Here are the lips of peace.
Roberts developed other ‘manners’ or styles. But, unquestionably, this Canadian idyllic impressionism, simple in thought and form, yet colorful and musical, is his natural forte—his natural, characteristic manner. It is exemplified, in the same volume, by other Canadian idylls in the simple style of On the Creek, as, for instance, In The Afternoon, Salt, Winter Geraniums, Birch and Paddle; by distinct and deliberate suffusions of Canadian Nature in dactylic hexameters, as in The Tantramar Revisited, and in the sonnet-form (somewhat anticipating the nature-poetry of Lampman), as in Roberts’ genuinely noble sonnets The Sower, and The Potato Harvest.
We may turn now to a general consideration of Roberts’ poetic treatment of Nature. In Roberts’ first volume, in his strictly Arcadian poetry, there is nothing of Canadian Nature, nothing of Canadian scenery, nor the color and sentiment of Canadian life in the habitat of the distinctive Canadian spirit. In the second volume, In Divers Tones, there is a definitive engagement, on his part, with Canadian Nature, or with Canadian life and sentiment pictured against Canadian backgrounds; and also a change in the form and style of Roberts’ poetic composition.
The natural forms of Roberts’ art are light, simple, lyrical, and descriptive verse, which he treats with charming naturalness, almost naiveté, with simple tunefulness of ballad or folk rhythms, and which sometimes he delicately suffuses with a contemplative revery, a gentle melancholy, or a subdued sentimental reflection on the magic and mystery of Nature and life, somewhat in the manner of Herrick and Tennyson, and Longfellow. But Roberts’ lyrical idyllism or nature-description is not always wholly soft or sentimental, pretty, or gentle, or charming, nor is his new manner always in folk rhythm in form. At times, even when simple, his verse is picturesque, even brusque, vigorous, and overweighted with descriptive details as if, in the last matter, he must ‘paint in’ all the features and properties of Canadian Nature and leave nothing of its physiognomy to be added by the imagination of the reader.
Roberts, however, has one singular limitation, an innate defect of his genius. He cannot limn the human person or figure as one of the properties of his poetry of Canadian woodlands or pastoral scenery and life. In the matter of human portraiture against a background of Nature Roberts, as poet, is abstract and faltering in drawing, lifeless, unveracious, ineffective. Otherwise in the Canadian idyll or in nature-description he is concrete, veracious, simple but graphic, nearly always winningly musical and on the whole satisfying. In short, Roberts discloses in his new manner, in the Canadian idyll and his Acadian nature-poetry, the sure possession of the secrets of color, movement and music, and of real Canadian national sentiment, in the presence of life and nature. He is an adroit nature-colorist and verbal melodist.
Absent, however, from his genius and art are all gifts in spiritual portraiture and the fine and noble interpretation of Nature which Lampman discloses in his nature-poetry and his interpretation of the essential Canadian spirit from the embodiment of that spirit, as Lampman discerns it, in Nature in Canada.
Roberts’ treatment of Nature may be illustrated by examples taken from his second volume, In Divers Tones (1887), and from The Book of the Native (1896), in the latter of which are some poems that really belong, in form, and spirit, to the time when he was changing his abstract Arcadian manner to his concrete Acadian manner as in his In Divers Tones. Illustrative of Roberts’ change to a Canadian theme and to the modern simple method of treating Nature, in the pseudo-classical style, an apt example is The Tantramar Revisited, composed in the dactylic hexameter, a form, suggested, no doubt, by Longfellow’s pretty story of Evangeline. In this poem Roberts treats Canadian Nature with an impressive originality in properties, color, and sentiment, and certainly with a pervasive directness and veracity which prove his sincerity and which convince the reader that the poet was moved by the beauty and pathos of his Acadian subject:—
Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture,—
Old-time sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt!
Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland,—