Johnson, E. Pauline. “The Lost Lagoon.” Flint and Feather. 1912. 6th ed. Toronto: Musson, 1920.

Today in 1861, E. Pauline Johnson was born in Chiefswood, near Brantford, Ontario, on the Six Nations Reserve.  In honour of her birthday, the Stanley Park History Group and the Stanley Park Ecology Society are hosting a photographic exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson.  The exhibit is open between noon and 3 pm at Lost Lagoon Nature House in Stanley Park (Vancouver, BC, Canada).

Flint and Feather is a collection of poems comprising Johnson’s earlier The White Wampum (1895) and Canadian Born (1903) as well as the addition of a number of miscellaneous poems. “The Lost Lagoon” appears in the “Miscellaneous Poems” section, but was originally published as the introduction to the story of “Deadman’s Island” in her Legends of Vancouver (1911).

The Lost Lagoon

It is dusk on the Lost Lagoon,
And we two dreaming the dusk away,
Beneath the drift of a twilight grey—
Beneath the drowse of an ending day
And the curve of a golden moon.

It is dark in the Lost Lagoon,
And gone are the depths of haunting blue,
The grouping gulls, and the old canoe,
The singing firs, and the dusk and—you,
And gone is the golden moon.

O! lure of the Lost Lagoon—
I dream to-night that my paddle blurs
The purple shade where the seaweed stirs—
I hear the call of the singing firs
In the hush of the golden moon.