Bliss Carman
AS A WORLD-POET—CREATIVE MELODIST—PERIODS OF HIS POETRY—SINGING QUALITY AND ITS METHOD—LYRIST OF THE SEA AND OF LOVE—TREATMENT OF NATURE.
Bliss carman is the only Canadian-born poet who reasonably and inevitably challenges comparison with English and United States poets of admitted distinction. He is, in the continental sense of the term, more American than he is Canadian; more English than American; and more a world-poet than Canadian, or American, or English, in the sense that famous poets writing in the English language, from Chaucer to Masefield, are world-poets. His genius and poetry, as do the genius and poetry of no other Canadian poet, challenge criticism to define the qualities of his mind and art. Unless, therefore, those who have written con amore about Carman and have denoted him as the greatest Canadian poet distinguish in what respect or respects he is so to be designated, the distinction is unmeaning. Carman is not the greatest Canadian poet in versatility of genius, variety of themes and forms, and perfection of technic or craftsmanship. He is surpassed by Roberts in versatility of genius and variety of forms. He is not the greatest Canadian nature-colorist or impressionistic word-painter in verse. There again Roberts surpasses him. Carman is not the greatest Canadian poetic interpreter of nature in Canada and of the Canadian spirit. Lampman is his equal, and, in one respect, his superior. Nor is Carman the greatest Canadian artist in narrative verse. Pauline Johnson and Edward W. Thomson surpass him. Further, Carman is not, save in a special sense, the greatest Canadian melodist. Pauline Johnson and Marjorie Pickthall have a more dulcet singing lilt and sensuous music. Finally, Carman is not the greatest, that is, the nearest to perfection, in technical artistry, of Canadian poets. Duncan Campbell Scott is his unrivalled master in that respect.
Yet indubitably Bliss Carman is the very foremost of Canadian-born poets. In Carman’s genius and poetry there are an originality and power and beauty and distinction that, first, make him unique amongst Canadian poets and that, secondly, compel the critical world to admit that he is the only Canadian-born poet who, whenever he is the supreme lyrist and the inspired technician in verse that he can be, has made a distinct, singular, and enduring contribution of his own to English or world poetry, and, on that account, is in the direct line of the Chaucerian succession. Whenever, that is, Carman excels in sheer genius, and as a nature-painter, nature-interpreter, story-teller in verse, melodist and technician, he surpasses each and all his Canadian compatriot poets at their best in their specialty. They each excel in one or two powers. Carman excels in all their combined powers, to the maximal degree. Moreover, none of his Canadian compatriot poets is his equal or even rival in originality and power of imagination, in sheer vision of the metaphysical meanings of nature and existence, in intensity of passion, in romantic atmosphere, in satiric humor, in free and potent diction and inevitable imagery, and in light or ecstatic lyricism. So great is Carman as a poet of the Sea that he has made a distinct contribution in this genre to English poetry. As a lyric poet of romantic and Spiritual Love, he has no superior, if even an equal, in Canada or America, and few in any other country. His Elegies are lovely lyric memorials of the Spirit. His poems of sheer joy of living or of satiric humor have no prototypes. His symbolistic or so-called mystical poetry, as an interpretation of the universe and as a means of solace and serenity in the midst of seeming Satanic triumphs, are as noble and grateful to the spirit and as sustaining as the breath of life from his own Maritime sea-winds and woodsy zephyrs. But when he sings most freely and liltingly, then is Bliss Carman the supreme melodist, and Chaucer is heard again in the land, and the troubadours, and all those upon whom Nature bestowed the gift of verbal bel canto.
While, then, it is the challenging quality of Bliss Carman’s poetry, as if he were directly of the strain of Chaucer, Burns, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Masefield, and as if his verse, like theirs, stood, as it does, upright on its own feet, that gives it its first and most important general distinction, it possesses other distinctions, one of which, namely, its special verbal music, of Keltic origin and form, is unique in Canadian poetry and rare in modern English poetry. It is these particular distinctions which stamp Bliss Carman as an extraordinary creative poet and melodist, and as the one Canadian poet who has a right to an indisputable place beside the finer and more compelling poets of England and the United States. These claims may be abundantly substantiated by a study of the texts of what may be called the Popular Collected Poems of Bliss Carman, namely, Ballads and Lyrics and Later Poems (with an appreciation by R. H. Hathaway), and by a study of such interpretative commentaries as Odell Shepard’s Bliss Carman and H. D. C. Lee’s Bliss Carman: A Study of Canadian Poetry, together with Hathaway’s ‘Appreciation’ in Later Poems by Bliss Carman. In this chapter Carman is considered and treated from the three sides in which he is unique amongst Canadian poets: namely, as, in the light of the history of English poetry, a singularly original and inventive Vowel Melodist; as a Nature-Poet whose impressionism and ‘readings’ of earth differ from those of Roberts and Lampman; and as a Philosophical or Mystical Poet who perceives in Beauty the only manifestation of the union of the Real and the Ideal and regards it as an intuitive proof of the Supremacy of Good in the universe.
