| Most
readers are familiar with Archibald Lampman’s
response to Charles G.D. Roberts’ Orion,
and Other Poems (1880): “It seemed
to me a wonderful thing that such work could be
done by a Canadian, by a young man, one of ourselves.
It was like a voice from some new paradise of
art calling to us to be up and doing” (94).
In the same lecture, Lampman notes that Roberts
made progress with In Divers Tones (1886),
his second volume: “In this the promise
of the first was strengthened and in part fulfilled”
(96). Because Roberts was so influential on his
Canadian peers, his development has often been
seen in nationalist terms, though not by Lampman:
for Archibald MacMechan in 1924, In Divers
Tones “registers a distinct advance
on his first volume, especially in the range of
themes. Unlike Lampman, Roberts took an interest
in the young, growing nation” (119); for
Pelham Edgar in 1943, it “marked the close
of his apprenticeship, his weaning from classical
themes, and the beginning of that faithful rendering
of the Canadian scene which with few intermissions
has characterized his poetry throughout his long
career” (103); for W.J. Keith in 1974, “whereas
Orion qualified as Canadian almost solely
by virtue of its being written in Canada, In
Divers Tones communicates a distinct national
feeling and recreates the essence of the Maritime
landscape. Nothing quite like it had been published
in Canada before” (Introduction xxii). In
fifty-eight poems, Roberts deals with both “national
feeling” and the “Maritime landscape,”
but he also includes love lyrics, Classical and
indigenous myths, light verse, dramatic monologues,
a translation from the French of Louis Fréchette,
philosophical meditations, serious and ironic
pastorals, and poems dedicated to friends, other
writers, and various causes. The forms include
twelve sonnets of various kinds, three ballades,
two odes, a roundeau, quatrains, blank verse,
tetrameter and trimeter couplets, triplets, and,
most memorably, three poems in what Roberts called
“rigid Ovidian elegiac metre” (Selected
Poetry and Critical Prose 302). In form as
in content, the most striking quality of the book
is its diversity.
Nationalism was
important to Roberts, but it was only one of his
diverse interests. Lampman thought that the three
patriotic poems “are clever, but heavy,
pompous, and more of the tongue [than] the heart.
The time has not come for the production of any
genuine national song” (107). Two of these
poems, “Collect for Dominion Day”
and “Canada,” open the book. The latter
begins with unusual vehemence:
O
Child of Nations, giant-limbed,
Who stand’st among the
nations now
Unheeded, unadored, unhymned,
With unanointed brow,--
How long the ignoble sloth, how long
The trust in greatness not
thine own?
Surely the lion’s brood is strong
To front the world alone!
As
Roberts explains in a letter “To Charles
Leonard Moore” of June 16, 1885, “Canada”
is “a lyric with a purpose (I am a devoted
Canadian Independent)” (Letters 48). But
not only was Roberts devoted to other issues as
well as nationalism, he also soon reconceived
his politics. As John Coldwell Adams notes, “Ironically,
the poem was close to being his swan song as a
‘Canadian Republican,’ for within
a year he became convinced that [his friend Edmund]
Collins’ proposals for independence would
lead to annexation with the United States, and
that Canada’s destiny lay within the Empire”
(“Roberts” 11). So Roberts’
move from Independence to Imperial Federation
followed his move from Toronto back to Fredericton,
after he quit his position as editor of The
Week in frustration with founder Goldwin
Smith’s support for a North American political
union. Given Roberts’ Anglican Maritime
background, the change is less surprising than
the decision to reprint “Canada.”
And all three of the patriotic poems are odd company
with “The Poet is Bidden to Manhattan Island,”
the penultimate poem in the book:
Your heart, dear Poet, surely yields;
And soon you’ll leave
your uplands flowery,
Forsaking fresh and bowery fields,
For “pastures new”--upon
the Bowery!
You’ve piped at home, where none could
pay,
Till now, I trust, your wits
are riper.
Make no delay, but come this way,
And pipe for them that pay
the piper! (41-48)
Whether
or not these lines foreshadow Roberts’ own
move to New York in 1897 (Pacey, Ten 40), they
certainly reveal his interest in American journals,
publishers, and readers. Ten of the poems in In
Divers Tones, including “Collect for
Dominion Day” and “Canada,”
had previously appeared in American journals,
and the book itself was published in Boston. As
E.K. Brown notes, “In the last twenty years
of the nineteenth century the best of the Canadian
poets appeared regularly in the best of the American
magazines” (“To the North” 79;
see also Rogers and Doyle), and it was Roberts
who blazed the trail.
