How many Canadians--how many even among the few who seek to keep
themselves informed of the best in contemporary literature, who are
ever on the alert for the new voices--realise, or even suspect, that
this Northern land of theirs has produced a poet of whom it may be
affirmed with confidence and assurance that he is of the great
succession of English poets? Yet such--strange and unbelievable though
it may seem--is in very truth the case, that poet being (to give him
his full name) William Bliss Carman. Canada has full right to be proud
of her poets, a small body though they are; but not only does Mr.
Carman stand high and clear above them all--his place (and time cannot
but confirm and justify the assertion) is among those men whose poetry
is the shining glory of that great English literature which is our
common heritage.
If any should ask why, if what has been just said is so, there has
been--as must be admitted--no general recognition of the fact in the
poet's home land, I would answer that there are various and plausible,
if not good, reasons for it.
First of all, the poet, as thousands more of our young men of ambition
and confidence have done, went early to the United States, and until
recently, except for rare and brief visits to his old home down by the
sea, has never returned to Canada--though for all that, I am able to
state, on his own authority, he is still a Canadian citizen. Then all
his books have had their original publication in the United States, and
while a few of them have subsequently carried the imprints of Canadian
publishers, none of these can be said ever to have made any special
effort to push their sale. Another reason for the fact above mentioned
is that Mr. Carman has always scorned to advertise himself, while his
work has never been the subject of the log-rolling and booming which
the work of many another poet has had--to his ultimate loss. A further
reason is that he follows a rule of his own in preparing his books for
publication. Most poets publish a volume of their work as soon as,
through their industry and perseverance, they have material enough on
hand to make publication desirable in their eyes. Not so with Mr.
Carman, however, his rule being not to publish until he has done
sufficient work of a certain general character or key to make a volume.
As a result, you cannot fully know or estimate his work by one book, or
two books, or even half a dozen; you must possess or be familiar with
every one of the score and more volumes which contain his output of
poetry before you can realise how great and how many-sided is his
genius.
It is a common remark on the part of those who respond readily to the
vigorous work of Kipling, or Masefield, even our own Service, that
Bliss Carman's poetry has no relation to or concern with ordinary,
everyday life. One would suppose that most persons who cared for
poetry at all turned to it as a relief from or counter to the burdens
and vexations of the daily round; but in any event, the remark referred
to seems to me to indicate either the most casual acquaintance with Mr.
Carman's work, or a complete misunderstanding and misapprehension of
the meaning of it. I grant that you will find little or nothing in it
all to remind you of the grim realities and vexing social problems of
this modern existence of ours; but to say or to suggest that these
things do not exist for Mr. Carman is to say or to suggest something
which is the reverse of true. The truth is, he is aware of them as
only one with the sensitive organism of a poet can be; but he does not
feel that he has a call or mission to remedy them, and still less to
sing of them. He therefore leaves the immediate problems of the day to
those who choose, or are led, to occupy themselves therewith, and turns
resolutely away to dwell upon those things which for him possess
infinitely greater importance.
"What are they?" one who knows Mr. Carman only as, say, a lyrist of
spring or as a singer of the delights of vagabondia probably will ask
in some wonder. Well, the things which concern him above all, I would
answer, are first, and naturally, the beauty and wonder of this world
of ours, and next the mystery of the earthly pilgrimage of the human
soul out of eternity and back into it again.
The poems in the present volume--which, by the way, can boast the high
honor of being the very first regular Canadian edition of his
work--will be evidence ample and conclusive to every reader, I am sure,
of the place which
The perennial enchanted
Lovely world and all its lore
occupy in the heart and soul of Bliss Carman, as well as of the magical
power with which he is able to convey the deep and unfailing
satisfaction and delight which they possess for him. They, however,
represent his latest period (he has had three well-defined periods),
comprising selections from three of his last published volumes: _The
Rough Rider_, _Echoes from Vagabondia_, and _April Airs_, together with
a number of new poems, and do not show, except here and there and by
hints and flashes, how great is his preoccupation with the problem of
man's existence--
the hidden import
Of man's eternal plight.
This is manifest most in certain of his earlier books, for in these he
turns and returns to the greatest of all the problems of man almost
constantly, probing, with consummate and almost unrivalled use of the
art of expression, for the secret which surely, he clearly feels, lies
hidden somewhere, to be discovered if one could but pierce deeply
enough. Pick up _Behind the Arras_, and as you turn over page after
page you cannot but observe how incessantly the poet's mind--like the
minds of his two great masters, Browning and Whitman--works at this
problem. In "Behind the Arras," the title poem; "In the Wings," "The
Crimson House," "The Lodger," "Beyond the Gamut," "The Juggler"--yes,
in every poem in the book--he takes up and handles the strange thing we
know as, or call, life, turning it now this way, now that, in an effort
to find out its meaning and purpose. He comes but little nearer
success in this than do most of the rest of men, of course; but the
magical and ever-fresh beauty of his expression, the haunting melody of
his lines, the variety of his images and figures and the depth and
range of his thought, put his searchings and ponderings in a class by
themselves.
Lengthy quotation from Mr. Carman's books is not permitted here, and I
must guide myself accordingly, though with reluctance, because I
believe that in a study such as this the subject should be allowed to
speak for himself as much as possible. In "Behind the Arras" the poet
describes the passage from life to death as
A cadence dying down unto its source
In music's course,
and goes on to speak of death as
the broken rhythm of thought and man,
The sweep and span
Of memory and hope
About the orbit where they still must grope
For wider scope,
To be through thousand springs restored, renewed,
With love imbrued,
With increments of will
Made strong, perceiving unattainment still
From each new skill.
