And here the first verse of In the Wings:
"The play is life; and this round earth
The narrow stage whereon
We act before an audience
Of actors dead and gone."
And here are some lines from Beyond the Gamut, which for philosophic insight are surely hard to equal in modern poetry:
"As all sight is but a finer hearing,
And all colour but a finer sound,
Beauty, but the reach of lyric freedom,
Caught and quivering past all music's bound;
"Life, that faint sigh whispered from oblivion,
Harks and wonders if we may not be
Five small wits to carry one great rhythmus,
The vast theme of God's new symphony.
"As fine sand spread on a disc of silver,
At some chord which bids the notes combine,
Heeding the hidden and reverberant impulse,
Shifts and dances into curve and line,
"The round earth, too, haply, like a dust-mote,
Was set whirling her assigned sure way,
Round this little orb of her ecliptic
To some harmony she must obey."
The temptation to go on quoting from Mr. Carman's work (which is more varied and touches more chords than most persons—even among those who endeavour to keep in touch with the poetry produced in our day—are aware) has to be resisted, but space must be found for a portion of a recent poem, A Mountain Gateway, in which, in beauty and clarity of thought and expression, the poet reaches perhaps his highest point:
"I know a vale where I would go one day,
When June comes back and all the world once more
Is glad with summer. Deep with shade it lies,
A mighty cleft in the green bosoming hills,
A cool dim gateway to the mountains' heart.
"On either side the wooded slopes come down,
Hemlock and beech and chestnut. Here and there
Through the deep forest laurel spreads and gleams,
Pink-white as Daphne in her loveliness—
That still perfection from the world withdrawn,
As if the wood gods had arrested there
Immortal beauty in her breathless flight.