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