Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drift across the darkened pane!
Mr. Roberts has the rare pictorial gift of flashing a scene before one without employing an excess of imagery, and never that which is confused or cumbrous. His style is nervous, magnetic, direct, and has, in his later work, very little superfluous tissue. This statement, has, of course, its exceptions, but is sufficiently accurate to be made a generalization, and in no case is it better shown than in the
descriptive poems of the Canadian country in The Book of the Native. What is there about Canada that sets the blood of her poets a-tingle and lends magic to their fingers when writing of her? What is there in Grand Pré’s “barren reaches by the tide,” or in the marshes of Tantramar, that such a spell should wait upon them, calling the roamer
“Back into the looming wonder,
The Companionship of Earth”?
With the American poets of the present day, despite their feeling for nature, it is rather her beauty in the abstract than any particular locality with which they chance to be associated, that inspires them,—though Mr. Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, furnishes a marked exception to this statement,—but the Canadian poets, with a passion like that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew their first devotion: now with a buoyant infectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a sympathetic identity with their country, an interchange of personality by which they reciprocally express each other.
Particularly is this true of Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D.
Roberts; and it was equally true of Archibald Lampman, whose untimely passing lost to Canada one of her anointed singers, to whose high promise justice has hardly yet been done. To illustrate Mr. Roberts’ nature-sympathy, and susceptibility to the mood of the year, let me put in contrast parts of two poems from The Book of the Native. The first belongs to the racy note pervading a good deal of the nature-verse of to-day, of which the Vagabondia books set the fashion: it is called “Afoot,” but might with equal aptness be named the “Processional,” since the second is the “Recessional”:
Comes the lure of green things growing,