Griffin Passant by Eric Ravilious
4 hours ago
Showing posts with label Carman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carman. Show all posts
25 December 2023
Bliss Carman's 'Christmas Song'
09 October 2022
Bliss Carman's Lesser-Known Thanksgiving Poem
Am I right that 'A New England Thanksgiving' ranks amongst Bliss Carman's better-known poems? Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure it's more familiar than 'A Thanksgiving.' This version is found in Last Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1900), Carman's final collaboration with American poet Richard Hovey. I quite like it.
A Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Related posts:
01 December 2021
The 1921 Globe 100 206: Don't Mention the War
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| The Globe, 3 December 1921 |
The 1921 edition of 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the Globe's annual list of best books, begins on a positive note: "Author's and publishers have had an unhappy experience during the past few years owing to conditions which they could not control, but the current season has a distinctly better tone."
The Great War must surely have ranked as the preeminent condition. There were years in which the conflict came close to dominating 'Recent Books and the Outlook.' The 1920 edition had an entire section devoted to books about the war:
Not only is the Great War barely mentioned in the 1921 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' just three of its 206 books are related to the bloodshed just twenty-four months past. Great War poetry disappears entirely... and with it poetry. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Eight volumes of verse are listed, down from nineteen the previous year; four are Canadian:
My Pocket Beryl - Mary Josephine BensonLater Poems - Bliss CarmanBill Boram: A Ballad - Robert NorwoodBeauty and Life - Duncan Campbell Scott
I'm not familiar with any of these titles, but have read and reviewed Robert Service's 1921 Ballads of a Bohemian. To this point, the Bard of the Yukon had been a 'Recent Books and the Outlook' favourite;' I'd thought Ballads of a Bohemian a shoo-in. Is Bill Boram: A Ballad so much better? I must investigate.
As in years past, fiction makes up the biggest category; their number is seventy-two, the star being If Winter Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson:
Hutchinson's achievement aside, the Globe is disappointed by foreign offerings:
Fiction in other countries has been disappointing during the last year, and has certainly not proved as rich as biography or history. American readers fall into two classes says the New York Times Book Review, those who like John Dos Passos' "The Three Soldiers" and those who do not.The correct title is Three Soldiers.
It doesn't make the list.
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| My copy (New York: Doran, 1921) |
Where foreign writers of fiction disappoint, Canadians flourish. A record twenty-four Canadian fiction titles figure. Or is it twenty-three? Twenty-two?
The Lone Trail - Luke AllanAnne of the Marshland - Lady ByngBarriers - Lady ByngTo Him That Hath - Ralph ConnorThe Lobstick Trail - Douglas DurkinThe Gift of the Gods - Pearl FoleyRed Meekins - W.A. FraserMaria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon [trans W.H. Blake]Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon [trans Andrew Macphail]The Quest of Alistair - Robert A. HoodThe Hickory Stick - Nina Moore JamiesonLittle Miss Melody - Marian KeithThe Conquest of Fear - Basil KingPartner of Chance - H.H. KnibbsThe Snowshoe Trail - Edison MarshallPurple Springs - Nellie McClungRilla of Ingleside - L.M. MontgomeryAre All Men Alike? - Arthur StringerThe Spoilers of the Valley - Robert Watson
Let's ignore the misspelling of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's surname, shall we. Louis Hémon's, too. Interesting to see both Maria Chapdelaine translations, don't you think? What really intrigues is the inclusion of Basil King's The Conquest of Fear.
As my 1942 World Library edition (above) suggests, The Conquest of Fear is a work of philosophy. The Globe describes it at a novel:
The inclusion of Arthur Stringer's Are All Men Alike? is just as intriguing. The author published two books in 1921, the other being his heart-breaking roman à clef The Wine of Life. By far the finest Stringer I've read thus far, my dream is to one day bring out an edition featuring the twenty-four James Montgomery Flagg illustrations it inspired.
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| My collection of the Globe's 1921 Canadian "fiction" titles |
Is Are All Men Alike? superior to The Wine of Life?
I haven't read it, nor have I read Jess of the Rebel Trail or Little Miss Melody. I have read Miriam of Queen's and The Window Gazer, both of which disappointed. The Empty Sack is my very favourite Basil King title, and yet it too pales beside The Wine of Life.