However well-intentioned the attempts to divide the poetical activity of Bliss Carman into Periods, on the whole they are not pedagogically successful. Three Periods have been remarked—a so-called Romantic Period, represented by Low Tide on Grand Pré and the Songs of Vagabondia series; a Transcendental Period, represented by Behind the Arras, subtitled ‘A Book of the Unseen,’ which indicates its mood, and The Green Book of the Bards; and a Synthetic Period, in which his appreciation of the beauty of earth is not contrasted with the evanescence and the mystery of life, but in which there is a joyous acceptance of both. This Synthetic Period is represented by The Book of the Myths, Sappho, and April Airs. Yet in each volume, from Low Tide on Grand Pré (1893) to April Airs (1916), there is in varying degree the same ‘touch of manner,’ the same ‘hint of mood,’ the same occupation both with the beauty of earth and with the mystery and meaning of existence and the universe. Really there is no development of Carman’s genius and art—no periods of growth—after his first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré, except an increase in ready mastery, not of technic, but of clear expression of thought and meaning. Some of his finest verbal melody and some of his most compelling lines are in his earlier volumes, and with them also embodiments of his essential thought about life and the universe. But we do note, in each succeeding volume, a gradual decrease in Carman’s sense of world-pain (weltschmerz), and an increase in clearer expression of his thought about the mystery of life. To use musical language: in his earlier books Carman heard discords in the universe. They were really not discords but dissonances. As he grew older and reflected more philosophically, he was able to resolve these dissonances; and as he gradually achieved this, the more he combined, with clarity and surety, his fine natural powers of lyrical utterance with, to use Meredith’s phrase, his ’reading of earth,’ his intuitions of the ultimate supremacy of the Good.
Since he fully recovered from the illness which attacked him about 1919, Carman has entered on what promises to be his greatest, most constructive period, the keynote of which is his characteristic lyrical utterance in the expressing of a confident synthesis of Sight and Faith, of Beauty and Goodness. It is all the same verbal melody and the same love of beautiful sound, color, and form as in Low Tide on Grand Pré, but all the felt dissonances that existed for thought have been resolved, and now existence is filled with an ineluctable joy and a tender peace which are a pure gain for the spirit. The poems which represent the new Carman or the Carman of the new and final period exist, for the most part in manuscript, though a few have been published fugitively. We quote one of these new fugitive poems, Vestigia (1921), in which the notable qualities, aside from verbal melody and color, are a confident synthesis of Sight and Faith, Earth and God, and absolute simplicity and clarity of the diction and images:—
I took a day to search for God
And found Him not. But as I trod
By rocky ledge, through woods untamed,
Just where one scarlet lily flamed,
I saw his footprints in the sod.
Then suddenly, all unaware,
Far off in the deep shadows where
A solitary hermit thrush
Sang through the holy twilight hush—
I heard his voice upon the air.
And even as I marvelled how
God gives us Heaven here and now,
In a stir of wind that hardly shook
The poplar leaves beside the brook—
His hand was light upon my brow.
At last with evening as I turned
Homeward, and thought what I had learned
And all that there was still to probe—
I caught the glory of His robe
Where the last flowers of sunset burned.
Back to the world with quickening start
I looked and longed for any part
In making saving Beauty be . . . .
And from that kindling ecstasy
I knew God dwelt within my heart.
Of the manuscript poems belonging to this fourth period, I may merely mention the titles, as, for instance, Wa-wa, a mystical interpretation of the wild-goose honk, The Truce of the Manitou, and, above all, Shamballah, which is the perfection of Carman’s mystical interpretations—a poem of
The City under the Star,
Where the Sons of the Fire-Mist gather,
And the keys of all mystery are.
