"The Need that Irks": Roberts' Sonnets in Songs of the Common Dayby Don Precosky Charles G.D. Roberts' sonnets in Songs of the Common Day are among his finest poetical works. Critics have praised their clear images, their fine melding of voice and subject matter, and their exploration of the effects of change on Roberts' life. Jean Mallinson in "Kingdom of Absence," concentrates upon "Roberts preoccupation with absence" (32). While warning that "I do not wish to suggest that Roberts wrote only about winter and the absence of things and people," Mallinson argues that "he seems most authentic when writing of these things. He is by temperament drawn to the bleak and the austere" (34). W.J. Keith, in his introduction to Roberts Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, asserts that the sonnets "in many ways represent the peak of Roberts' poetic achievement" (xxiv) and praises their "quiet, unostentatious tone" and their "exploration and discovery of 'what beauty clings/In common forms'" (xxiv). In "'The Poetry of Earth': A Note on Roberts' Sonnets," Lorraine McMullen explores their concern with contrasting images of permanence and transience as evidence that "the central theme posed by Roberts is the dilemma of permanence versus transience, the search for the enduring within the world of change, and for life in the midst of death" (253). In this essay, I propose to examine several aspects of the sonnets, including their interrelatedness, the complexly structured sequence which a portion of them constitute, the major techniques Roberts used in opening, developing, and closing the sonnets, and the unorthodox sources of power and beauty which he employs in them. According to The Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (Desmond Pacey [ed.]), Roberts wrote the sonnets over an eleven year period, from 1882 to 1893, before including them in Songs of the Common Day in 1893. There he did not reprint them in chronological order, the most logical if they are to be considered a collection of individual pieces. Instead, he re-ordered them in two blocks. The first twenty-six constitute a sequence. Because they are a sequence, their ordering is based upon a temporal or causal principle; they do not merely belong together: they belong together in a specific order. The poet arranged his sonnets according to the seasons. They take the reader from spring to summer, autumn, winter and back to spring again. In this sequence, the sonnets take on narrative characteristics. Together they tell the story of a year in nature in New Brunswick. Roberts places particular emphasis upon process in the sequence. Nothing in nature is static; he chronicles twelve months of growth, change, and becoming in these "seasons" sonnets. The remaining eleven poems, beginning with "In the Wide Awe and Wisdom of the Night", constitute not a sequence, but a group. Their sequential ordering is not as important as the fact of their being deliberately put in close proximity to each other. In these sonnets, Roberts usually omits specific details of setting and deals directly with ideas. As a result, they are more obviously subjective and introspective than the seasons sonnets. Most contain a statement of frustration or limitation, often coincident with Roberts' awareness of his own mortality. This similarity of mood gives the group its unity. As intimated, the season-sonnets follow the process of one year in rural New Brunswick. Four of the poems are set in spring, ten in summer, eight in autumn, and four in winter. The focus is on nature and not man. At times, this process is captured within an individual poem; at other times, it is created in the movement from poem to poem, or in the contrast between them. The sequence begins in spring, with "The Furrow". The land is waiting; there is a sense of anticipation. A farmer is ploughing the field, his plough gouging a "scar" from which will grow "the future's sweet". Readers of Canadian poetry are familiar with this depiction of nature as a pattern of opposites. To D.C. Scott it is the beauty of terror and the beauty of peace; to Layton the rock and the butterfly. One of the singular aspects of Roberts' sonnets is that they give much more attention to the "scar" side of the dichotomy — to weeds, blackened stumps, barren scenes — than to the "sweet" side, yet they are seldom gloomy or despairing. After the ploughman prepares the ground, "The Sower" comes to seed it. In his second sonnet, Roberts expands the import of his statement from the specific to the universal. He points out the impersonal qualities of the spring planting, qualities which transform and elevate the individual who takes part in the process. The sower is "Godlike" yet a "churl"; a mere mortal, yet someone playing a role in a great drama. Not aware of the importance of his backbreaking task, the sower is "unwittingly divine". After the sober austerity of the first two sonnets, Roberts bursts into a joyful hymn to spring in "The Waking Earth". He hails the first visible evidence of growth: "Praise for the new life! Praise/For bliss of breath and blood beneath the sun!" A spring euphoria invades the poet: "the soul is flown