I haven't read it, nor have I read Jess of the Rebel Trail or Little Miss Melody. I have read Miriam of Queen's and The Window Gazer, both of which disappointed. The Empty Sack is my very favourite Basil King title, and yet it too pales beside The Wine of Life.
Or is it better? Are they all better?
What do I know? I think Three Soldiers is the best novel of 1921.
Yes, I'm one of those who like it.
What do I know? I think Three Soldiers is the best novel of 1921.
Yes, I'm one of those who like it.
Related posts:
31 December 2017
Bliss Carman's New Year's Rockin' Eve
NEW YEAR'S EVE
The air is pulsing as with crowding wings.
Migrant Ideals and valiant-hearted Dreams,
The Heavenly vanguard of eternity,
Muster to cross the frontier of new days.
A brave unhasting company, they throng
Out of old years with life’s immortal zest,—
In gleaming panoply of seraphim
Advance these dauntless heralds of all good.
‘Tis midnight hour. The clanging bells break forth.
The march of man has crossed the boundary
Into another year. Close up the ranks!
Our ancients bid, fare on! New Year, Salute!
The promise of the past is on your knees.
The glory of all time is unto God.
Related posts:
31 December 2016
'The year is dead, for Death slays even time...'
Verse for the day from the 1935 revised edition of Our Canadian Literature, an anthology of verse selected by the poet's friends Bliss Carman and Lorne Pierce.
A Happy New Year to all!
Related posts:
05 December 2016
The Season's Best Books in Review — A.D. 1916
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| The Globe, 2 December 1916 |
An embarrassment of riches.
How far we've come.
Consider "THE SEASON'S BEST BOOKS IN REVIEW" above, published a century ago in the very same newspaper. It begins on a fairly upbeat note:
The third year of the war finds no appreciable diminution in the output of books. The demand for good reading grows apace, although publishers are in difficulties over the increased cost of production. One result of the paper shortage across the border is the growing tendency to place orders for printing and binding in Canada. The examples of workmanship recently turned out by Canadian printers show what this country may yet accomplish in the production of books.The downer comes with the next paragraph:
Canadian fiction is still in a stagnant condition. The attractions of the American market have proved too strong as yet to admit the development of a Canadian school of novelists.Take heart, our poets are being recognized south of the border:
In a New York publisher's circular the following appeared: "Canadians or Americans? In 'Canadian Poets and Poetry,'* an anthology collected by John Garvin and recently published by Stokes, the verse of Bliss Carman and Arthur Stringer along with that of Roberts and more generally recognized Canadians somewhat surprise the average reader who thinks these poets are native Americans. It is true, however, that Arthur Stringer's birthplace is Fredericton, New Brunswick, and his A.B. [sic] is from the university there, while Carman was born in Ontario and educated at the Universities of Toronto and Oxford."Though the copywriter has confused Stringer and Carman – the former is the Ontario boy and Oxford man – this is just the sort of recognition that makes glowing hearts glow. The anonymous Globe reviewer – William Arthur Deacon, I'm betting – fans the flames in writing that the war has brought "a renaissance of Canadian poetry," as exemplified by Canon Scott's In the Battle Silences and Rhymes of a Red Cross Man by Robert W. Service (the lone book I own on the list).
Meanwhile, on the home front, "Canada is discovering fresh talent. Two gifted writers have attracted notice in the past year – Robert Norwood and Norah M. Holland."
Being somewhat familiar with his verse, I dismissed Robert Norwood. I couldn't do the same with Norah M. Holland because I'd never heard of her. Imagine my surprise in learning that Miss Holland, a native of Collingwood, Ontario, was a cousin of Yeats.
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| Spun-yarn and Spindrift Norah M. Holland Toronto: Dent, 1918 |
Canadian Poets* – John Garvin, ed.I read nothing into the misspelling of Miss Pickthall's Christian name (nor the brevity of the review).