Fugitive poems representing this final period are The Mirage of the Plain, The Rivers of Canada, Kaleedon Road, and Vancouver, which contain mystical interpretations ’suggested,’ as Carman has said, ‘by the vast spaces of Canada.’ Apropos of the mood, manner, and interpretations of Nature in this period, Carman has observed: ‘All Nature poems are more or less mystical.’
What we really observe, then, in Carman’s genius and poetry is not genuine, clearly marked Periods, but rather Periodicities—waves of poetical activity, in which the crest of the wave is either lyrical ecstasy, the singing of the Beauty of Earth for its own sake and out of love of beautiful sound and color, or mystical ‘readings’ of Earth, transcendental interpretations of the meaning of the life of sentient and spiritual creatures, but below the crest of the wave are poems of transcendentalism if the crest is lyrical naturalism or poems of lyrical naturalism if the crest is transcendental. Yet in these periodicities there is a sure and well-demarcated development, not of technic, but of clarity of thought and expression—from that earlier so-called mysticism which was only mystification, to the genuine mysticism which is the immediate intuition of God in the universe and especially the immediate perception of the oneness of the spirit of Nature with that of Man and of God. But all the while, as the development goes on, even to his final period, Carman remains the superb melodist and colorist. So that Bliss Carman must be regarded as at once both the most lyrical of Canadian philosophical poets and the most philosophical of Canadian lyrical poets.
Carman’s prototype in sheer singing quality is Chaucer—the first, freest, and sweetest of the English poets, whom Tennyson apostrophized in avian metaphor as a ‘warbler.’ So in the same way Carman sings with the natural lilt, abandon, and melodiousness of the lark and linnet. He is a ‘warbler.’ It is an irrelevant criticism to say, as has been said, that Carman ‘sings on and on,’ frequently in his earlier poems, out of his own ecstasy over hearing the beautiful verbal melody he is making, whether a given poem makes sense in thought or not. He is not ecstatically singing on and on from love of beautiful sound, but because he cannot clearly express what he means in his thinking; and so we hear the singing as if it were the accompaniment to the thought which we cannot, any more than he, articulate. But how lovely, how melodious the accompaniment!
As a matter of truth, however, we shall get at the secret of Carman’s unique singing quality if we ask what is the method of his warbling. It is in his method that he differs from all modern English poets and has made an original and distinct contribution to English lyrical poetry. This is the fact: Bliss Carman is a belated troubadour or 16th century English lutanist or Keltic harpist. Lutanists and harpists created the text for their songs; and the prime end was melody or at least melodiousness. The ultimate element or unit in verbal melody with the lutanists or harpists was the word, and the core of the word, for melodic purposes, was the vowel. Poets arose in England, but more especially in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland, who aimed to make the melody of unaccompanied poetry imitate the melody of the lutanists’ and the harpists’ accompanied verses. The lutanists, harpists, and melodic poets, who aimed to imitate music, passed, and new generations of poets substituted metrical and stanzaic structure and alliterative arrangement of consonants for the old vowel-melody. The unit in English poetry, after the 16th century, became the line, not the word or the vowel in the word.
It is the chief glory of Bliss Carman, as a creative poet, that he brought back into English poetry the word and the pure unimpeded singing vowel, with the same intent as the Italian bel canto composers, as the unit in verbal melody. Some critics have made considerable point of the fact that Carman is a ‘great’ poet, in spite of the fact that he employs chiefly the rhymed octosyllabic line or measure, or iambic tetrameters and trimeters, with trochaic and anapaestic substitutions and other metrical mechanics for variety. The truth is that Carman wrote his poetry as a melodist, not as a technical musician; that he aimed to sing, like the lark or linnet, not to compose, like a musician. His measures were chosen, whenever he meant to be lyrical, because they were singing measures and his diction was chosen for the melody inside the words, for the ‘vowel-chime’ in them. In Carman’s lyrical poetry the word determines the line, or rather the word alone counts, and the line is insignificant. Dulcet vowel-melody or delicate vowel-harmony is Bliss Carman’s chief original contribution to Canadian and English poetry. Examples are innumerable. Consider the clarion tones in this line, which as a line by itself is perfect:—
The resonant far-listening morn.
There are no closed vowels in those words, and the word ’resonant’ is precisely resonant in vowel-melody and harmony. It is the open vowels that count melodically in this stanza:—
But in the yule, O Yanna,
Up from the round dim sea
And reeling dungeons of the fog,
I am come back to thee!