While
they are less dominant after Orion, classical
themes and metres remain important to Roberts
throughout his career. When in 1927 Lorne Pierce
asked him what he got from his study of the classics,
Roberts responded: “Everything that I am.
It was my most formative period. I was moulded
on the classics, and Greek especially was a great
passion with me” (Whalen 67). In her review
of In Divers Tones, Sara Jeannette Duncan
found that “Actæon” and “The
Pipes of Pan” make “the strongest
intellectual claim of the volume” (280).
In the latter, Roberts associates himself with
Pan, whose music survives in the fragments of
pipes that are scattered to “secret spots”
(34), where they inspire “a charm-struck
/ Passion for woods and wild life, the solitude
of the hills” (41-42). The former is at
209 lines the longest poem in the book by far,
and it was long ago singled out by James Cappon
as “Roberts’ most successful achievement
in the region of classical idyll” (11).
Lampman went further: for him “Actæon”
is “certainly the best poem of that kind
that has been written in America, and as regards
workmanship I think it will stand comparison favourably
with Tennyson’s ‘Oenone’”
(98). The poem focusses on the psychology of the
speaker, a woman of Platæa:
I
have lived long, and served the gods, and drawn
Small joy and liberal sorrow,--scorned the gods,
And drawn no less my little meed of good. (4-6).
She
is now “well sick of watching” (94)
because she saw Actæon, “thewed and
sinewed like a god, / Godlike for sweet speech
and great deeds” (60-61), turned into a
stag and devoured by his own hounds because he
gazed on Artemis bathing. She is certain of the
power of the gods but not of their justice, and,
as Fred Cogswell notes, “her account of
early devotion, her loss of faith, and her return
to worship on the ground that providence, however
amoral, does exist and does wield terrifying power
could be taken as a paradigm of an analogous development
in Roberts’ own view of existence at the
time of composition” (“Classical”
33).
But
In Diverse Tones also includes “The
Quelling of the Moose” and “The Departing
of Clote Scarp,” two poems based on the
mythology of the Malecite, one of New Brunswick’s
native peoples. As D.M.R. Bentley suggests, both
poems may have been written specially for In
Divers Tones, since they extend its representation
of “Canadian and Native subject-matter”
while adding to its diversity (“Roberts’s
Use” 18-19, 34 n1). In “The Departing
of Clote Scarp,” Roberts tells the story
of the loss of primal “gladness” (2)
when “All the works / And words and ways
of men and beast became / Evil” (5-7). Clote
Scarp calls all the animals, but not the humans,
to a final feast, at which he explains that “he
must depart from them, / And they should look
upon his face no more” (20-21). As the poem
ends, Clote Scarp’s song of departure fades,
causing the animals to lift “their voices
in their grief”:
Lo! on the mouth of every beast a strange
New tongue! Then rose they all and fled apart,
Nor met again in council from that day. (39-42)
As
Bentley writes, “the diction of the King
James Bible proclaims the analogue between the
linguistic and societal consequences of [Clote
Scarp’s] departure and the ‘confusion
of tongues’ at the building of Babel in
Genesis 11” (“Roberts’s Use”
23). Roberts is interested in comparing rather
than dismissing mythologies, and he suggests in
“The Marvellous Work” that it is a
time of
strange
discordant motley.
But O rare motley,—starred with thirst
of truth,
Patched with desire of wisdom, zoned about
With passion for fresh knowledge, and the quest
Of right! Such motley may be made at last,
Through grave sincerity, a dawn-clear garment!
(17-22).
“The
Isles—an Ode” concludes with a mixed
collection of the writers that Roberts includes
among the immortals: Homer, Milton, Omar Khayám,
Shakespeare, the author of the Song of Songs,
and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
If at times Roberts’
diversity seems excessive, it is well to remember
that his title comes from Tennyson’s In
Memoriam:
I
held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things. (1.1-4)
Roberts’
equivalent of a “clear harp” is his
native region of New Brunswick, the Tantramar.
