Carman's "Shelley" and Roberts' "Ave"by Susan GlickmanThat delectable rag-bag of cultural opinion, "At the Mermaid Inn," commenced publication in the Toronto newspaper The Globe on February 6, 1892. From the start, its scope was international and topical; the latest book from Paris or London was as likely to be reviewed as the most recent scandal in Ottawa. A subject of continuous interest throughout. the eighteen months of the column's existence was Percy Bysshe Shelley, the centenary of whose birth took place in 1892. The founding of the Shelley Society in 1886 had confirmed the near-canonization of a poet who, at the time of his death, was reviled but largely unread by the English public, and unknown abroad. Thus Duncan Campbell Scott could assume that the doings of the Society would be of interest to his readers when, on February 20th, he wonders why its zeal to honour the centenary has taken the "curious outlet" of a production of The Cenci.1 Closer to home, on March 5th Archibald Lampman considers a local proposal "that some Canadian publisher should issue a memorial volume of contributions by Canadian authors in honour of the Shelley anniversary," and doubts whether there are enough "Canadian writers who would be naturally impelled to produce enough writing of a high standard of excellence to form the volume proposed." Confessing himself to be no worshipper of Shelley, he goes on to suggest that
That Lampman was aware of Roberts' admiration for Shelley is not surprising; the two had become friendly during Roberts' six-month sojourn in Toronto as editor of The Week from November 1883-April 1884, while Lampman was a student at Trinity College.3 What is rather intriguing, however, is that Lampman had read an obscure poem, "Shelley," that Carman had published in a Boston journal while at Harvard .4 One can't help wondering whether these well-informed comments actually inspired the events of the following summer, when Roberts invited Carman to come to Kingscroft for a writing holiday "to build. . . `Shelley'. . . into an ode to be published with his own `Ave et Vale."'5 Richard Hovey joined the cousins as he had done in the past, but this summer they dropped their playful game of competitive verse-making and "buckled down to serious undertakings" in the writing of their elegies (Hovey's "Seaward," however, being not for Shelley but for the American poet Thomas William Parsons).6 According to Carman's biographer Muriel Miller, Roberts had nearly finished his poem by the time Carman arrived.7 This is interesting, because it corroborates the impression one gets that "The White Gull" was written rather hastily — that Carman had already said all he had to say on the subject in "Shelley" but was trying to keep up with the boys. The new title, displacing Shelley himself for the image of his "fame" in the flight of a gull, signals the transformation of an empassioned lyric of ten stanzas into a meandering meditation of thirty-two. Moreover, unlike Roberts, who in "Ave" gives a minutely detailed account of Shelley's career pervaded by the language and imagery of Shelley's own poetry, Carman gives only the sketchiest idea of who Shelley was or what he actually accomplished. His Shelley is ultimately a type rather than an individual. Hence Roberts' final judgement in his "Reminiscences of Bliss Carman" is that, although "The White Gull" is "crowded with passages of poignant and haunting beauty," ultimately it fails to reach "the first rank" because of "some diffuseness of thought and incoherence of structure."8 His evident disappointment in the direction Carman's revision had taken is doubtless the reason Roberts abandoned his initial plan to publish their Shelley tributes together. "Ave" was printed privately late in December of 1892, with only one stanza of "The White Gull" — and that the only stanza which had survived unchanged from "Shelley" — as an epigraph.9 The hypothesis that Carman's late arrival resulted in hasty imitativeness is further supported by the fact that his title image, the white gull, may also be found towards the end of, "Ave." The difference between the multifold implications of the image as it occurs in Roberts and its purely fortuitous character in Carman could not be more pronounced, and reveals the opposing æsthetics of these poets in their early years. The twenty-eighth stanza of "Ave" depicts the mourners around Shelley's funeral pyre. Besides Trelawney, Byron, and Hunt, Roberts tells us there was also
This detail comes straight from Edward Dowden, who states in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley that:
But quite apart from any biographical authority conferred by Dowden, much of the appeal of the image for Roberts would have been in its coincidence with elegiac convention. Grieving birds are as much a part of the pastoral elegy as are weeping nymphs and scattered flowers. Moschus, in the "Lament for Bion," even has a sea-bird among the chorus of Nature's mourners:
Roberts dispenses with most of the classical machinery in "Ave," evoking no nymphs, muses, or powers of Nature except in his exhortation to the waters of Lerici to mourn for the poet they have drowned (11. 211-20). Moreover, he emphasizes his distance from the pastoral model by calling the poem an "Ode." Nonetheless, "Ave" does have many features in common with the pastoral elegy as described by Roberts himself in his 1888 essay: it too is "the expression of a grief which is personal but not too passionately so, and which is permitted to utter itself in panegyric."12 And, as Tracy Ware notes, it incorporates the three chief elegiac components: lamentation, praise, and consolation.13 Thus the image of the sea-bird provides a perfect link between convention and experiment. It represents the particular circumstances of Shelley's death and burial at the same time as it reminds the reader of the literary tradition behind the form of the poem. In Moschus the sea-bird is only one of several whose sad songs express Nature's lament for her lost beloved, but in Roberts there is just the single bird sanctioned by biography. Of course this bird has a symbolic function as well; as a "ghost" it suggests either the spirit of Keats (whom Shelley had described as akin to the nightingale in "Adonais" 1. 145), or Shelley himself. It is true that elsewhere in the poem Roberts describes Shelley as "the lark melodious in mid-heaven" (1. 151). But in the passage which perhaps inspired Dowden to invent the sea-bird in the first place, Trelawny says
and when Carman decides to adopt this image for his poem he makes the gull representative of Shelley.14 To be accurate, the ghost-like bird itself does not remind Carman of the Romantic poet; rather, he finds its powerful flight across oceans "something . . . like [Shelley's] fame" ("The White Gull," 1. 37). The vagueness of this epithet is not inapt in a poem structured as an eight-part improvisation upon the theme of Shelley by the seashore. The speaker has already made it clear that the meditation takes place on the centenary of Shelley's birth, and that therefore his thoughts keep drifting back and forth between the maritime scenery which surrounds him and the poet whose special day it is. Nonetheless, if we compare the impressionistic style of "The White Gull" with Carman's original poem, "Shelley," which it partially incorporates (particularly in sections six and seven, which are drawn almost entirely from the original), we find a striking loss of energy and intensity. The only real improvement in the new version seems to be the more logical sequence of starting on the Canadian shore rather than abruptly arriving there. The new frame of "The White Gull" may well have been suggested by those of Hovey's "Seaward" and Roberts' "Ave," which are similar. However, what is more striking than Carman's debt to Roberts is the extent to which not only "The White Gull" but also "Ave" derive from the prototype of "Shelley." As far as I know, the poem has never been reprinted, so I give it below.
The structure of the poem is symmetrical; the first half follows the title and is about Shelley, and the second half describes the scenery of "Frye's Island, N.B.," as the concluding note explains. Although the idealized presentation of the poet is conventional enough, the argument of the poem is — as Lampman called it — highly original. Carman insists that the remains of such a revolutionary spirit as Shelley ought to be interred in the new world, a world whose natural beauty exemplifies "the dawn divine" his song foretold. Paradoxically, the ancient and populous city of Rome is presented as static, while the untouched maritime coast is envisioned as full of primal energy. Maia Bhojwani emphasizes the radicalism of Carman's vision here; he is proposing to replace "the decadent European context of Shelley's poetry with the Utopian idea of Canada as the New World, as yet untainted by history."15
Carman's rejection of history is prepared for by his insistence that the conscious political ideals of Shelley were only "half' his inspiration (11. 13-18); "deep in its core" his heart held images of nature which compelled him to desire "some new life" for mankind (11. 19-28). Unfortunately, the description we get of this "new life" on the "far western headland" is notably devoid of human interest, and what it offers to the spirit is a healing union with nature that is neither "new" nor, despite the indigenous thrushes and firs, particularly Canadian. Nonetheless, although Carman's poem fails to persuade the reader either that Nature made Shelley a revolutionary or that Shelley's sleep would be "more soft" in Canada (1. 31), this bold juxtaposition of English poet and Canadian landscape lies behind not only Carman's attempt in "The White Gull" to fulfill his vision but also behind Roberts' "Ave."
That "Ave," despite being so much more formal, is yet so much more moving than "Shelley," is due in no small measure to Roberts' having turned Carman's unproven assertion of relationship into personal testimonial. While the two halves of Carman's equation stay separate, Roberts persuades us that, for him, they are intimately — even logically —related. Where Carman simply states that Shelley's spirit would feel both "keen delight and rapt repose" (1. 54) in the variety of New Brunswick's landscape and its changing seasons, Roberts gives us a reason to believe this: he tells us it is the ever-changing quality of that landscape which, by shaping him as a boy, prepared him to understand the spirit of Shelley. Roberts explicates the vague impressionism of Carman; he makes sense out of it.