Now follow some verses from "Behind the Gamut," to my mind the poet's
greatest single achievement;
As fine sand spread on a disc of silver,
At some chord which bids the motes combine,
Heeding the hidden and reverberant impulse,
Shifts and dances into curve and line,
The round earth, too, haply, like a dust-mote,
Was set whirling her assigned sure way,
Round this little orb of her ecliptic
To some harmony she must obey.
And what of man?
Linked to all his half-accomplished fellows,
Through unfrontiered provinces to range--
Man is but the morning dream of nature,
Roused to some wild cadence weird and strange.
Here, now, are some verses from "Pulvis et Umbra," which is to be found
in Mr. Carman's first book, _Low Tide on Grand Pre_, and in which the
poet addresses a moth which a storm has blown into his window:
For man walks the world with mourning
Down to death and leaves no trace,
With the dust upon his forehead,
And the shadow on his face.
Pillared dust and fleeing shadow
As the roadside wind goes by,
And the fourscore years that vanish
In the twinkling of an eye.
"Pillared dust and fleeing shadow." Where in all our English
literature will one find the life history of man summed up more briefly
and, at the same time, more beautifully, than in that wonderful line?
Now follows a companion verse to those just quoted, taken from "Lord of
My Heart's Elation," which stands in the forefront of _From the Green
Book of the Bards_. It may be remarked here that while the poet recurs
again and again to some favorite thought or idea, it is never in the
same words. His expression is always new and fresh, showing how deep
and true is his inspiration. Again it is man who is pictured:
A fleet and shadowy column
Of dust and mountain rain,
To walk the earth a moment
And be dissolved again.
But while Mr. Carman's speculations upon life's meaning and the mystery
of the future cannot but appeal to the thoughtful-minded, it is as an
interpreter of nature that he makes his widest appeal. Bliss Carman, I
must say here, and emphatically, is no mere landscape-painter; he
never, or scarcely ever, paints a picture of nature for its own sake.
He goes beyond the outward aspect of things and interprets or
translates for us with less keen senses as only a poet whose feeling
for nature is of the deepest and profoundest, who has gone to her
whole-heartedly and been taken close to her warm bosom, can do. Is
this not evident from these verses from "The Great Return"--originally
called "The Pagan's Prayer," and for some inscrutable reason to be
found only in the limited _Collected Poems_, issued in two stately
volumes in 1905 (1904)?
When I have lifted up my heart to thee,
Thou hast ever hearkened and drawn near,
And bowed thy shining face close over me,
Till I could hear thee as the hill-flowers hear.
When I have cried to thee in lonely need,
Being but a child of thine bereft and wrung,
Then all the rivers in the hills gave heed;
And the great hill-winds in thy holy tongue--
That ancient incommunicable speech--
The April stars and autumn sunsets know--
Soothed me and calmed with solace beyond reach
Of human ken, mysterious and low.
Who can read or listen to those moving lines without feeling that Mr.
Carman is in very truth a poet of nature--nay, Nature's own poet? But
how could he be other when, in "The Breath of the Reed" (_From the
Green Book of the Bards_), he makes the appeal?
Make me thy priest, O Mother,
And prophet of thy mood,
With all the forest wonder
Enraptured and imbued.
As becomes such a poet, and particularly a poet whose birth-month is
April, Mr. Carman sings much of the early spring. Again and again he
takes up his woodland pipe, and lo! Pan himself and all his train troop
joyously before us. Yet the singer's notes for all his singing never
become wearied or strident; his airs are ever new and fresh; his latest
songs are no less spontaneous and winning than were his first, written
how many years ago, while at the same time they have gained in beauty
and melody. What heart will not stir to the vibrant music of his
immortal "Spring Song," which was originally published in the first
_Songs from Vagabondia_, and the opening verses of which follow?
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
When thy flowery hand delivers
All the mountain-prisoned rivers,
And thy great heart beats and quivers
To revive the days that were,
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
Take my dust and all my dreaming,
Count my heart-beats one by one,
Send them where the winters perish;
Then some golden noon recherish
And restore them in the sun,
Flower and scent and dust and dreaming,
With their heart-beats every one!
That poem is sufficient in itself to prove that Bliss Carman has full
right and title to be called Spring's own lyrist, though it may be
remarked here that not all his spring poems are so unfeignedly joyous.
Many of them indeed, have a touch, or more than a touch, of
wistfulness, for the poet knows well that sorrow lurks under all joy,
deep and well hidden though it may be.
Mr. Carman sings equally finely, though perhaps not so frequently, of
summer and the other seasons; but as he has other claims upon our
attention, I shall forbear to labor the fact, particularly as the
following collection demonstrates it sufficiently. One of those other
claims is as a writer of sea poetry. Few poets, it may be said, have
pictured the majesty and the mystery, the beauty and the terror of the
sea, better than he. His _Ballads of Lost Haven_ is a veritable
treasure-house for those whose spirits find kinship in wide expanses of
moving waters. One of the best known poems in this volume is "The
Gravedigger," which opens thus:
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he'll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore--
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.
In "The City of the Sea" (_Last Songs from Vagabondia_) Mr. Carman
speaks of the seabells sounding
The eternal cadence of sea sorrow
For Man's lot and immemorial wrong--
The lost strains that haunt the human dwelling
With the ghost of song.