As Pacey argues, “the really remarkable
development evident in [In Divers Tones]
is not that Roberts has discovered Canadian nationalism
nor improved his technique in the classical narrative,
but that he has begun to recognize the poetic
possibilities in his own environment” (Ten
47). For Roberts, “nature-poetry is not
mere description of landscape in metrical form,
but the expression of one or another of many vital
relationships between external nature and ‘the
deep heart of man’” (“The Poetry
of Nature,” Selected Poetry and Critical
Prose 281). This kind of poetry had to fuse
the lyrical self and the setting:
Nature
becomes significant to man when she is passed
through the alembic of his heart. Irrelevant
and confusing details having been purged away,
what remains is single and vital. It acts either
by interpreting, recalling, suggesting, or symbolizing
some phase of human feeling. Out of the fusing
heat born of this contact comes the perfect
line, luminous, unforgettable, with something
of mystery in its beauty that eludes analysis.
(Selected Poetry and Critical Prose
277-78)
At
first Roberts kept the setting distinct from the
theme. Thus an early sonnet “To Fredericton
in May-Time” (1881) concludes that the beauty
of the area is not enough to satisfy the speaker:
“The whole air pulses with its weight of
sweet; / Yet not quite satisfied is my desire!”
(13-14). Then “In the Afternoon,”
an 1882 poem in which, as Pacey notes, “for
the first time we see the distinctive land- and
seascape of the Tantramar country” (Ten
47), contrasts the speaker and his younger self
and introduces the Wordsworthian theme of memory:
Blown
back to olden days, I fain
Would quaff the olden joys again;
But all the olden sweetness not
The old unmindful peace hath brought. (43-46)
Here
Roberts starts to chart his distinctive territory,
but the tetrameter couplets are not his ideal
form. In “A Breathing Time,” also
from 1882, Roberts uses the longer lines of the
elegiac meter as he seeks to return to what Wordsworth
called “the hour / Of thoughtless youth”
(“Tintern Abbey” 89-90):
Lo,
out of failure triumph! Renewed the wavering
courage,
Tense the unstrung nerves, steadfast the faltering
knees!
Weary no more, nor faint, nor grieved at heart,
nor despairing,
Hushed in the earth’s green lap, lulled
to slumber and dreams! (9-12)
The
regressive overtones of that “slumber”
are at best partially balanced by the speaker’s
sense that this landscape can provide rest only
“for a little season” (1).
Roberts returned
to the problem and the form of “A Breathing
Time” in 1883 in “The Tantramar Revisited.”
Part of the greatness of that poem is its recognition
that it is not possible to return to an “unmindful”
state. Since the poem’s elegiac meter alternates
hexameter and pentameter lines in a kind of ebb
and flow, it is uniquely suited to both the setting
and to the speaker’s mood. As Lampman observes,
“There is a certain passionate stress in
it, which makes it specially applicable to descriptive
writing of an emotionally meditative and reminiscent
character” (99-100). The poem opens with
the hope that the remembered landscape will have
escaped the “Hands of chance and change”
(5,8), but every detail in the poem suggests that
the hope will not be fulfilled. The very houses
are “Stained with time,” the slopes
are constantly “Wind-swept,” the shores
are vexed by the “Surge and flow of the
tides” (12, 14,18; see Jackel 49), and so
on. As Bentley notes, “The Tantramar region
with its blowing grasses, its flowing rivers,
its proximate sea and, of course, its ‘tremendous
Fundy tide’ could be said to constitute
a visible image of flux, a working model of time”
(“Poetics” 19; the internal quotation
is from Roberts, “New Brunswick” 756-57).
As the poem ends, the speaker recognizes that
the relief that he seeks, and that Roberts sought
in the earlier Tantramar poems, is an illusion:
Ah
the old-time stir, how once it stung me with
rapture,—
Old-time sweetness, the winds freighted with
honey and salt!
Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to
the marsh-land,—
Muse and recall far off, rather remember than
see,—
Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion,
Spy at their task even here the hands of chance
and change. (59-64)
The
poem has been the most extensively discussed of
all Roberts’ poems, and its possible sources
and analogues include Tibullus and Ovid (Lampman
99), Longfellow (Cappon 18; Pacey, Ten 47; Strong
27), Swinburne (Keith, “Roberts” 58;
Bentley, “Poetics” 25-26), Clough
(Cappon 18; Keith, “Roberts,” 59),
Wordsworth (Marshall 9; Bentley, “Poetics”
25-27; Ware), and Sidney Lanier (Bentley, “Tantramar”).
