Determination
Sunday Missive
Thought.
By Thomas Frederick Young (? – 1940)
The blight of life, the demon, Thought—BYRON.
With demon’s shriek or angel’s voice,
‘Mid hellish gloom, or heav’nly light,
Thought haunts our path o’er land and sea,
And dwells with us, by day and night.
In roomy hall, or narrow hut,
It withers, blasts and kills with gloom,
Or gently onward smooths the path
Of him, who gives the tyrant room.
With siren voice it soothes our woe;
It dwells with us in blissful dreams;
But when we wake, it tells us then,
That it is far from what it seems.
Rebellious o’er its prostrate slave,
Its iron chain of bondage swings,
Or, govern’d by a master hand,
In numbers loud and strong, it sings.
And, with its keys of rarest mould,
Its stores of hoarded wealth unlocks,
It dives for man beneath the sea,
And cleaves for him the hardest rocks.
Forever thus it lives and acts,
With angel host, or demon throng,—
To sing with voice of heav’nly love,
Or shout, with dismal, hellish song.
Thus shall it live, thus shall it act,
While ages shall their cycles roll;
It leaves us when we reach the grave
But oh? it rises with the soul.
And still it lives in that beyond,
As here it lives in this our sphere,
To light our road and cheer our path,
Or torture us with nameless fear.
This poem was published in the collection Canada, and Other Poems.
It is in the public domain.
Thomas Frederick Young is not a well-known poet, nor was he prolific. I was unable to find biographical notes about him which I felt were accurate, much less germane.
One site claimed he was an American poet, so clearly everything else was highly suspect, especially his date of birth listed as 1892, rendering the volume a remarkable feat of genius for someone who would not be born for another five years.
Another source showed the place of publication as Port Arthur, and a third as Port Albert. Clearly, neither is Toronto, and in any case, it was the Preface that was written in Port Albert.
In another fallacious gaffe, The Internet Archive classifies the collection as “americana”[sic]. Now, some have called the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, but the only gulf there is the cognitive deterioration demonstrated by a functional IQ equal to the the latitude of Canada, which, even at its northernmost point at Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, is 83°. Or maybe that’s the bastard’s core temperature where the heart is located in most humans.
Just to make sure it wasn’t meant in the larger sense of the North American Continent or The Americas, I checked their definition:
The American Libraries collection includes material contributed from across the United States. Institutions range from the Library of Congress to many local public libraries. As a whole, this collection of material brings holdings that cover many facets of American life and scholarship into the public domain.
Even Project Gutenberg, one of my cherished repositories of freely available riches in the public domain, has a summary of the poet ending with: “This is an automatically generated summary.” Sorry, to me that says AI, and therefore, not in the least bit trustworthy. I would trust my cat to write a more accurate summary, but aside from having no thumbs, he refuses to do so in any case.
This did not start out as a philippic against internet dross, but it is a good reminder, across all endeavors, to Question Everything.
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These days I seem to qualify much of what I say, "According to such-and-such a source. I don't know if it's true."