Bliss Carman
(William) Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United Empire Loyalists who withdrew from Connecticut at the time of the Revolutionary War. Carman was educated at the University of New Brunswick (1879–81), at Edinburgh (1882–3) and Harvard (1886–8). He took up his residence in the United States about 1889 and, with the exception of short sojourns in the Maritime Provinces, has lived there ever since.
In 1893, Carman issued his first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics. It was immediately successful, running quickly into a second edition. From the outset, it was evident that Carman possessed the true lyrical power: the ability to fuse thought in emotion, to interpret the external world through a personal intensity. Simple and direct in his choice of themes, his passion made them universal. A vivid buoyancy, new to American literature, made his worship of Nature frankly pagan as contrasted to the moralizing tributes of most of his predecessors. This freshness and irresponsible whimsy made Carman the natural collaborator for Richard Hovey, and when their first joint Songs from Vagabondia appeared in 1894 Carman’s fame was established. (See Preface.)
Although the three Vagabondia collections contain Carman’s best known poems, several of his other volumes (he has published almost twenty of them) vibrate with the same glowing pulse. An almost physical radiance rises from Ballads of Lost Haven (1897), From the Book of Myths (1902) and Songs of the Sea Children (1904).
Carman has also written several volumes of essays and, in conjunction with Mary Perry King, has devised several poem-dances (Daughters of Dawn, 1913) suggesting Vachel Lindsay’s later poem-games. In his collection April Airs (1916), although the strength is diluted and the music somewhat thinned, the old magic persists; the spell may be overfamiliar but it is not powerless.
A Vagabond Song
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.
The Gravedigger
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre
Went out, and where are they?
In the port they made, they are delayed
With the ships of yesterday.
He followed the ships of England far,
As the ships of long ago;
And the ships of France they led him a dance,
But he laid them all arow.
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him
Is the sexton of the town;
For sure and swift, with a guiding lift,
He shovels the dead men down.
But though he delves so fierce and grim,
His honest graves are wide,
As well they know who sleep below
The dredge of the deepest tide.
Oh, he works with a rollicking stave at lip,
And loud is the chorus skirled;
With the burly rote of his rumbling throat
He batters it down the world.
He learned it once in his father’s house,
Where the ballads of eld were sung;
And merry enough is the burden rough,
But no man knows the tongue.
Oh, fair, they say, was his bride to see,
And wilful she must have been,
That she could bide at his gruesome side
When the first red dawn came in.
And sweet, they say, is her kiss to those
She greets to his border home;
And softer than sleep her hand’s first sweep
That beckons, and they come.
Oh, crooked is he, but strong enough
To handle the tallest mast;
From the royal barque to the slaver dark,
He buries them all at last.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.
Hem and Haw
Hem and Haw were the sons of sin,
Created to shally and shirk;
Hem lay ’round and Haw looked on
While God did all the work.
Hem was a fogy, and Haw was a prig,
For both had the dull, dull mind;
And whenever they found a thing to do,
They yammered and went it blind.
Hem was the father of bigots and bores;
As the sands of the sea were they.
And Haw was the father of all the tribe
Who criticize to-day.
But God was an artist from the first,
And knew what he was about;
While over his shoulder sneered these two,
And advised him to rub it out.
They prophesied ruin ere man was made;
“Such folly must surely fail!”
And when he was done, “Do you think, my Lord,
He’s better without a tail?”
And still in the honest working world,
With posture and hint and smirk,
These sons of the devil are standing by
While man does all the work.
They balk endeavor and baffle reform,
In the sacred name of law;
And over the quavering voice of Hem
Is the droning voice of Haw.
Daisies
Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea,
A host in the sunshine, an army in June,
The people God sends us to set our hearts free.
The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell,
The orioles whistled them out of the wood;
And all of their singing was, “Earth, it is well!”
And all of their dancing was, “Life, thou art good!”