When Frank Oliver Call published “The Lotus-Worshippers” in his 1920 collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape*, he was a Quebec-born poet and professor at Bishop’s University whose work often moved between French and English literary traditions. The poem reflects that cosmopolitan reach while also turning inward. It is a Petrarchan sonnet about ancient Buddhist worshippers, yet it ends not in Asia but beside a Canadian lake, where the same impulse stirs in the speaker.
The octave begins in motion: “With silent feet in trailing robes of white,” figures leave “shadowy temples” and “tall bamboo groves” to seek a lotus pond. Call gives the pond a striking metaphor: it “gleamed like some dark jewel through the night / Upon great Buddha’s breast.” The earth becomes a body, and the pond its ornament, so the worshippers’ journey is at once physical and spiritual. Their chant rises as “the crimson height” catches the sunrise, and every lotus bud, “breaking from its silver bond,” lifts its cup to the golden light. The regular iambic pentameter and the octave’s enclosed rhymes create a slow, processional music. White, shadowy, silver, and gold are not merely decorative colours; they mark the movement from moonlit temple mystery to sunlit revelation.
The volta arrives with “And here,” shifting the poem from a distant scene to the speaker’s present. He stands beside a “mist-bound northern lake” ringed by “tall spires of Gothic firs.” That word “spires” does quiet work: the Canadian forest takes on the shape of a cathedral, just as the lotus pond once adorned Buddha’s breast. The “ancient beauty-worship” does not remain an ethnographic detail. It “wakes and stirs” inside the speaker as he watches white lily-buds open in the morning. Their “lips agleam” whisper the “secret of the world-old dream.” The secret is never stated as doctrine; it lives in the recognition that longing for beauty and a sacred presence in nature crosses continents and centuries.
The sestet’s rhyme—lake, firs, stirs, break, agleam, dream—loosens the octave’s more formal pattern, just as the speaker’s reflection becomes more personal. The white lilies mirror the lotus, the Gothic firs mirror the temples, and the northern dawn answers the crimson Asian morning. Call’s achievement is to make these parallels feel not like forced analogy but like a genuine correspondence. He could have treated the lotus-worshippers as picturesque figures from a faraway land; instead, he finds their ritual reborn in his own landscape and in his own response to a Canadian morning.
That is the poem’s significance for a school reader. It demonstrates how a traditional sonnet can hold two worlds in conversation: the East of temples and chanting, the North of mist and fir spires. Written at a time when Canadian poets were still negotiating between inherited European forms and local experience, the poem suggests that the “world-old dream” is not the property of one culture. It awakens wherever someone watches a white bud open to the light and feels, for a moment, that the earth is speaking back.