492 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
and that fine ecstasy which is life in our machine shops, in our railroad 
yards, in our tramp steamers abroad on the seas of commerce, in 
our offices, in our slums, and in our mansions of the rich. And 
this intensity and passion and ecstasy—whether it be in terms of 
love or hate or social indignation or pain or the slow horror of the dying 
poor, or the red sins of the rich—this intensity and passion and 
ecstasy is poetry latent and manifest. It is spiritual ardour to be 
extricated, emancipated by the writer of poems that our age may know 
itself and learn a reverence for its own life and a control over it. 
Yonder mechanic swung far out tense into blue air and bright sunshine 
with a hand grip and a hammer stroke at a skyscraper’s top is a poet. 
But who will tell us what he thinks, who he is, amid the vitalities of 
this vital generation of to-day. We need the writer of poems and 
poetry to do that for us. 
When we thus allow to the poet his function there is no longer 
stigma and limitation in our materialism, and all our industrial 
enterprises are on the way to becoming spiritual achievements. 
In reality poetry is everywhere latent and manifest. Indeed, the 
appeal of the propagandist need only be for the seeing eye. Poetry, 
once seen, discovered, is its own proclamation. It commends itself. 
The task of the lover of poetry among those who do not appreciate 
its ministry is not to describe and extoll. It is rather simply to 
introduce. This is the great goal to be arrived at, to come to the 
sense that all life is poetry, that the Divine ardour is everywhere. 
Once this is felt poetry is indeed in all places and the writers of poems 
are simply those of us so worthily endowed that they see further 
than we see, and are able to assist our inadequate vision and to open 
our holden eyes. They aid us in the seeing of what has been kept 
secretfrom the foundation of the world. 
I live in a rural community on the shore of the Bay of Quinte. 
One day of wind we drove for eight miles along that shore to our 
village. At a turn of the road and where it slipped down close to the 
water two black horses were startled from drinking and went galloping 
away down the wind. Eight ducks sat squat in a row on the foamy 
pebbles. They remained unmoved where the horses had been. On 
certain mornings certain green fields bordering the amber water are 
white with thousands of gulls. Once we saw four schooners driving 
into the cove out of storm. Sometimes in the evening we see 
a ship go by with all sail set and with three or four gulls follow- 
ing it on slow wings. I dreamed the other night that someone 
showed me a lot of things that have wonder about them. Among 
them were: wet roofs and pavements under your city street lights; 
a V of wild geese flying over a city with honking clangour; a grass 
