble instrument;Defend from attitude and mime, The metered thought, and lead the wit, From obvious and facile rhyme, And unexpected ending's pit � Above all, may I never take, Albeit light, the cynic's view That love is always on the make � However true, however true.
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125The stormclouds gather, the rigging hums, The captain shudders � and here she comes � Ripping the shingles from off the deck, The wind grows louder and louder, by Heck � Ah, many a vessel has been submersed, And gone to the bottom, caboose-end first � So its heave, my hearties,And yell, my hearties,And slug and batter the bell, my hearties, And Bend out the S.O.L. my hearties, The storm is at its worst;Ah, many a sailor, when help is past, Has gone to the bottom, caboose-end last, And many aweeping sweetheart true, Has counted and waited a month or two, Has counted and waited a month at least And written him off as predeceased �So belay, my buddy,And stay, my buddy,And let them bloody well weigh, my buddy, And stay or stow away, my buddy, When the wind is turning east.There we have it. Tragedy. Tragedy, and the long wait � a month at least. It is the age-long story of man against the elements.Why did Sarah Binks write STORM AT SEA? The sea, after all, isOle's sea, or grandfather's sea, or anybody's sea, and the brave sailors are true to the nautical tradition in not sending out the S,O.L. until it is too late. But the wind � the wind is a prairie wind, a Saskatchewan wind. And Sarah, ever since the day of the Quagmire Agricultural Society Fair had promised herself never to write another word about the wind as long as she lived. It had been a surrender, a defeat � and Sarah knew it. Always- that wind had defeated her and it always would. And she knew, too, that long aftershe herself was gone, long after Saskatchewan itself had been blown back into the geological dust from which she had unshovelled it in so many arduous cantos, that that wind would still blow -- persistent, unyeilding, powerful. But one last gesture she must make. One last
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126fling of defiance in the face of that eternal challenge. Man against the gods! Sarah against the Saskatchewan wind! She might go down under it, but she would go down asserting herself as something finally and ultimately greater � the poetic spirit flaunting itself before the destinies. What premonitions one may nave had at this hour we can never know. But this we know , that in writing STORM AT SEA at this stage of her career, she was true, not alone to herself, but to the finest traditions of poetry in every age and clime.The effort must have wearied her. STORM AT SEA is the last poem of any consequence in THE MAGMA. Hesitatingly, almost falteringly she closes her great work with four lines from an old Mission Song � not even her own;"Now is the last spike driven, New is the last tie riven, How is the last speech given � let's all go home.'
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127CHAPTER X SARAH, THE WOMAN.UP FROM THE MAGMA AND BACK AGAIN won the Wheat Pool Medal. Say what we will of Sarah's genius, acclaim her as the Sweet Songstress Of Saskatchewan, the Poet*s Poetess, or simply as Sarah, the Woman, this spontaneous and unsolicited bestowal of the highest honor in the land will always place her in the van of that never ending stream of poets which next to cereals is Saskatchewan's greatest contribution to the big, open spaces. Never again was the Wheat Pool Medal to be bestowed for poetry; "Once is enough," declared the Hon, a.i. Windheaver in pinning the medal to Sarah's breast and tieing his handkerchief around his thumb, "once, and once only has this honor been bestowed for poetry. This great organisation, the Wheat Pool, together with my good friends of Willows and district and the electors as far south as Pelvis and as far west as Quagmire who have asked me to act as their representative on this occasion because they were not sure that they could get here over the roads which have been promised for the last four years although thousands of dollars of the taxpayer's money has been spent, join me today in bestowing this honor upon you, Miss Binks, or shall I call you Sarah Binks, because I want my friends to know me as I know them, join me today and we are proud of you and Saskatchewan is proud of you and if there were more like you and the ladies of this district would get together and organize for a good, clean government, I think I could get another honor for this district, and if the new Post Office which i spoke of before is ever built I think I could get some of your verses emblazoned on it in letters of imperishable bronze or carved in gleaming tablets of immortal stone or at least concrete,
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128if we ever get a government that has the interests of the peopleat heart and not just riding around on free passes and blowing the taxpayer's money."Letters of imperishable bronze! Tablets of immortal stone!. Alas, the horse thermometer.' Already in this moment of Sarah's greatest triumph Death had marked that shining mark for its own soon aim and the daisies were burgeoning restlessly, nay, impatiently in the sod. The ringing words of the Honorable A.E. Wind-heaver, himself long since called to his reward in the Canadian Senate, were not to find their splendid realization when the new Post Office was finally built. She had written her name upon the soil of Saskatchewan, she had carved her words into the hearts of the people.The award of the Wheat Pool Medal was no mere honor to be won in competition with others, no subscriptions to be sold or portraits of Adolf McCohen to collect. It was even more than the a acclaim of Sarah's genius as a poetess. That had been established. It was a tribute, a spontaneous recognition of Sarah Binks as a public character, as a woman, and as a producer. Above all as a producer. Production was the motto and slogan of the Pool, production and a controlled market. And when the directors of the Wheat Pool made the announcement that their annual medal that year would be given in the Willows-Quagmire district to the onewho had shown the greatest productive activity and asked for nominations, what name but that of Sarah Binks, the authoress of acubic foot of UP FROM THE MAGMA AND BACK AGAIN would come firstto mind. It had been a drought year and production in almost everyother respect had reached new lows. True, there was a possibilitythat Kurt Scwanthacker, a father and a taxpayer, would be con-
