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.