Frank Oliver Call, a Canadian professor and poet who published the collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape* in 1920, wrote “Lucerne” at a time when organized tourism and rail travel were turning the sublime landscapes of Europe into packaged scenery. Call taught at Bishop’s University in Quebec, but his poetic imagination often traveled across the Atlantic. In this poem, he stands in the Swiss resort town of Lucerne, surrounded by hotels, steamers, and tour groups, and finds that the city’s famous beauty is being drowned in human greed and noise.
The poem is built around a single emotional turn: revulsion gives way to reverence. It opens with a long chain of “From” phrases that pile up the speaker’s disgust. Hotel windows stare like blank eyes, the rich flaunt while the poor cringe, and people are “drunken with wine, passion and money.” Even the visitors are not real travelers; they are “tired Cook’s tourists / Doing Switzerland on sixteen pounds,” buying a country on a budget rather than truly seeing it. Call deliberately mixes social and moral ugliness, so that wealth and poverty become almost interchangeable. The line “from all that is poor and rich and ugly” collapses class difference into a single atmosphere of corruption.
The rhythm of the opening list is deliberately jagged. The repeated “From” creates an incantatory pressure, as if the speaker cannot escape the noise of “shrieking steamers” and “bands beating out brazen music.” Harsh sounds and violent verbs accumulate: the steamers tear “the shadow of Mount Pilatus into shreds,” a striking image of mechanical power ripping apart the mountain’s natural reflection. No regular rhyme scheme controls these lines; instead, the poem’s music comes from its angry, breathless pile-up of images. Then everything changes. The speaker looks up: “I lift my eyes unto the eternal hills.” This line echoes the language of the Psalms, turning a simple glance into a quiet act of faith. The mountains are no longer just geology; they are outlined “upon orange and crimson / By a Supreme Master with a brush of sunlight.” Here Call presents God as an artist, and the sunset as a painting that no tourist ticket can cheapen.
The key words in this transformation are visual and sacred: “eternal hills,” “orange and crimson,” “Supreme Master,” “sunlight,” and “peace.” They replace the earlier vocabulary of staring, cringing, shrieking, and beating with a quieter, more luminous language. The speaker does not say the mountains are beautiful; he says they give his soul peace. That is the poem’s central claim: the natural world can heal what human society degrades, but only if we stop treating it as a backdrop for consumption. Lucerne’s real treasure is not the hotel or the steamer, but the view that has existed long before the tourists arrived.
What makes “Lucerne” significant is its refusal to be merely a travel poem or a complaint. Call names the modern world’s cheapness with unflinching honesty, yet he also offers a way out. The lifted eyes, the silent hills, and the divine brushstroke suggest that peace is found not by buying experience but by receiving it. That tension between packaged tourism and spiritual perception still speaks to readers today, whenever a famous place feels overcrowded, commercialized, or reduced to a photograph. Call’s poem is not a postcard from Switzerland; it is an invitation to look beyond the noise.