Similarly, although Carman says that it is the "changeless" quality of Rome (1. 30) which makes it inimical to Shelley's spirit, he yet insists most on the "covert resting" (1. 47) offered to that spirit by Canada. The sentimentality of the poem's conclusion thus defeats Carman's attempt to make an analogy between Shelley's utopian idealism and his appreciation of the "tameless" forces of nature. Roberts, however, insists that it is precisely "the endless and controlless ebb and flow" of the Tantramar marshes that make them "strangely akin" to Shelley ("Ave" 11. 86-87). In fact, Roberts expands the analogy to make it stand as a kind of ars poetica when he goes on to apostrophize the landscape in stanza ten:
We recognize an allusion here to Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," wherein "the awful shadow of some unseen Power / . . . visiting / This various world with as inconstant wing" (11. 1-3) is requested to descend upon the poet and supply its "calm" to his life (11. 78-81). There is also a strong reminiscence of Swinburne's seaside autobiography, "Thalassius," and a fainter one of section XIX of Tennyson's "In Memorium," in the analogy between the ebb and flow of the tides and the pulses of the poet's feelings.16 More particularly, however, since earlier Roberts has declared that his "kindred heart" has been shaped by these "strange unquiet waters" (11. 46-47), he is effectively declaring his own kinship with Shelley through the common third term: the Tantramar.
This term is deliberately ambiguous — it signifies both the general region, which is described as "tranquil" (1. 81), and at the same time the river, "untamable and changeable as flame" (l. 53). The paradoxical quality of the landscape, always in flux and yet somehow serene, is also described implicitly in "Shelley," but there its significance remains unclear. Roberts elucidates this significance in "Ave;" but not for the first time. He had already explored how ever-changing activity can give the illusion of changelessness in an earlier poem on the region, his first great elegy, "The Tantramar Revisited" (1883).
Oddly enough, most critics, following James Cappon's lead, have been unconvinced by Roberts' central analogy. Cappon objects that Roberts' statement of kinship between Shelley and the Tantramar in stanza nine gives the reader
William Keith, on the other hand, finds the "inevitableness" of this poem, as I do, precisely in its maritime setting. In fact, Keith suggests that this choice of setting has profound cultural implications. He asks:
Of course, that parenthetical "so it seems" acknowledges that Roberts was not the kind of poet to subvert conventions "automatically." As I have just been arguing, Carman's "Shelley" clearly provided a model for Roberts, although Carman started his poem in the old world and ended it in the new. And there were other precedents — both scholarly and literary — for Roberts' decision to celebrate Shelley via the Tantramar. For example Andrew Lang, whose classical translations Roberts so relied on, points out the inauthenticity of neo-classicism. Lang notes that Theocritus was describing the landscape in which he lived:
Presumably Arnold felt the same way, for in "Thyrsis," a poem Roberts describes as "in temper one of the most modern of poems," he updates the elegiac setting, describing a living landscape around Oxford rather than a timeless Arcadia.20 Similarly, in "When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed," Whitman translates the classical narcissus and nightingale into the lilac and thrush of his native New England. The move away from Greek shepherds preceded Roberts' "Ave;" by the mid-nineteenth century, the artifice of pastoral, rather than evoking the continuity of poetic themes, was felt to inhibit the mourning process it was meant to assist. But neither Arnold nor Whitman left the gentle meadows and woods of the pastoral milieu for anything so distant as the seashore. Suggestively, however, in the very essay on Theocritus wherein he deplores the artificial use of Greek pastoral by northern poets, Lang lavishly praises Theocritus's ninth idyl, also known as "The Fisherman's Dream." He says that "there is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of nature" than this poem, and then gives an enthusiastic description of the vision it inspires in him of
The elegiac quality of Lang's description is much more emphatic than anything in Theocritus's rather humourous dialogue. But Lang's evocation of the sea as a symbol of human mortality is a prime Romantic trope, which Swinburne among the Victorians, and Carman and Roberts after him, were to return to again and again. Indeed, this vision of Lang's has much in common with that of Roberts in "The Tantramar Revisited." With the naturalized elegies of Arnold and Whitman before him, and with the seaside setting of his own great ode being evoked not only by classical authorities but also by Carman's "Shelley" it does seem, if not "automatic," at least inevitable, that Roberts should begin "Ave" in his own backyard. Notes
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||