What a superb singing line is the first, and what booming sonorities are in the eloquently descriptive third line, ‘the reeling dungeons of the fog.’ Repeat it orally (for with Carman poetry is an oral art) and all the melody will be found in the vowels. And what bright vowel-melody resides in the single words of this line:—
The glad indomitable sea!
For an example of just the kind of vowel-melody, dulcet and delicate, which is of the lutanist or harpist order, all in the words per se, not in the lines as lines, consider this stanza:—
A golden flute in the cedars,
A silver pipe in the swales,
And the slow large life of the forest
Wells back and prevails.
This is the music or melody which Pan must have piped and with which he hushed to peace the wild-creatures of the ancient forests—it is silvery, pastoral reed music, and in verbal reed melody Carman is a modern Pan.
Carman can make beautiful line-melody, line-harmony when he wishes to do so; and he is a master of alliteration, quite the peer of Tennyson or Swinburne. For instance, these alliterative lines:—
The gold languorous lilies of the glade.
• • • •
Burying, brimming, the building billows.
• • • •
Silent with frost and floored with snow.
• • • •
And softer than sleep her hands first sweep
• • • •
And down the sluices of the dawn.
• • • •
And like green clouds in opal calms.
• • • •
Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.
• • • •
While down the soft blue-shadowed aisles of snow
Night, like a sacristan with silent step,
Passes to light the tapers of the stars.
Carman is as adept as Kipling in employing, for the sake of verbal music and variety of rhythm, such devices as shifting of accent, slurring, and elision, and, further, he invents beautiful measures, as, for instance, the dimeter of Ilicet, or the six-line stanza of The White Gull (Shelley):—
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.
Carman is also singularly adept in the use of what may be called musical onomatopœia. In this quality his ear is specially sensitive to pianissimi in Nature, the soughing of the winds, the sighings and whisperings of the zephyrs, the fifings and murmurings of the insects (with Carman the crickets always ‘fife’ and the bees ‘murmur’), and, to use his own phrase, all the ‘tiny multitudinous sound’ of rustling leaves, dancing grasses, crooning brooks, tinkling rain, which make the instrumentation of the Toy Symphony of Nature:—
Outside, a yellow maple tree,
Shifting upon the silvery blue
With tiny multitudinous sound,
Rustled to let the sunlight through.
It is, however, in the use of rhythmical onomatopœia that Carman is even more inventively masterly than in mere sound imitation. An outstanding example of the imitation of the ‘fife and drum’ marching rhythm, with an exact imitation of the fife in the word ‘whistle’ and of the rattle-roll of the drum in the word ‘rallied,’ is Carman’s lovely nature-lyric Daisies, second stanza:—
Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea
• • • •
The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell,
The orioles whistled them out of the wood;
And all of their singing was, ‘Earth, it is well!’
And all of their dancing was, ‘Life, thou art good!’
Always, from his very first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré, to his latest, April Airs, published almost a quarter of a century later, Bliss Carman has been the master troubadour, the master melodist, constructing his melody chiefly by an exquisite but subtle use of vowel-tones, vowel-harmonies. But never has he aimed to be the consciously meticulous technical musician, laboring at involved and intricate metrical and stanzaic structure, assonance and alliteration. His verbal melody is in the word and vowel as his ear naturally picked these up from everyday speech, and is just as spontaneous and simple. His melody did not come by ‘working at’ it in the study. We may often note Roberts, and even Lampman, assiduously busied with constructing the perfect musical line. Carman’s melody wells out of him in the ‘great outdoors’—natural and spontaneous as the lark’s or linnet’s. By virtue, then, of this spontaneous lyrical melodiousness of Carman’s poetry, a melodiousness newly based on the vowel-tones and harmonies in words, simple words of actual humanized speech, and not on modern intricacies of line or stanzaic structure and consonantal systems, Bliss Carman is one of the master-melodists of English poetry.
Thus as a melodist in general. Canada, however, has produced no poet who is Carman’s equal as a lyrist of the Sea and of Love. It is indubitable that he has made a distinct and superb contribution to the authentic Sea Poetry in the English language. His sea ‘speech’ is the native speech of his soul, the expression of an innate personal sympathy with the moods, powers, and deeds of the Sea, a sympathy which is, in Carman, an identity of the spirit in Nature with the spirit in the Man or Poet. Melodiously he declares this personal sympathy and identity with the Sea in his autobiographical poem, A Son of the Sea:—
I was born for deep-sea faring;
I was bred to put to sea;
Stories of my father’s daring
Filled me at my mother’s knee.