In no way is “The Tantramar Revisited”
diminished by our awareness of these other poems.
So far from being derivative, the poem is so profoundly
original that Pauline Johnson could write that
“For another to sing of Tantramar would
be almost plagiarism; its very name is so wedded
with Roberts, that to sever them would be an arrant
literary divorce. The great Maritime marsh is
not only his lyrical possession, it is himself,
for as you view, and study, and absorb a great
picture painted by a great artist . . . so with
passing through Tantramar you learn of the man
who identified himself with it ere he could glorify
it in song and story” (17-18). Johnson writes
in 1896, and she quotes extensively from Roberts’
recent verse, but “The Tantramar Revisited”
is clearly a key poem for her.
Johnson’s
comparison of poetry and painting is especially
apt for Roberts’ sonnets, especially for
the eight Petrarchan sonnets set in New Brunswick.
One of these, “The Sower,” which Cappon
calls “the poet’s popular masterpiece”
(24), was inspired by Jean François Millet’s
painting of the same name (Pomeroy 52), and so
the poem moves towards a monumental assertion:
“This plodding churl grows great in his
employ;—/ God-like, he makes provision for
mankind” (13-14). Later readers are more
likely to prefer “The Potato Harvest,”
which frames a landscape that is picturesque in
every sense, as both the octave and sestet move
carefully from background to foreground (see Pacey,
“Sir” 194). Here is the sestet:
Black
on the ridge, against that lonely flush,
A cart, and stoop-necked oxen; ranged
beside,
Some barrels; and the
day-worn harvest-folk,
Here emptying their baskets, jar the hush
With hollow thunders; down the dusk
hillside
Lumbers the wain; and
day fades out like smoke. (9-14)
Although
these lines are striking for their restraint,
and for the accuracy that Roberts was inclined
to regard as a lesser virtue of nature poetry,
the last words remind us that the poem is the
expression of a mood as well as a description
of a scene, and so it fulfills Roberts’
aesthetic. Or as Bliss Carman might argue, “In
passages like these poetry is at its best; it
is doing for us what nothing else can; it is interpreting
for us the beauty of the outward world and the
inward mysterious craving of the human mind”
(169). In Divers Tones also includes
five other sonnets on the various themes indicated
by their titles: “To Fredericton in May-Time,”
“The Slave Woman,” “Reckoning,”
“Khartoum,” and “Collect for
Dominion Day,” the only Shakespearean sonnet
in the volume. So even with the sonnet Roberts
experiments with diverse tones and finds his voice
in the poems set in his native region.
With the publication
of Songs of the Common Day and Ave: An Ode
for the Shelley Centenary in 1893, the main
current of Roberts’ work was plainly visible.
We can see that achievement foreshadowed in In
Divers Tones, which includes seven sonnets
that were later included in the Songs of the
Common Day sequence, and which starts to
conceive of the Tantramar region as it is depicted
in the autobiographical opening stanzas of Ave:
But
most availed
Your strange unquiet
waters to engage
My kindred heart’s companionship;
nor failed
To grant this
heritage,—
That in my veins forever must abide
The urge and fluctuation of the
tide. (Collected 45-50)
More
that that, however, In Divers Tones enables
us to recover something of the excitement that
accompanied the early productions of the Confederation
poets. Roberts was surely referring to his own
work when he said, in his review of Lampman’s
Among the Millet in 1889, “With
us in Canada, though we may appear to trifle a
little with ballades and villanelles and triolets,
there is a strenuous undercurrent almost always
to be detected” (41). Nowhere is that undercurrent
stronger than in In Divers Tones, and
so it was one of the “manifestations, unmistakable
enough to the heedful observer, of an approaching
harvest for these acres which so long we have
been tilling almost in vain” (Roberts, “Review”
41). Since E.K. Brown published On Canadian
Poetry in 1943, Canadian critics have often
focussed on Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott
at the expense of Roberts and Carman. Pacey’s
response is still convincing:
There
was no rivalry between them: in all the letters
and critical articles of the four that I have
read I have never found the slightest evidence
of jealousy among them. They all agreed that
Roberts was their leader, in
the sense that he first published his poems
in the great magazines of North America and
in book form, but he was the first among equals.
(“Sir” 187-88)
Orion
showed Roberts’ promise, but In Divers
Tones is one of the key achievements for
Roberts and the Confederation poets in general.
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