Resounds the ebb with destiny in its roar.
It was remarked, in a preceding chapter, that we miss the ethical note in Roberts’ genius and poetry. Here is the exception. In his Ave! he became morally or religiously, as well as imaginatively, sublimated. In that poem he treats life and death with the moral beauty and significance of his exemplars and models, Shelley’s Adonais, Arnold’s Thyrsis, and Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale. In form and substance Roberts’ Ave! is a true elegiac monody.
But is it a great poem? Fault has been found with it on the side of structure or coherency. The poem appears coherent when it is remembered that the structure is symphonic rather than strophic. For though the poem begins with a Canadian setting, which on the face of it is as far away as possible from Shelley and Shelley’s England where he was born and the Italy where he died, it is the thought of the Canadian marshes and the floods and unrest of the tides that suggests to Roberts the inner spirit and genius and life and death of Shelley. So that naturally Roberts passes from the Canadian setting and its suggestions to the subject proper of his poem, namely, Shelley; then to memorializing Shelley’s genius and lamenting his passing, and, finally, back to the Canadian setting which suggested the whole poem. Surely that is coherent logic, unity in variety of structure!
Nor is there any real contradiction between the diction and imagery of the poem and the high magnificence of the soul which the poem commemorates. The ‘properties,’ of course, are not classical—heroes and nymphs, and all the mythical personages of the Greek pastoral poets. There is genuine spiritual dignity in the Canadian setting of the Ave!—the atmosphere and color of the grassy Canadian flatlands, and tides, and mists, and air, and life, and sky. The poem, too, is in the grand manner and is marked by a spiritual sweep and lyrical eloquence which convey to the heart and the imagination of the reader the sense of profound emotion and of sincerity on the part of the poet. So that, in spite of alleged structural and dictional faults, Roberts’ Ave! is distinguished by sensuous beauty and splendor, by imaginative sweep, by emotional intensity and moral and spiritual dignity. But above all it is, as a pastoral elegy or monody, much more Canadian than English. As such, it is a really fine and distinctive contribution to Canadian creative literature. If it is not a great poem, it is a magnificent, compelling, and noble achievement in great poetry—a poem which surpasses any monody in American Literature and which indubitably takes an important status amongst the elegiac monodies of England.
In 1895 Bliss Carman published A Seamark[[1]] (sub-titled A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson). It is a poem of thirty-eight stanzas in rimed iambic tetrameter. It is all in the inimitable lyric manner of Carman, and commemorates Stevenson as ‘the master of the roving kind.’ Altiloquence is never a quality of Carman’s poetry, as it is of Roberts.’ Subtlety in simplicity is the formula of Carman’s genius. And he will color all his homely or simple images with the most apt felicity of phrase and the most insinuating verbal melody. For this reason, some miss the high spiritual, mystical, and religious note in poems which are even more sublimated, though less grandiloquent, than Roberts’ verse. On the face of A Seamark, it seems as if Carman, in commemorating the death of Stevenson ‘as the master of the roving kind,’ composed a colorful musical lyric, but not a highly spiritualized poem. How simple or homely, and yet how felicitous and colorful, are the images in Carman’s musical lines, announcing the death of Stevenson on the island of Vailima:—
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.
The hasty reader does not suspect or surmise the deeper meaning that is to come. But Carman and Stevenson were kin of mind and heart, and their kinship was a kinship of the love of searching out the haunts and ways of the joy and beauty that are on the face and in the heart of Nature. So that these master rovers are not careless, irresponsible vagabonds, but are spiritual nomads with a spiritual function and bent on a divine errand. Thus does Carman magnify their office:—