Mr. Carman sings equally finely, though perhaps not so frequently, of summer and the other seasons; but as he has other claims upon our attention, I shall forbear to labor the fact, particularly as the following collection demonstrates it sufficiently. One of those other claims is as a writer of sea poetry. Few poets, it may be said, have pictured the majesty and the mystery, the beauty and the terror of the sea, better than he. His _Ballads of Lost Haven_ is a veritable treasure-house for those whose spirits find kinship in wide expanses of moving waters. One of the best known poems in this volume is "The Gravedigger," which opens thus:
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.
In "The City of the Sea" (_Last Songs from Vagabondia_) Mr. Carman speaks of the seabells sounding
The eternal cadence of sea sorrow For Man's lot and immemorial wrong-- The lost strains that haunt the human dwelling With the ghost of song.
And here from another poem is a striking picture:
... the old sea Seems to whimper and deplore Mourning like a childless crone With her sorrow left alone-- The eternal human cry To the heedless passer-by.
I have said above that Mr. Carman has had three distinct periods, and intimated that the poems in the following collection are of his third period. The first period may be said to be represented by the _Low Tide_ and _Behind the Arras_ volumes, while the second is displayed in the three volumes of _Songs from Vagabondia_, which he published in association with his friend Richard Hovey. Bliss Carman was from the first too original and individual a poet to be directly influenced by anyone else; but there can be no doubt that his friendship with Hovey helped to turn him from over-preoccupation with mysteries which, for all their greatness, are not for man to solve, to an intenser realisation of the beauty and loveliness of the world about him and of the joys of human fellowship. The result is seen in such poems as "Spring Song," quoted in part above, and his perhaps equally well-known "The Joys of the Road," which appeared in the same volume with that poem, and a few verses from which follow: