And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.
When a poet gives us such realistic portraiture and such inimitable lyrical melody and rhythm as does Carman in The Gravedigger, it is a futile criticism to find fault with his sea poems on the side of lack of dramatic elements, and weakness in narrative, since the strength of the poems was meant by the poet to be their inherent passional intensity and melody. Carman’s sea poems were not meant to be strictly dramatic narrative tales of the sea, but to be ballads or songs of the romance of the sea. We may remark, as a general observation, that as a balladist of the Sea, Carman does not aim at dramatic narration, but at singing, with the freedom and picturesque vernacular and technical slang of sailors, as they would sing their chanteys, the romance, happy or grim, of the sea. As songs, his so-called ballads of the Sea are a supreme achievement in verbal melody, the glory of Canadian sea poetry, and one of the glories of English poetry.
As the master melodist or musician of the Sea, Carman brilliantly achieved, but he is equally the master melodist or musician of Romantic and Spiritual Love. His Love Poetry is best represented in Songs of the Sea Children (1904) and in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1904). Earlier he had written lightly, as it were flirtingly, about love. But in Songs of the Sea Children, while he wrote as daintily or delicately as in his earlier poems dealing with the passion, he has at last realized the spiritual intent and meaning of pure devoted love, and has been moved deeply and inspired by the passion. Though copyright restrictions forbid full quotation, the spirit or mood or temper, and the pure melody, of Songs of the Sea Children may be gathered from this single stanza:—
O wind and stars, I am with you now;
And ports of day, Good-bye!
When my captain Love puts out to sea,
His mariner am I.
The rhymeless stanzas of the love poems in Sappho are high-minded, but are a poetical genre by themselves. They are a tour de force in ‘poetical restoration,’ and, perhaps for the first time, we actually observe Carman at work in the study as the technical verbal artist and musician. They have a technical perfection, and a quiet beauty of their own, and though there is in them a large degree of spontaneity, naturally they are not informed with the characteristic Carman lyrical ecstasy and melody. They are, as love poems, perfect as the love poetry of Sappho was fleckless with a Greek perfection of form and grace.