abroad,/Lord of desire and beauty, like a God!" The process of elevation and transformation which changes the earth from brown barrenness to sprouting plants, and which transforms the sower, also enlivens and uplifts the poet, who gives it its voice. In the fourth, and last, spring sonnet, "The Cow Pasture," Roberts takes a calmer, more analytical look at the season and its place in the round of the year. Spring's beginning excites and enlivens man because it promises more, and because it is not entirely satisfying in itself. Spring instills in man and nature a sense of "incompletion," giving rise to "the need that irks" both toward the fulfillment which comes in summer. From the explosiveness of spring Roberts moves to the placidity of summer. In "When Milking-Time Is Done" and "Frogs", the first two summer sonnets, he stresses serenity and peacefulness. Summer is the time for the slow process of life's struggle to maturation. It is also a time for toil in the fields and the barns, but Roberts does not depict the labour directly. Instead, he concentrates on the moments of escape from it, implying that most men and nature are at odds, while he is closer to nature's true moods:
Notice how economically Roberts creates a picture of the effects of man's hectic labours — "midday soil and taint", "tired ears" — while always holding up the picture of nature's serenity and of its resuscitative possibilities. In the remaining sonnets dedicated to summer, Roberts takes pains to drive home the impression that nature is always in a state of becoming and change. In "The Pea-Fields" and "The Mowing", the season reaches its peak, but even as "high" summer proclaims itself in sights, sounds, smells, and feel (heat, dryness) the hay is cut and Roberts leaps forward in time to "the dusky stalls, some winter's day" ("The Mowing"). Each of "The Clearing", "The Summer Pool", and "Buckwheat" also depicts this process of change. In "The Clearing", someone has denuded a patch of forest, attempting to make a field, and then abandoning it. The scene is bleak, but in the end Roberts shows nature regenerating itself, with fire-weed and golden-rod growing up to mask the scarred landscape with their beauty. In "The Summer Pool" and "Buckwheat" Roberts foretells the change of season from summer to autumn, in the former speaking of the "grave expectancy" of the trees, in the latter anticipating "the thresher's flail" and buckwheat "Crisped by the first frost". The transition from summer to autumn fills Roberts with mixed feelings. At first, his heart rebels against the change. In "The Cicada in the Firs", the insect first heard in "The Mowing" as part of an orchestra of sound is now a soloist. "No bird-call stirs the blue": autumn is a time of austerity and absence. In "In September" he fears autumn as "the fall of Summer", a time when beauty disappears. He vows that if beauty flies so will he, but the gesture is pointless — beauty will fade wherever the poet goes. There is no escaping, in this life, the cycles of nature. With "The Potato Harvest", Roberts completes a circle, returning to the "high bare field, brown from the plough" first depicted in the spring sonnets. The poem has a weary, but not sad, mood. He is beginning to reconcile himself to the "fall of Summer". In "The Autumn Thistles" Roberts shows that beauty has not flown with the summer:
Furthermore, in "Indian Summer", he says that the autumn landscape gives rise to "hopes" and "dreams" which surprise him with thoughts of "Unjarring fitness" and a vision of "Ideals whereto our Real must attain". Roberts has overcome his initial bitterness over the loss of beauty which autumn seemingly brings and can see that even this season has its own characteristic beauty. This thought of the real aspiring to the ideal provides the link between the autumn and winter sonnets. In "The Winter Fields", the first of the winter sonnets, Roberts points out that hidden in winter lies the potential for spring: "fallows lie,/Thin streaked with meagre drift" where "life . . . waits on summer, till the rain,/Whisper in April and the crocus come." Nature is a source of inexhaustible potential. This linking of "Indian Summer" and "The Winter Fields" eloquently drives home what the process of the year means to Roberts: the constant cycle of change — beginning, growth, fulfillment, rest — which is driven by the desire for completion, the dream of attaining the ideal through the real. Roberts presents winter as little more than a prelude to spring. "In An Old Barn", "Midwinter Thaw", and "The Flight of the Geese" all stress that the new beginning of spring lies just beyond the winter. The cattle in "In An Old Barn"
and in "Midwinter Thaw" these same "stall-wearied cattle dream their fill/Of deep June pastures where the pools are fair". In "The Flight of the Geese" Roberts presents a "night/Full filled with April forecast". The birds are "strong hosts prophesying as they go". Soon it will be time for the ploughman and the sower. A grand energy drives the changes that Roberts chronicles. His sonnets are charged with this energy. Things happen; events unfold; the poems have impact. Roberts invests his poems with this impact through repeated use of "pointing" words in his opening lines: demonstrative pronouns or adverbs setting time and/or place. Their cumulative effect is to make Roberts a guide — at the reader's elbow, tramping with him through the countryside, gesturing with his walking stick to call things to his companion's attention (the italics are added):
