Saga of Leif the Lucky: Part 1 -

Leif was a man's name.
Over the huge, bold shoulder of the world he came,
Into a land as lonesome as a star
That God had set aside
For mortals not to mar, —
Too huge for men, —
Not till Leif's sons set foot upon the moon
Will such a deed as his be done again.

Leif Erikson came rowing up the Charles
In the sea-battered dragon-ships,
Stroked by the strong, blond carls,
The rattle of whose oars
Had wakened sea-lions on the glacial shores
Of Greenland, where the white Christ newly ruled.
Leif brought the old gods, too,
The grim, scarred northern crew.
Though Olaf had baptized Leif,
Grace irked him strangely
As rust upon a knife,
And he feared the hammer of Thor
And the voice of the Norns, —
He was by sea-winds schooled;
Mystery and fighting his trade, —
And men had heard the braying of his horns
Above the boom and pother of the seas;
Thorgunna, the Sorceress, heard them at the Hebrides,
And Icelandic fjords, and dwellers
In the low-eaved stone huts of Greenland villages,
Now roofless to the Arctic sky
And the cold's malice,
Five centuries staring up like a skull's eye
At the ghost dance of the borealis.
Leif steered southwest,
Watching the stars slip
Over the carved hair of the dragon's crest,
Until he drove on foggy coasts,
With great, flat rocks, porches to bleak plateaus,
Where crowding icebergs grind,
Next, a landfall of dark forests piled like thunderheads
Against long, frosty hills behind.
Then south,
Past inland-twinkling mountains
And a vast river mouth,
While vague voices bellowed at them from the sea.
In calms they heard the breathing whales;
Strange fish leaped flapping on their decks;
Spears winked in starlight
As they patched the ragged sails
Or polished shields with ballast sand,
Staggering up quivering mountains to the stars —
Staggering down —
Leaving a spuming wake,
Till a great tongue of land
Turned them west again
Into a river and a lake.
So Lief came rowing up the Charles,
He and his golden-bearded carls.

Others came after him,
Bringing Norwegian women
With gold-wire braided hair.
These men built dams and cut the masur wood,
Floating it down to Norumbega Town,
Where by stone quays
The long ships lay with folded sails,
That in the spring took wing,
Carrying the wart-wood and the skins
To Iceland, to Norway.
There craftsmen turned the wood to rune-carved bowls
And sold them to the king
Or to the priests,
And the berserks gulped from them
At the feasts,
" Vas hael " ,
In frothing mead and ale.
All this was sung by skalds
In saga tunes,
And set down by Olaf's priests in runes,
And then forgot.
Plague fell on Greenland villages,
Breaking the last link in the chain,
Till the news died from lips of men
Through the dark years
And no ships came to Vinland coasts again.