The great sea, mystic and musical.
And here from another poem is a striking picture:
... the old sea
Seems to whimper and deplore
Mourning like a childless crone
With her sorrow left alone--
The eternal human cry
To the heedless passer-by.
I have said above that Mr. Carman has had three distinct periods, and
intimated that the poems in the following collection are of his third
period. The first period may be said to be represented by the _Low
Tide_ and _Behind the Arras_ volumes, while the second is displayed in
the three volumes of _Songs from Vagabondia_, which he published in
association with his friend Richard Hovey. Bliss Carman was from the
first too original and individual a poet to be directly influenced by
anyone else; but there can be no doubt that his friendship with Hovey
helped to turn him from over-preoccupation with mysteries which, for
all their greatness, are not for man to solve, to an intenser
realisation of the beauty and loveliness of the world about him and of
the joys of human fellowship. The result is seen in such poems as
"Spring Song," quoted in part above, and his perhaps equally well-known
"The Joys of the Road," which appeared in the same volume with that
poem, and a few verses from which follow:
Now the joys of the road are chiefly these:
A crimson touch on the hardwood trees;
A vagrant's morning wide and blue,
In early fall, when the wind walks, too;
A shadowy highway cool and brown,
Alluring up and enticing down
From rippled waters and dappled swamp,
From purple glory to scarlet pomp;
The outward eye, the quiet will,
And the striding heart from hill to hill.
Some of the finest of Mr. Carman's work is contained in his elegiac or
memorial poems, in which he commemorates Keats, Shelley, William Blake,
Lincoln, Stevenson, and other men for whom he has a kindred feeling,
and also friends whom he has loved and lost. Listen to these moving
lines from "Non Omnis Moriar," written in memory of Gleeson White, and
to be found in _Last Songs from Vagabondia_:
There is a part of me that knows,
Beneath incertitude and fear,
I shall not perish when I pass
Beyond mortality's frontier;
But greatly having joyed and grieved,
Greatly content, shall hear the sigh
Of the strange wind across the lone
Bright lands of taciturnity.
In patience therefore I await
My friend's unchanged benign regard,--
Some April when I too shall be
Spilt water from a broken shard.
In "The White Gull," written for the centenary of the birth of Shelley
in 1892, and included in _By the Aurelian Wall_, he thus apostrophizes
that clear and shining spirit:
O captain of the rebel host,
Lead forth and far!
Thy toiling troopers of the night
Press on the unavailing fight;
The sombre field is not yet lost,
With thee for star.
Thy lips have set the hail and haste
Of clarions free
To bugle down the wintry verge
Of time forever, where the surge
Thunders and trembles on a waste
And open sea.
In "A Seamark," a threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson, which appears in
the same volume, the poet hails "R.L.S." (of whose tribe he may be said
to be truly one) as
The master of the roving kind,
and goes on:
O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gypsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood
That dreams of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease.
Perfection's lovers all your lives!
You whom the wander-spirit loves
To lead by some forgotten clue
Forever vanishing beyond
Horizon brinks forever new;
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.
"Perfection's lovers all your lives." Of these, it may be said without
qualification, is Bliss Carman himself.
No summary of Mr. Carman's work, however cursory, would be worthy of
the name if it omitted mention of his ventures in the realm of Greek
myth. _From the Book of Myths_ is made up of work of that sort, every
poem in it being full of the beauty of phrase and melody of which Mr.
Carman alone has the secret. The finest poems in the book, barring the
opening one, "Overlord," are "Daphne," "The Dead Faun," "Hylas," and
"At Phaedra's Tomb," but I can do no more here than name them, for
extracts would fail to reveal their full beauty. And beauty, after all
is said, is the first and last thing with Mr. Carman. As he says
himself somewhere:
The joy of the hand that hews for beauty
Is the dearest solace under the sun.