Our Canadian Fatherland

OUR CANADIAN FATHERLAND

By Agnes Maule Machar (~1935)

I

WHAT is our young Canadian land?

Is it fair Norembega’s strand?

Or grey Cape Breton by the sea?

Quebec? Ontario? Acadie?

Or Manitoba’s flower-decked plain?

Or fair Columbia’s mountain chain?

Can any part, from strand to strand,

Be a Canadian’s Fatherland?

Nay, for our young Canadian land

Is greater, grander far than these;

It stretches wide on either hand

Between the world’s two mighty seas.

So let no hostile foot divide

The fields our feet should freely roam;

Gael, Norman, Saxon, side by side,

And Canada our nation’s home;

From sea to sea, from strand to strand.

Spreads our Canadian Fatherland.

II

Where’er our country’s banner spreads

Its folds o’er free Canadian heads—

Where’er our land’s romantic story

Enshrines the memory and the glory

Of heroes who with blood and toil

Laid deep in our Canadian soil

Foundations for the future age,

And wrote their names on history’s page—

Our history—from strand to strand,

Spreads our Canadian Fatherland!

So each to each is firmly bound

By ties all generous hearts should own;

We cannot spare an inch of ground:

No severed part can stand alone.

So Nova Scotia and Quebec

Shall meet in kinship real and true;

New Brunswick’s hills be mirrored back

In fair Ontario’s waters blue.

From sea to sea, from strand to strand,

Spreads our Canadian Fatherland!

III

Where’er Canadian thought breathes free.

Or strikes the lyre of poesy—

Where’er Canadian hearts awake

To sing a song for her dear sake,

Or catch the echoes, spreading far,

That wake us to the noblest war

Against each lurking ill and strife

That weakens now our growing life,

No line keep hand from clasping hand—

One is our young Canadian land.

McGee and Howe she counts her own;

Hers all her eastern singers’ bays;

Frechette is hers, and in her crown

Ontario every laurel lays:

Let CANADA our watchword be,

While lesser names we know no more;

One nation spread from sea to sea,

And fused by love from shore to shore;

From sea to sea, from strand to strand,

Spreads our Canadian Fatherland!