I was sired among the surges;
I was cubbed beside the foam;
All my heart is in its verges,
And the sea-wind is my home.
All my boyhood, far from vernal
Bourns of being, came to me
Dream-like, plangent, and eternal
Memories of the plunging sea.
No English poet of distinction so often even mentions the Sea or creates such Homeric epithets for the Sea as does Bliss Carman. A catalogue of Carman’s original epithets for the Sea, if complete, would be a poetic phenomenon by itself. Some of the most apt and fetching may be noted—‘the hollow sea,’ ‘the curving sea,’ ‘the old gray sea,’ ‘the plunging sea,’ ‘the shambling sea,’ ‘the brightening sea,’ ‘the troubling sea,’ ‘the lazy sea,’ ‘the open sea,’ ‘the heaving sea,’ ‘the eternal sea,’ ‘the ruthless noisy sea,’ ‘the misty sea,’ ‘the ancient ever-murmuring sea,’ and that supreme achievement in English poetry, Carman’s inevitable, perfect line:—
The glad indomitable sea!
For lovers of sea poetry Carman’s Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book of the Sea (1897) is a genuinely unique anthology by itself—‘one hundred pages,’ as a London critic has said, ‘of salt sea without a trace of Kipling, and yet having a sea-flavor as unmistakable as his, and with a finer touch—with less repetition, less of mere technicality, and a more varied human interest.’ For Carman the Sea is a human personality. Its moods and deeds embrace all the contradictory moods and deeds of human beings. But whatever mood or deed of the Sea is expressed by Carman, he does it with pure and perfect lyricism. Carman is said to have no gifts for spiritual portraiture. Yet what English or American poet has matched Carman’s portrait of the Sea as a shambling, fierce, grim, rollicking, burly, cruel, crooked, old man, and at the same time created such a brave and lilting song of the Sea, as in The Gravedigger, with its inimitable burly refrain?—
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.
When a poet gives us such realistic portraiture and such inimitable lyrical melody and rhythm as does Carman in The Gravedigger, it is a futile criticism to find fault with his sea poems on the side of lack of dramatic elements, and weakness in narrative, since the strength of the poems was meant by the poet to be their inherent passional intensity and melody. Carman’s sea poems were not meant to be strictly dramatic narrative tales of the sea, but to be ballads or songs of the romance of the sea. We may remark, as a general observation, that as a balladist of the Sea, Carman does not aim at dramatic narration, but at singing, with the freedom and picturesque vernacular and technical slang of sailors, as they would sing their chanteys, the romance, happy or grim, of the sea. As songs, his so-called ballads of the Sea are a supreme achievement in verbal melody, the glory of Canadian sea poetry, and one of the glories of English poetry.
As the master melodist or musician of the Sea, Carman brilliantly achieved, but he is equally the master melodist or musician of Romantic and Spiritual Love. His Love Poetry is best represented in Songs of the Sea Children (1904) and in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1904). Earlier he had written lightly, as it were flirtingly, about love. But in Songs of the Sea Children, while he wrote as daintily or delicately as in his earlier poems dealing with the passion, he has at last realized the spiritual intent and meaning of pure devoted love, and has been moved deeply and inspired by the passion. Though copyright restrictions forbid full quotation, the spirit or mood or temper, and the pure melody, of Songs of the Sea Children may be gathered from this single stanza:—
O wind and stars, I am with you now;
And ports of day, Good-bye!
When my captain Love puts out to sea,
His mariner am I.
The rhymeless stanzas of the love poems in Sappho are high-minded, but are a poetical genre by themselves. They are a tour de force in ‘poetical restoration,’ and, perhaps for the first time, we actually observe Carman at work in the study as the technical verbal artist and musician. They have a technical perfection, and a quiet beauty of their own, and though there is in them a large degree of spontaneity, naturally they are not informed with the characteristic Carman lyrical ecstasy and melody. They are, as love poems, perfect as the love poetry of Sappho was fleckless with a Greek perfection of form and grace.