In the Battle Silences – F.G. Scott
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man – Robert W. Service
The Witch of Endor – Robert Norwood
The Watchman and Other Poems – L.M, Montgomery
Maple Leaf Men and Other War Gleanings – Rose E. Sharland
Lundy's Lane and Other Poems – Duncan Campbell Scott
Rambles of a Canadian Naturalist – S.T. Wood
The Lamp of Poor Souls and Other Poems – Marjorie Pickthall
There are 127 best books in "THE SEASON'S BEST BOOKS IN REVIEW", thirty-six of which are Canadian. Stephen Leacock leads the very short of list of Canadian fiction with Further Foolishness. The Secret Trails by Charles G.D. Roberts, H.A. Cody's Rob of the Lost Patrol, and Marshall Saunders' The Wandering Dog follow. Though I've not read the last, I like to think it served as inspiration for The Littlest Hobo.
We writers of non-fiction aren't particularly well represented. Ten more volumes of the sketchy Chronicles of Canada series feature, as does R. Burton Deane's Mounted Police Life in Canada (a book I helped return to print – briefly – fifteen years ago). Much is made about William Boyd's With a Field Ambulance in Ypres, which I really should've read... but haven't.
Still more is made of the fact that the year saw not one but two biographies of Sir Charles Tupper.
Of course, we all remember Tupper as our sixth prime minister. He served for 59 days.
Not a single one of the Canadian books on the 1916 Globe list is in print today.
Not a single one.
* In Canada, the anthology was published as Canadian Poets (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1916).
Related posts:
13 October 2013
An Expatriate Canadian Poet's New England Thanksgiving Poem for Canadian Thanksgiving
from The Rough Rider and Other Poems
Bliss Carman
New York: Kennerley, 1906
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15 April 2011
Bliss Carman at 150
Bliss Carman
(15 April 1861 – 8 June 1929)
The End of the Trail
Once more the hunters of the dusk
Are forth to search the moorlands wide,
Among the autumn-colored hills,
And wander by the shifting tide.
All day along the haze-hung verge
They scour upon a fleeing trace,
Between the red sun and the sea.
Where haunts the vision of your face.
The plane at Martock lies and drinks
The long Septembral gaze of blue;
The royal leisure of the hills
Hath wayward reveries of you.
Far rovers of the ancient dream
Have all their will of musing hours:
Your eyes were gray-deep as the sea,
Your hands lay open in the flowers!
From mining Rawdon to Pereau,
For all the gold they delve and share,
The goblins of the Ardise hills
Can horde no treasure like your hair.
The swirling tide, the lonely gulls,
The sweet low wood-winds that rejoice—
No sound nor echo of the sea
But hath tradition of your voice.
The crimson leaves, the yellow fruit.
The basking woodlands mile on mile—
No gleam in all the russet hills
But wears the solace of your smile.
A thousand cattle rove and feed
On the great marshes in the sun,
And wonder at the restless sea;
But I am glad the year is done.
Because I am a wanderer
Upon the roads of endless quest,
Between the hill-wind and the hills,
Along the margin men call rest.
Because there lies upon my lips
A whisper of the wind at morn,
A murmur of the rolling sea
Cradling the land where I was born;
Because its sleepless tides and storms
Are in my heart for memory
And music, and its gray-green hills
Run white to bear me company;
Because in that sad time of year,
With April twilight on the earth
And journeying rain upon the sea,
With the shy windflowers was my birth;
Because I was a tiny boy
Among the thrushes of the wood,
And all the rivers in the hills
Were playmates of my solitude;
Because the holy winter night
Was for my chamber, deep among
The dark pine forests by the sea,
With woven red auroras hung,
Silent with frost and floored with snow,
With what dream folk to people it
And bring their stories from the hills,
When all the splendid stars were lit;
Therefore I house me not with kin.
But journey as the sun goes forth,
By stream and wood and marsh and sea,
Through dying summers of the North;
Until, some hazy autumn day.
With yellow evening in the skies
And rime upon the tawny hills.
The far blue signal smoke shall rise,
To tell my scouting foresters
Have heard the clarions of rest
Bugling, along the outer sea.
The end of failure and of quest.
Then all the piping Nixie folk,
Where lonesome meadow winds are low,
Through all the valleys in the hills
Their river reeds shall blow and blow,
To lead me like a joy, as when
The shining April flowers return,
Back to a footpath by the sea
With scarlet hip and ruined fern.
For I must gain, ere the long night
Bury its travelers deep with snow,
That trail among the Ardise hills
Where first I found you years ago.