The immediacy Roberts creates accords with his sense of process. Notice the active, present-tense verbs. The openings have an abruptness, even a quality of surprise about them. He is not merely pointing; he is pointing to something that is happening now, and writer and reader are present to witness it. In addition to having a favourite method of opening his sonnets, Roberts also favours certain techniques for developing them. Though not used in every sonnet, these methods are prominent in the collection. One method often used by Roberts is to present a scene, and his emotional response to it, in the octave and to expound upon its meaning in the sestet. In "The Furrow" the octave focuses on a "sombre" field and a sunrise and creates a mood of anticipation. When the ploughman appears in the sestet with his "serious team" and "griding" plough, the anticipation is fulfilled. In the last line, Roberts explains the "meaning" of it all: "So, from a scar, best flowers the future's sweet". "The Sower" employs the same method, beginning with description and ending with an explanation of the "churl['s]" significance: "Godlike, he makes provision for mankind". This recurring structure, appearing most often in his most successful sonnets, gives an important clue to the workings of Roberts' mind. First he saw and felt, then he analyzed and formulated conclusions. In such sonnets, there are two processes: the process of growth in nature which Roberts observes and the process of the growth of Roberts' perceptions of the world which the reader observes. Significantly, those sonnets in which he abandons this dual-leveled process tend to be his weakest. A successful Roberts sonnet begins with a fusion of sensual experience and emotional response. "Mist" and "In the Wide Awe and Wisdom of the Night" are typical of the sonnets that fail because they do not follow this method. One feels that in them Roberts has his conclusions drawn right from the start. There is no build up of specific detail leading to the conclusion. He has no concrete base on which to stand. Another of Roberts' favourite methods of development is the blackout ending. The conclusion is surprising, even jarring, in its abruptness, yet appropriate because it is the logical culmination of the events being described. "When Milking Time Is Done" is a good example. Roberts positions himself somewhere beyond the farmyard, possibly on a nearby hill. Everything is settling down for the night. As light fades, sounds become increasingly important and "through the dusk the farmstead fades from view . He ends "The Potato Harvest" similarly: "and day fades out like smoke". In "Frogs" Roberts' very consciousness fades into a nap as he is lying in an "islet of brown weeds blown dry": "under tired eyelids lapse and faint/The moon's derisive visions — fade and cease". As with his sudden openings, this device gives the poems added energy and impact. A second visual effect which Roberts favours is to begin with a wide-angle view and then to narrow his focus until he is concentrating on some small object or space. "The Oat-Threshing" opens with a homestead "bowered in trees/That o'er the Autumn landscape shine afar" and reduces its scope to a hillside, to a barn on the hillside, and, finally, to the threshing within the barn. Similarly, "The Herring Weir" begins with "the green deeps of the outer bay" and the "red flats . . . mile on mile" and shrinks its range to the emerging weir, then to the cart approaching it, and, at last, to the "black trail across the light" caused by the wagon's wheels. The sonnet becomes a journey toward a central image, but that image only has significance as the end of a process of discovery, so Roberts guides his reader through that process before giving him the image. Again, the best of Roberts' sonnets are dynamic acts of discovery, not presenta tions of static facts or conclusions. Roberts' most interesting method of development is contrast. McMullen in "'The Poetry of Earth': A Note on Roberts' Sonnets," has already pointed out the prominence of his use of contrast, antithesis, and juxtaposition in these sonnets. Though her analysis is thorough, the conclusion she draws is too simplified and somewhat inaccurate. She reduces the matter of contrast to a single theme: "the dilemma of permanence versus transience, the search for the enduring within the world of change, and for life in the midst of death" (253). I believe that McMullen gives to Roberts an anxiety which is not always there. Change is one of the four moods which he sees as giving rise to power in verse (discussed later) and he usually looks upon it postively. McMullen fails to note that contrast as a method does not occur merely within single poems. One of the results of Roberts' non-chronological re-ordering of the sonnets is the creation