Bliss Carman is not properly called a nature-interpreter. To understand his point of view we must contrast his with that of Lampman. For Lampman Nature is one kind of being and Man is another—two separated entities—and Man may only commune with Nature by ‘reciprocal sympathy.’ So Lampman goes out to his Canadian maples and elms, fields and streams, and talks to them, as if they were human, and can sympathize with him. This is all simulated imaginative sympathy and communion on the poet’s part. The maples and elms, fields and streams, are really dumb, and the poet does but attribute to them what speech or answer he wants back from them for the solace of his spirit. Always with Lampman, Nature and Man are two. He does but humanize Nature for his own purposes, by conscious, deliberate objective symbolism.
Carman, on the other hand, is a spiritual monist. Nature and Man are not two. There is, in Carman’s poetical psychology and metaphysic, no mind and matter. The whole universe is spiritual through and through, and the vital spirit which is in Nature is the same spirit which is in Man and which is God. The universe is wholly spirit. We may call this ‘the higher pantheism;’ but even in pantheistic doctrine, matter does exist as alien to mind or spirit. Carman has no such attitude. He differs from Lampman in conceiving himself as able, by spirit or will, to identify himself personally with Nature. This power of personal identification with Nature begets personal sympathy; and the communion which the poet has with Nature is a ‘heart-to-heart talk,’ for spirit with spirit can meet. This new philosophy of personal identity of the human spirit with Nature is expressly declared by Carman:—
I blend with the soft shadows
Of the young maple trees,
And mingle in the rain-drops
That shine along the eaves . . .
No glory is too splendid
To house this soul of mine,
No tenement too lowly
To serve it for a shrine.
But specially to be noted is the fact that Carman does not stand apart from Nature, from the woods, and flowers, and hills, and streams, and become an interpreter of Nature’s moods and emotions. Nay, the poet enters into the tree or flower and becomes one with their soul or spirit, their body becomes his body, and their voice, as heard in his poetry, is but his voice articulating to the world what they are unable to articulate. Nature, in Carman’s poetry, is become vocal; and the poet himself is her very Voice. Metaphors in the nature-poetry of Carman are not metaphors at all; they are direct experiences of spirit:—
Just where one scarlet lily flamed,
I saw His footprint in the sod.
• • • •
I caught the glory of His robe
Where the last fires of sunset burned.
This personal identity of the human spirit with the spirit in (or of) Nature, this personal sympathy with the poet’s kin in wild Nature, and this taking on as a body the matter and form of a tree or flower or bird or other creature of Nature, and becoming vocal for them, and thus uttering their thoughts, and feelings, and emotions, is new in Nature poetry, and original with Bliss Carman. It is not Greek; it is not English; but it is Canadian and unique. It is Carman’s most notable contribution to world poetry.
This spiritual monism in Carman’s poetical attitude to Nature explains the seemingly strange commingling of songs of pure delight in the beauty and bounty of Nature and of joy in existence with poems which are the expression of a poet who has ‘kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ It explains such contradictions as the joyousness of some poems and the metaphysical questings of others in Carman’s From the Green Book of the Bards (1903). It explains, in particular, why Carman, who, when he wishes, can surpass Roberts as a nature-colorist and whose poetry is actually rich in idyllic impressionism, never seems to set out, with conscious intent, to be a nature-colorist or word-painter for the sake of sheer impressionism. No other Canadian poet can make or has made such a brilliant use of primary colors or such an exquisite use of delicate tints and evanescent play of light on color as has Bliss Carman. In all his nature description or impressionism, Carman’s aim has been two-fold—first, ‘to better the world with beauty,’ and to compel appreciation of Nature wherever her sweet or solacing spirit abides, to reveal the haunt where Nature affords spiritual communion and refreshment. His aim, in short, is to have men go out and meet Mother Nature. To effect this, not to show how flashily she is dressed, Carman paints her face and garb sometimes brilliantly, sometimes with a grey-eyed loveliness. Carman’s poetry of Nature is only Nature herself ‘calling’ to each vagabond to rise and go out to meet her, ‘wherever the way may lead.’ This two-fold aim of Carman’s nature-painting or poetic impressionism is compellingly expressed in A Vagabond Song:—
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters on the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.
The quiet or subdued call of Nature is winsomely uttered in The Deserted Pasture where
The old gray rocks so friendly seem,
So durable and brave . . .
There in the early springtime
The violets are blue,
And adder-tongues in coats of gold
Are garmented anew . . .
And there October passes
In gorgeous livery,—
In purple ash and crimson oak,
And golden tulip-tree.
