"A Ma Belle Exilée" | Deportation of the Acadians 1755-1766 | Joseph Charles MacKenzie

On July 28, 1755, British Governor Charles Lawrence signed the deportation order which set in motion Le Grand Dérangement, or the Great Upheaval, a vile persecution of French Catholics who had been in Atlantic Canada for generations. The Acadians were then exiled from their homeland of Acadie, and from 1755 until 1763, an estimated one-third of their population perished on their journeys. See:
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-deportation-of-the-acadians-feature

While many Acadians eventually found their way to Louisiana and reestablished a community, their descendants remained a people in exile until 2003, when Queen Elizabeth II signed a Royal Proclamation declaring July 28 as the official day in which the world would remember the Acadians’ suffering as a result of Le Grand Dérangement. See: https://www.acadianmuseum.com/apology.html

MacKenzie composed "A Ma Belle Exilée" (To My Beautiful Exiled One) in honour of his wife, a descendant of the exiled Acadians who settled in French Louisiana and became known as the Cajuns. The love poem is in the form of an Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet, to enhance the overall sadness of the victims of the Great Upheaval which saw whole villages cleared out and families separated. Unlike Longfellow's extended masterpiece on the same event—the epic "Evangeline"— MacKenzie, a lyric poet, has opted to exploit the much more concentrated powers of the sonnet to produce a subtle, but highly emotional, effect.

A MA BELLE EXILÉE

Fille de l’Acadie, je pense à tes ancêtres,
Ce peuple martyr, entourés de forêts,
Labourant leurs champs noirs et priant dans la paix,
Avant d’être tirés de leurs maisons champêtres.

Et je vois dans tes yeux, comme en songe apparaître
Un jour sombre et lointain, le paysage muet
D’un lieu abandonné. Et leurs adieux discrets,
S’entendent encore par les pins et les hêtres.

Mais nous deux orphelins, dans ce monde d’exil,
Exposés à la pluie, au froid et au grésil
Des malheurs de nos jours qui viennent en déluge,

Nous avons pour abri et l’amour et la foi,
Comme eux les Acadiens, qui n’eurent pour refuge
Que la mére de Dieu et son Fils en sa croix.

TO MY BEAUTIFUL EXILED ONE

Daughter of Acadia, I think on your ancestors,
This martyred people, surrounded by forests,
Ploughing their black fields and praying in peace,
Before being dragged out of their rustic homes.

And I see in your eyes, like a dream, to appear
A bleak and distant day, the mute landscape
Of an abandoned place. And their discreet farewells
Are still heard through the pines and the beech trees.

But we two orphans, in this world of exile,
Exposed to the rain and the cold and the sleet
Of these the woes of our times that come in a flood,
We have for shelter our love and our faith,

Like those Acadiens, whose only refuge
Was the Mother of God and her Son on the cross.