Frank Oliver Call was a Canadian poet and professor of modern languages at Bishop’s College in Quebec, and his collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape* appeared in 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War. “The Old Gods” speaks directly to that disenchanted moment, when inherited religious and cultural certainties seemed to lie in ruins. Yet the poem does not simply mourn; it asks what a destructive modern skepticism can put in place of the altars it throws down.
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The phrase “Old gods are dead” tolls at the beginning of three separate quatrains, giving the poem an elegiac pulse. In the first quatrain, the imagery is of violence and decay: broken shrines, blood, trampled ground, a sunset that seems to take beauty with it as it dies. Sound, too, becomes mournful, since the speaker hears “lost music” in an echo. The second quatrain introduces the “scoffer” who stands triumphantly beside old altars. Call grants a possibility with the phrase “False gods perhaps—”, then turns sharply with a question: “but what have you to offer / Who batter down old temples in a day?” The dash makes the speaker pause, as if honestly conceding that the old gods may not have been true; but the question suggests that knocking down temples is not the same as building anything that can replace them.
The volta comes at line nine with “Old gods are dead; but still...” From that point the poem floods with durable natural images. The sunset no longer only dies; it lingers. The moonlight yields a “store of treasure,” dawn has “magic fingers,” and bluebirds move across green fields. The vocabulary shifts from the broken and profaned to verbs of motion and continuity: lingers, yields, touches, wing. Call is not denying the earlier destruction. Instead, he suggests that the divine or the beautiful was never wholly contained in the shrines. It survives in the recurring rhythms of the natural world.
The final couplet gathers the poem’s argument into a single breath: “The sea-tides ebb and flow, stars shine above, / And human hearts still long for human love.” The balance of cosmic movement and human feeling matters. Tides ebb and flow, stars shine, and hearts long. The repeated word “still” ties this couplet back to the earlier “still the sunset lingers.” What endures after the old gods is not a new theology but an old ache—the longing for love. Call places human love at the end of a chain that includes tides and stars, as if it were just as elemental.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to choose between rigid orthodoxy and empty iconoclasm. Written at a time when many felt that the modern world had shattered tradition, it insists that reverence can relocate itself. The old temples may be broken, but the experiences that made people build them—wonder at dawn, moonlight, birdsong, the need to love—remain. Call makes that argument in a carefully built sonnet, which is itself a quiet answer to the scoffer: even after old gods are declared dead, the old forms can still carry new life.