Though the keynote of Carman’s poetry is Joy in the universe, he is no mere hedonist. The beauty he loves is uranian, the Joy he aims to get from Beauty and to share with the world through his poetry is spiritual joy. What he has always been sure of was that the dissonances in the world and in existence were resolvable, but he himself gradually had to resolve those dissonances, and win full and complete joy in Nature, in Love, and in Religion. If we call him a Philosophical Poet, we must do so only after we understand that his belief in the supremacy of the Good or of God is intuitively derived. Carman is not philosophical by virtue of having employed the faculty of relational thinking for the attainment of his belief in the moral meaning of life and the universe. He perceived Beauty in the world, and, after much obfuscation of the immediate meaning of Beauty, Carman at length perceived it as a symbol and pledge of the union of the Real and the Ideal. Only in the sense that Beauty is a symbol of perfection does Carman regard Nature as a symbol of God; and only in the sense that God, like Beauty, can be directly or immediately perceived, is Carman a mystical poet. If there is one thing of indubitable ill that science and philosophy have accomplished, it is their dogmatizing that because science and metaphysics with their categories cannot find out God as an actuality, much less can the senses. The pseudo-mystics took science and philosophy at their word, and said the only way to find God is by the use of the religious imagination. Whereupon they so strained the imaginative faculty to achieve what they called mystical union with God that their mysticism only resulted in mystification. Science, with its categories, only cast a veil over Truth, over the face of God. Pseudo-mysticism only placed an opaque void between God and the Sons of God called Men.
It is because Carman was in his early manhood caught on the wheels of agnostic science, transcendental metaphysics and pseudo-mysticism that in his earlier poems this lover of Beauty sings entrancingly of Beauty and winsomely paints her dwelling-places, but while doing this he also mystifies his readers with regard to the meaning of his poetry. The music is all accompaniment to something that Carman himself does not in his own soul clearly understand. Hence the wistfulness and melancholia observable in many of Carman’s earlier poems; hence his sad engagement with the problem of death, as in Pulvis et Umbra and The Eavesdropper.
Carman could not have written Vestigia at that period. For that poem is based on an immediate sense-intuition of God in Nature and in the heart of Man. It was his gradual negation of the categories of science and metaphysics and vacuous pseudo-mysticism, and an instinctive return to an intuitive perception of the meaning of Beauty in Nature and Love and Religion that cleared his vision, and gave him a sure and clear understanding of the supremacy of the Good or God, and that thus won for him triumphant spiritual Faith, Joy in existence, and Peace with God. This is the true mysticism, the true union with God.
It is an interesting excursion in spiritual history to trace Carman’s gradual escape from ‘mystical mystification’ into the triumphant faith of true, earth-born, sense-perceived mysticism, as in Behind the Arras (1895), By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (1898), Last Songs from Vagabondia (1901), From the Book of Myths (1902), From the Book of Valentines (1905), and Collected Poems (1904). It was a ‘mystified’ Carman who wrote Pulvis et Umbra. It was a truly mystical Carman, possessed of a triumphant faith who a full twenty years afterwards wrote Te Deum, the concluding verses of which follow:—
So I will pass through the lovely world, and partake of beauty to feed my soul.
With earth my domain and growth my portion, how should I sue for a further dole?
In the lift I feel of immortal rapture, in the flying glimpse I gain of truth,
Released is the passion that sought perfection, assuaged the ardor of dreamful youth.
The patience of time shall teach me courage, the strength of the sun shall lend me poise.
I would give thanks for the autumn glory, for the teaching of earth and all her joys.
Her fine fruition shall well suffice me; the air shall stir in my veins like wine;
While the moment waits and the wonder deepens, my life shall merge with the life divine.
The immediate sense-perception of God through Beauty and the acceptance of Beauty as a factual proof of the union of the Soul with Nature, of the Real with the Ideal, and thus a proof of the supremacy of Good in the universe—this is the formula of Carman’s philosophical ‘reading’ of Nature and Existence. Always a poet of fine and assured artistry and of lyrical eloquence and spiritual power, Bliss Carman stands alone amongst Canadian poets as a verbal melodist, as a lyrist of love and the sea, and as a mystical interpreter of the moral and spiritual meaning of nature and existence. As an original verbal melodist and poetic impressionist and as an unexampled creator of songs of the sea, Bliss Carman has added significantly to English and to world poetry and to him, therefore, we may apply the distinction Great.
Quotations in this chapter, with the exception of a few lines, are from Later Poems, and from Ballads and Lyrics, by Bliss Carman, (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).