Carman's "Shelley" and Roberts' "Ave"

by Susan Glickman


That 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

Professor Roberts would certainly have something strong to say of the poet whom he is said to look to as a master. Mr. Bliss Carman . . . has already written a beautiful and original poem, which might form a chief ornament of any memorial volume.2

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

   One grieving ghost, that flew
Hither and thither through the smoke unstirred
In wailing semblance of a wild white bird. (11. 278-80)

This detail comes straight from Edward Dowden, who states in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley that:

During the whole funeral ceremony a solitary sea-bird crossing and recrossing the pile was the only intruder that baffled the vigilance of the guard.10

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:

Nor so much, by the grey sea-waves, did ever the sea-bird sing, nor so much in the dells of the dawn did the bird of Memnon bewail the son of the Morning, fluttering around his tomb, as they lamented for Bion dead.11

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

[t]he lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonized with Shelley's genius, that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us

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.

Shelley

 

One heart of all the hearts of men,
Tameless nor free,
Plunged for a moment in the fire
Of old regret and young desire,
A meteor rushed through air, and then
What eyes can see?
 

O rebel captive, fallen soul,

Self-strong and proud,
Throbbing to lift against the stars
An angel voice whose frenzy mars
And frets the song which thou wouldat roll
Aloft aloud!
 

To thee was given half to mould

That heart of thine
(Knowing all passion and the pain
Of man's imperious disdain),
Into a song whose splendour told
The dawn divine.
 

It held the rapture of the hills

Deep in its core;
The purple shadows of the ocean
Moved it to supreme emotion,
The harvest of those barren rills
Was in its store.
 

Thine was a love that strives and calls,

Outcast from home,
Burning to free the soul of man
With some new life: how strange, a ban
Should set thy sleep beneath the walls
Of changeless Rome!
 

More soft, I deem, from spring to spring,

Thy sleep would be,
Where this far western headland lies
Beneath these matchless azure skies,
Under thee hearing beat and swing
The eternal sea.
 

A bay so beauteous islanded

A bay so stilled
You well might dream the world were new;
And some fair day's Italian blue,
Unsoiled of all the ages dead,
Should be fulfilled.
 

Where all the livelong day and night

A music stirs,
The summer wind should find thy home,
And fall in lulls and cease to roam:
A covert resting, warm and bright,
Among the firs.
 

An ageless forest dell, which knows

Nor grief nor fear,
Across whose green red-berried floor
Fresh spring shall come and winter hoar,
With keen delight and rapt repose
Each year by year.
 

And there the thrushes, calm, supreme,

Forever reign,
Whose glorious kingly golden throats
Hold but a few remembered notes;
Yet in their song is blent no dream
Or tinge of pain!
 

Frye's Island, N.B., Canada

  

  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:

 

Like yours, O marshes, his compassionate breast,
Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace,
Was tortured with perpetual unrest.
Now loud with flood, now languid with release,
Now poignant with the loney ebb, the strife
Of tides from the salt sea of human pain
That hiss along the perilous coasts of life
Beat in his eager brain;
But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.

(ll. 91-100)

    

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

 

a disenchanting glimpse of the artist's hand in a moment of embarrassment and difficulty, and quite destroys the impression of inevitableness which poetry should give.17

 

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:

 

Surely we must rethink our glib assumptions about literary colonialism when we come upon a Canadian who, setting out to offer a poetic tribute to an English poet whom he had always admired, a poet who had died in the tempting world of classical antiquity, automatically (so it seems) begins in his own backyard.18

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:

Sicily shewed him subjects which he imitated in truthful art. Unluckily the later pastoral poets of northern lands have imitated him, and so have gone far astray from northern nature.l9

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

sandhills by the sea, of a low cabin roofed with grass, where fishing-rods of reed are leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floats up her waves that fill the waste with sound. This nature, gray and still, seems in harmony with the wise content of old men whose days are waning on the limit of life, as they have all been spent by the desolate margin of the sea.21

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

 

1.

See Barrie Davies, ed., At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in "The Globe" 1892-93, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 19. For further observations about Shelley, see Scott's column p. 45; on p. 132 he reprints Swinburne's sonnet for the Shelley centenary. The imagery of Wilfred Campbell's eulogy for Shelley in the following column, August 20, seems to derive from Swinburne's poem; see pp. 134-5.[back]

 

2.

At the Mermaid Inn, pp. 28-29. On January 21, 1893, Lampman dedicated his column to an enthusiastic review of "Ave." See pp. 239-41.[back]

 

3.

