A Hymn of Empire and Other Poems

by Frederick George Scott

 

THE KING'S BASTION

(Quebec)

 
FIERCE on this Bastion beats the noonday sun,
    The city sleeps beneath me old and gray,
    On convent roofs the quivering sunbeams play,
And batteries guarded by dismantled gun.
No breeze comes from the northern hills, which run
5
    Circling the blue mist of the summer’s day;
    No ripple stirs the great stream on its way
To those dim headlands where its rest is won.

Ah God! what thunders shook these crags of yore!
    What smoke of battle rolled about this place!
10
        What strife of worlds in pregnant agony!
Now all is hushed, yet here in dreams once more
    We catch the echoes, ringing back from space,
        Of God’s strokes forging human history.