Frank Oliver Call, a Canadian poet and university professor, published “An Idol in a Shop Window” in his 1920 collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape*. Writing in the early twentieth century, when Western readers and artists were drawn to Asian artifacts, Call takes that fashion and quietly unsettles it. Instead of merely describing an antique as a lovely object, he imagines what it might feel like to be that object—a sacred figure stranded in a modern marketplace.
The poem follows Old Lohan, a Buddhist holy man rendered in bronze, who peers from a shop window into an ancient square. He is surrounded by “a jumble of curios quaint and rare,” but he waits for something far older: “the sound that the gongs and the conches made / In the days of old at the temple gates.” The central idea is displacement and endurance. The temple has been gone for “a thousand years,” yet the Lohan remains, patient and uncomprehending. Call does not let him grieve; “his heart is bronze, and he does not know” that his sacred home is now “a mound of dust where the bamboos grow.” The poem therefore holds two perspectives in tension: the reader sees a dusty curiosity in a shop, while the idol sees the passing crowds as fleeting visitors to his stillness.
Call constructs the poem as six quatrains with alternating rhymes and a steady, song-like rhythm. That regularity imitates the unchanging passage of “nights and the days” and the slow arc of the sun “up and down the sky.” The rhyme pairs often bind present and past, as when “glass” meets “pass” or “jade” meets “made.” The word “dusty” appears early and again in the description of the ruined temple, so the dust on the shop-window ledge feels like the same dust that swallowed the old faith. The key image of the “robe of gold and jade” gives the idol richness, but that richness is now behind glass, admired rather than worshipped.
Perhaps the most delicate part of the poem is its treatment of consciousness. The idol “heaves no sighs and he sheds no tears,” yet he looks with a “wistful gaze” and drifts into “a mystic dream / Of his poppy-land of long ago.” This language is deliberately dreamy and romantic, full of “sacred stream” and “kneeling throng,” as if the idol’s memory is not exact history but a hazy vision of lost reverence. By naming him Old Lohan, Call ties the figure to Buddhist tradition; he is not a random ornament but a holy being who once inspired devotion. That makes his present role—as one more “curio” in a jumble—quietly poignant.
The poem’s significance lies in the way it reverses the usual act of looking. The shoppers may glance at the window, but the idol watches them. At the end he “sometimes smiles as he sees the crowd / Of human folks that pass him by”; then he wraps himself in his “mystic shroud,” and the sun goes down once more. The smile could be read as superiority, pity, or simply the fixed expression of bronze. Either way, Call gives the object a final quiet dignity. In a time when Western culture was collecting Eastern art, this lyric reminds us that behind the glass is not just a thing but a survivor of a vanished world, keeping its own silent watch.