See the transcript of Lorne Pierce's 1927 interview with Roberts, published as "Charles G.D. Roberts Lorne Pierce" in Canadian Poetry, 21 (Fall-Winter 1987), p. 70.[back]

 

4.

Tracy Ware erroneously identifies this "beautiful and original poem" of Carman's as "The White Gull" in what is otherwise the best essay on Roberts's "Ave," "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Elegiac Tradition," The Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium ed. Glenn Clever (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), p. 43. Since "The White Gull" was not written until the summer of 1892, the March date of Lampman's column makes it certain he was referring to the poem "Shelley," published in The Literary World 18, no. 1 (Jan. 8, 1887), p. 8. I would like to thank Robarts Library for obtaining a microfilm of this journal for me.[back]

 

5.

Muriel Miller, Bliss Carmen: Quest and Revolt (St. Johns: Jesperson, 1985), p. 86.[back]

 

6.

See Roberts' "More Reminiscences of Bliss Carman," Dalhousie Review, 10 (April 1930), p. 9.[back]

 

7.

Bliss Carman, p. 87.[back]

 

8.

"More Reminiscences of Bliss Carman," p. 9.[back]

 

9.

"The White Gull" was first printed in The Independent, 44 (August 4, 1892), pp. 9-10. This date is rather confusing since, by all accounts, Carman wrote the poem in September. Possibly literary journals, then as now, were published behind schedule. Carman later collected the poem with his other memorials in By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, 1898).[back]

 

10.

Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886), II, 534. In the preface to his edition of Shelley's Adonais and Alastor (New York: Silver, Burdett, 1902), Roberts declares that Dowden's biography "in all crucial points has been relied upon as final" (p. 6), so he would have presumed Dowden to have good authority for the presence of this sea-bird at the funeral pyre. Perhaps he had, but I have been unable to find any such detail among the eye-witness reports of Shelley's cremation.[back]

 

11.

Andrew Lang, Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose, with an Introductory Essay (London: MacMillan, 1880), p. 190. Roberts relied on this translation for his essay "Pastoral Elegies," The New Princeton Review, V (May 1888), pp. 360-70, and for his notes to Shelley's Adonais and Alastor.[back]

 

12.

Roberts made profuse but minor emmendations to "Pastoral Elegies" before incorporating it in the introduction to Shelley's Adonais and Alastor. William Keith reprints this revised version as "Shelley's Adonais" in his edition of Roberts' Selected Poetry and Critical Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). I will quote from this edition as being more accessible. For the reference, see p. 283.[back]

 

13.

"Charles G.D. Roberts and the Elegiac Tradition," p. 44.[back]

 

14.

Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878; rpt. Har­mondaworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 171. Also, in an essay on "Shelley's Nature‑Poetry" published in The Shelley Society's Papers series 1, no. 1(London: Reeves and Turner, 1888), Henry Sweet juxtaposes similar images of the spirit soaring out of the body like a sea-bird over the ocean from Shelley's "Revolt of Islam" and the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer." See p. 276.[back]

 

15.

See "A Northern Pantheism: Notes on Confederation Poets and Contemporary Mythogra­phers," Canadian Poetry, 9 (Fall-Winter 1981), p. 42.[back]

 

16.

These lines from "Thalassius" are remarkably close in theme and imagery:

Now too the soul of all his senses felt

The passionate pride of deep sea-pulses dealt

Through nerve and jubilant vein

As from the love and largess of old time,

And with his heart again

The tidal throb of all the tides keep rhyme

And charm him from his own soul's separate sense

With infinite and invasive influence

That made strength sweet in him and sweetness strong,

Being now no more a singer, but a song.

(11. 465-74)

The poem was first published in Songs of the Springtides (1880), dedicated to Shelley's friend Trelawny, and Swinburne described it as a "symbolical quasi-autobiographical poem after the manner of Shelley." (See L.M. Findlay, Swinburne: Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet, 1982, p. 265n.) In Shelley's Adonais and Alastor, Roberts calls Swinburne "the lyrical descendent of Shelley" (p. 99n).[back]

 

17.

Charles G.D. Roberts and the Influence of his Times (1905; rpt. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1975), p. 32.[back]

 

18.

W.J. Keith, "Charles G.D. Roberts and the Poetic Tradition," in The Proceedings of the Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium, Mount Allison University (1972), ed. Carrie MacMillan (Halifax: Nimbus, 1984), p. 59.[back]

 

19.

Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, p. xxii.[back]

 

20.

See "Shelley's Adonais," p. 290.[back]

 

21.

Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, p.xvii.[back]