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129sidered, but it would appear � Mathilda, his youngest, was now eighteen � that his producing days were over. Moreover, the medal carried with it no cash award. Honor begets honor, Sarah had won the McCohen and Meyers competition, then why not the Wheat Pool Medal. If the Willows-Quagmire district were to qualify at all, then why not Sarah Binks, the poetess, the woman. Her market was very definitely a controlled one, her productive activity amazing.Indeed, posterity may well ask, why not Sarah Binks. There was never any real doubt as to her qualifications. Sarah was henceforth to belong to Saskatchewan for all tim's. The Reeve and Councillors of the Municipality of North Willows, and the Associated Boards of Trade of Quagmire and Pelvis, were unanimous in nominating Sarah Binks , the author of UP FROM THE MAGMA AND BACK AGAIN to the honor of the Wheat Pool Medal and moved that nominations close. Nor did the directors of the Wheat Pool hesitate. The Secretary was asked to read UP FROM THE MAGMA AND BACK AGAIN and to bring in a favorable report. Indeed, the minutes of the annual meeting of the Wheat Pool indicate that the entire poem, on the motion of the chairman, "be taken as read", and is so recorded.Sarah wrote two poems for the occasion of the presentation of the medal. One is a personal tribute to the Hon. A.E, Windheaver, who made the presentation, and the other a gracious and graceful tribute to the Saskatchewan farmer, which, with a fine sense of fitness she dedicates to her father. It is one of her deeply reflective works in which she shows the attachment of the farmer for and to the soil, and discusses the finely adjusted balance of nature;
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130TO MY FATHER, JACOB BINKS.I used to think the cut-worm and the weevil, Were things that blindly come and go by chance, And Hessian-fly an undiluted evil, To make the farmer shudder in his pants; But now I know they hold him to his acre, For could he ever win and take his ease, He'd up and leave his hinder and his breaker, And give the precious land back to the Crees.I used to think the beetle and the hopper Were but a pest, but now I realise That French-weed as a yield is right and proper, And out-worms are a blessing in disguise; That rust, and hail, and stem-rot are protection, And what we call the drought-year is a means To keep the farmer on his quarter section, Although it makes him tremble in his jeans.The things that we call trials are a warning, The thing we call the gopher is a boon, For should a crop appear some early morning, The farmer would be gone by afternoon; The hopper should be cherished and be shielded, And Hessian fly is something we should trust � If what we call the crop is ever yielded, You'll never see the farmer for his dust. It is a poem which definitely places her among the Immortals. Even her father, Jacob Binks was moved. The actual presentation of the Wheat Pool Medal had been described by the special correspondents of the Hitching POST and theQuagmire INFLUENTIAL, both under the heading, "New Post Office forWillows." Sarah, we are told, wore her white dress for the occasion,and Ole and Jacob Binks occupied positions of prominence on the stagetogether with a group of representative citizens and the Committeein charge of the arrangements. The INFLUENTIAL gives the Hon. A.E.Windheaver'a speech in full and also reprints Sarah's tribute tothat statesman which she recited after receiving the medal;
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131TO THE HONORABLE A.E.WINDHEAVER.I left this place an ignorant youth, In homespun shirt and fortunes wrecked, But came hack wiser than my fondest hope Could have led me to expect; My voice is heard where conglomerate men. My name in the Government books,And I have fine frock-coat, striped pants, and a vest, And keen, intellectual looks.The account in the Hitching POST, (which at that time was Conservative, hut has since become United Parmer, C.C.F., Reconstruction, Social Credit, United Bible Student, Birth Control, Vegetarian, and Liberal,) omits to mention the presence of the Honorable Windheaver, but reprints in full the dedication to Jacob Binks, and is unstinting in its praise of the Wheat Pool.Of particular interest and significance is the editorial in the Willows SHEET, under the heading, "Local Girl Makes Good.""The high place in the world of letters which our own Sarah Binks, daughter of Jacob Binks, the Chairman of the School Board, has carved for herself, culminating in the highest honor which it is the privilege of Saskatchewn to bestow, will always be a source of satisfaction and pride to the people of this community. The large crowds which gathered last Wednesday to attend the ceremony at which she received the Wheat Pool Medal from one of this Province's most distinguished hands, attest to the interest in poetry and to the admiration which her published work has received. But to us, the citizens of Willows and surrounding district, this presentation is more than the mere acknowledgement of her ability as a poetess. There are many of us who have never, and probably never will read her greatest work, UP FROM THE MAGMA AND BACK AGAIN, said to be very powerful. The crowds, therefore, that gathered last Wednesday afternoon in the skating rink, as well as those which gathered in the two overflow meetings at the Clarendon Hotel and the Commercial House, at which Sarah's kinsman, Thadeus T. Thurnow, consented to preside, speak all the more eloquently of the personal esteem in which our local poetess is held by all. To us, Sarah Binks is more than the winner of the Wheat Pool Medal. To us, she is one of ourselves. She has grown up among us, attended our school, and done most of her shopping at our stores. We have seen her grow from the first grade into young womanhood. Some of us have read her poems and followed her literary career and all of us have followed her trip to Regina with more than usual interest. In so far as she was able to take time off from poetry she has taken her part in community

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