and, next, discloses the inner meaning of the ‘wander-biddings’ that were in the soul of Stevenson who, even in death, still kept
The journey-wonder on his face.
For when Stevenson died, men sorrowed and surmised not why they grieved. But Carman in A Seamark reveals why. Men thought a prince of joy had passed forever. But Carman discloses the higher spiritual truth:—
He ‘was not born for age.’ Ah no,
For everlasting youth is his!
And part of the lyric of the earth
With spring and leaf and blade he is.
In form, and in musical, colorful, simple yet subtle, spiritualization of the meaning and value of men in whom the lyric spirit of earth is supreme and vocal, there is not another elegiac monody in English like, or comparable to, Carman’s A Seamark. It, too, like Roberts’ Ave! enhances both the quality and quantity of the Canadian and the English elegy.
Wilfred Campbell was a myriad-minded man and had an inherited Keltic imagination which felt acutely the magic and mystery of earth and existence. He conceived, most beautifully and nobly, the passing of Archibald Lampman not as a bereavement suffered by mere persons but rather by the great and constant ‘companion’ of Lampman, namely, Nature. With a peculiar and lovely sense of the poetic significance of death, Campbell ennobled the spirit of Lampman, and perpetuated the meaning of his poetry, in an elegiac monody which bears the felicitous title Bereavement of the Fields.
The poem is in a seven-lined pentameter stanza, and is infused with Canadian Nature-color throughout. The diction and the structure are simple, and there is no attempt at sublimated imagination. The poem is rather in the subdued and gentle manner of Lampman himself. That is to say, there is a gentle melancholy running through the poem, but the melancholy is relieved by a simple spiritual beauty which conveys the rare essence of the spirit of Lampman, who passed from earth:—