of contrasts between them. By placing side by side poems which may have been written years apart, Roberts gives his seasons sonnets a kind of roundness and enhances the narrative possibilities of the sequence. This use of contrasts between sonnets needs to be examined in some detail. The "grey monotony" of "The Furrow" and the "brown, sad-coloured hillside" of "The Sower", the first two poems in the sequence, form a contrast with the "shining brooks" of "The Waking Earth", the third sonnet. All three make statements about potential and the process of growth which begins in the spring and will end with autumn harvest. The contrast that Roberts uncovers through his arrangement of the sonnets highlights the change from drabness and passivity to colour and activity which comes over the earth in spring. "The Waking Earth" contrasts in a different way with "The Cow Pasture", the sonnet following it. Both touch on what Dylan Thomas called the "force that through the green fuse drives the flower". The former speaks of the joy and energy and beauty which characterize one side of the process, while the latter shows the incompleteness that makes man and nature hunger for that beauty. "The Cow Pasture" puts spring in perspective as coming in the aftermath of winter. Winter is the sire of spring and if it were not for "sparse, pale grasses" there would not be the urge toward the blooms of summer felt equally in man and nature:
The sonnets of summer also have their contrasts. In "The Pea-Fields" and "The Mowing" Roberts works out similar pictures of "high" summer using contrasting techniques. "The Pea-Fields" is a painting done in soft pastel colours: "yellow butterflies, and foraging bees,/And whitish, wayward blossoms". Everything dances and shimmers until Roberts brings the mood back to earth by leading the reader into a face to face confrontation with some cows. "The Mowing" relies upon sound to create a summer's day. It is a song in high notes: "rasping vibrant clamour [that] soars and shrills"; "brazen grasshoppers with triumphing note"; and "crying knives". Together the two sonnets create a solid picture of summer at its finest, while also capturing its more ethereal side. To increase the complexity of the sequence further, Roberts pairs "The Pea-Fields" and "The Mowing", with their picture of nature at its fullest summer beauty, and contrasts them with the two succeeding poems, "Burnt Lands" and "The Clearing". In the latter pair, Roberts focuses on death, absence, loss, and change — "bleak shapes" ("Burnt Lands") and "Stumps, and harsh rocks, and prostrate trunks all charred" ("The Clearing") — as opposed to "Pale. .. blue, but pure beyond compare" ("The Pea-Fields"). I have already pointed out how the seasons sonnets achieve narrative characteristics through Roberts' use of a sequencing method. The way in which he uses contrast between the sonnets is another way in which he creates unity and roundness in the sequence. This essay has looked at the methods Roberts uses to record his responses to nature in his sonnets, but it has not actually identified the moods and emotions which nature engenders in him. He tells about them in one of his most important essays. Writing in "The Poetry of Nature", Roberts says that "that poetry of earth" is (my italics):
This statement is an important clue to Roberts' aesthetic as it operates in these sonnets. It tells where he finds beauty and power and why he selects the images he does. According to Roberts, "power" in a poem can be caused in the traditional way, by "sheer beauty or sheer sublimity", but it can also arise out of austerity, reticence, limitation, or change. These sonnets do not draw principally on the former, but rather on the latter source of power, the power of the "bleak pasture-lot" and "roadside thistle-path". Change is the most pervasive of the moods. At least fifteen of the poems reflect change in a significant way. Lorraine McMullen has already pointed out its key role in the sonnets, but she incorrectly, I think, sees it as always posing a threat for Roberts as it does in "Tantramar Revisited". But in these sonnets change is not always viewed with fear. Rather, it is a natural part of the process of the year. In "The Furrow", change is a welcome thing as Roberts celebrates the effect of nature's reawakening upon his soul; when "the glad earth wakes" the "fetterless soul is flown abroad". This natural, unfeared change occurs in many other sonnets. In "The Mowing" he shows how memory can overcome loss occasioned by a change in seasons:
Roberts longs for change in many of the sonnets. In "The Summer Pool" the end of summer is overdue and Roberts feels that he is held in bondage by that season. In "Buckwheat", the change of seasons is anticipated with good feeling, for it brings both harvest and beauty. In a number of other poems, including "The Winter Fields", "In An Old Barn", "Midwinter Thaw", and "The Flight of the Geese", Roberts shows that the change from winter to spring is a transition awaited with longing and impatience. Granted, not all change is presented in a positive light. In "The Salt Flats" the change is a loss: the Fundy tidal flats are silting up: "Here seethed the sweep of journeying waters, where/No more the tumbling floods of Fundy flow". Absence and emptiness are emphasized, but such negativity is rare in the sonnets. Usually, when change entails a loss some consolation, direct or implied, can also be found. In "The Clearing", the change which man has caused by cutting and burning is slowly being obliterated by nature. Change is moving in the direction of beauty. In "In September" Roberts portrays the change from summer to autumn as a change from life to death and from beauty to ugliness: "even now some yellowing branches shake,/Some hue of death the living green endows". But the last line hedges a bit. He is not certain beauty will fly; he is only afraid that it will: "If beauty flies, fain would I vanish too". He is posing an hypothesis, not describing an occurrence. Subsequent sonnets in the sequence, in fact, show that beauty does not fly when summer goes. The second most frequent of the four moods is limitation. Although it appears in a few of the seasons sonnets such as "The Cow Pasture", where Roberts writes of the need to overcome limitation as the source of creativity, or in "The Fir Woods", where he is haunted by the sense of being too limited to one locale, limitation plays its most important role in the group of eleven sonnets. Time and again, he reiterates that he is frustrated by his inability to act. In "Tides" he observes that although the "evasive waters" of the sea leave the reed-beds "void amid the waste of desolate lands," the "solacing tide" soon "returns/To quench their thirst of longing". Unfortunately, "not so/Works the stern law our tides of life obey". Unfulfilled longing is a major aspect of these sonnets of limitation. Much like Carman, Roberts likes to use separation from a beloved woman as sign of limitation and spiritual impotence. In "Dark", he says, "My soul desires communion, Dear, with thee./But hour by hour my spirit gets not free", and he complains of "this strange divorce/Of will from power". And in "Mist" and "Moonlight" he expands this sense of limitation beyond the individual to the universal. Disenchantment and pain are what all humanity inherits as "one by one our dear illusions go,/Stript and cast forth as time's slow wheel revolves" ("Mist") and he laments "These aching lips, these hungering hearts that strain" ("Moonlight"). As a group these sonnets are stronger than the sum of their individual strengths. Taken individually, their thematic statements are flimsy. Together they probe, deeply, what obviously was for Roberts a painful problem. Austerity and reticence are less prominent than change and limitation. A number of the poems emphasize the severe simplicity or plainness (i.e. austerity) of the place. The austerity of"The Sower" creates an implied contrast between the present bareness and the growth which is hoped for. It also serves to emphasize the isolation of the sower's task: there is "no break in the remote sky-line" and the sower is "alone". Through austerity of detail Roberts breaks the scene down to its elemental units: man, earth, and sky. A similar beauty of austerity is to be found in "Burnt Lands" ("no cheer of summer leaves and bees,/And no shade mitigates the day's white scorn") and "The Cicada in the Woods" ("No bird-call stirs the blue"). The best example of the power of absence is "The Autumn Thistles". First, Roberts comments on the scene's austerity:
Yet out of this unpromising material he retrieves a glimpse of something beautiful:
The very sparseness of the setting makes its few small beauties all the more precious. Of the four moods, reticence is the least readily discernible. In a sense, austerity is the reticence of nature, but there are at least two sonnets where nature aspires to silence. In "When Milking Time is Done" the scene fades to darkness and to silence. In "Frogs", the poet finds peace and release through his own silence and escape into sleep and dream:
Roberts and nature are at one, both lapsing into a restful silence. The sonnets in Songs of the Common Day are more than a mixture of picture postcards done in words and failed versified philosophy. Roberts has rearranged poems written over an eleven year period to produce a richly complex sequence. And the more philosophical poems, when examined in the context in which I have placed them, as a series of poems which give voice to his dissatisfaction with his own limitations, are not as bad as most critics have made them out to be. In addition, Roberts has employed a variety of techniques, particularly contrast, to give them immediacy and depth. And he has applied new, uniquely local, sources of power and beauty to the sonnet to Canadianize a venerable verse form. Works Cited Keith, W.J.
"Introduction," Selected Poetry and Critical Prose McMullen,
Lorraine "'The Poetry of Earth': A Note on Roberts' Mallinson, Jean.
"Kingdom of Absence," Canadian Literature, Pacey, Desmond Creating
Writing in Canada. 1952; rev. Toronto: Roberts, Charles
G.D. Songs of the Common Day and Ave: An _____. "The
Poetry of Nature," 1897; rpt. W.J. Keith (ed.), Selected _____. The
Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Ed. |