I shall not fail, for I am strong,
And Time is very old, they say,
And somewhere by the quiet sea
Makes no refusal to delay.
There will I get me home, and there
Lift up your face in my brown hand.
With all the rosy rusted hills
About the heart of that dear land.
10 January 2010
Portrait of a Former Mistress
Barbara Ladd
Charles G.D. Roberts
Boston: Page, 1902
This latter Mrs Roberts – Lady Roberts, if you prefer – most certainly had an easier time of it than her predecessor. The author cheated on his first wife constantly. For two years he carried on with Jean Carré, a Guernsey-born visual artist who came to him by way of Nova Scotia. To Roberts, sweet Jean was "she whose name is writ in music"... at least that's how he referred to her in letters written to cousin Bliss Carman.
There are lessons to be learned from this correspondence, not the least of which is to pick up the phone when dealing with matters of the heart. Roberts comes off by turns as a love-struck adolescent and an excitable fop. In the closing days of 1891, he writes his cousin, "I fear that she whose name is writ in music shall henceforth have it writ in mud!" Four months later, Roberts claims he's planning to run off with her. Of course, he did nothing of the kind, rather he replaced "she whose name is writ in music" with "the Queen of Bohemia", a tall and slim woman by the name of Maude Clarke, who also served as governess to the Roberts children.
I mention all this because Jean Carré not only designed the cover of Barbara Ladd, but served as model for the title character. Roberts did nothing to hide this connection; indeed, he was quite open about it, inscribing one copy: "The cover of this novel was designed by the lady from whom I drew the heroine of the story."
So, how does Sir Charles depict this character based on his ex-lover?
We first encounter Barbara as a nymph-like, sylph-like orphan, newly arrived in pre-Revolutionary Connecticut from Maryland. Carefree and careless, self-absorbed and intolerant, Barbara is "one of those who colour the moods of others by their own, and are therefore apt to be at fault in their interpretation of another's motives."
Like that other orphan Anne Shirley, whose story would appear in bookstores six years after Barbara Ladd, she's an unusual, unconventional girl. How unusual? How unconventional? Sir Charles treats the reader to a description of her sexually charged "mad negro" dance:
She danced with arms and hands and head and feet, and every slender curve of her young body. She moved like flames. Her eyes and lips and teeth were a radiance through the live, streaming darkness of her hair. Light, swift, unerring, ecstatic, it was like the most impassioned of bird-songs translated into terms of pure motion.
"Nothing more utilitarian than silk stockings, most dear and unexpected frivolous lady," he vowed, "shall be my tributes of devotion to you henceforth!""And mine shall be garters, fickle Mehitable!" cried Doctor Jim, dropping on his knee beside Doctor John, and swearing with like solemnity. "Silk garters, – and such buckles for silk garters!""And little silk shoes, and such big buckles for little silk shoes!" said Doctor John."And silk petticoats!" went on Doctor Jim, antiphonally. "Brocaded silk, flowered silk, watered silk, painted silk, corded silk, tabby silk, paduasoy silk, alamode silk, taffety silk, charrydarry –" till Mistress Mehitable put her hand over his mouth and stopped the stream of eruditions."And silk – and silk –" broke in Doctor John, once more, but stammeringly, because his knowledge of the feminine wardrobe was failing him.
Yes, Doctor John, best stick with shoes – buckled shoes – your brother is the petticoat expert.
Fun and fetishes are, sadly, set aside with the advent of the American Revolution. As the mood shifts, Richard declares his love for Barbara, but is rejected because he is not a Patriot. When he leaves to fight on the side of the Loyalists, she writes him off... but Roberts never writes him out. We know that it is only a matter of time before headstrong Barbara will accept Richard's love. Will it be when he's injured fighting a duel in defence of her honour? No, the moment comes only when he's lying near death in her arms... and even then, Richard feels obliged to give up his fight for George III.
For some, loyalty will always take second place to the love of a beautiful woman... no matter how headstrong she might be.
Trivia: Roberts' working title, the oddly appropriate Mistress Barbara, was changed after the 1901 publication of a Halliwell Sutcliffe novel by the same title.
Object: Voyeurs will be disappointed to learn that Carré designed the cover, but not the interior. The colour illustrations above, by Frank VerBeck, come from two of the four plates found in the first edition.
Access: For a novel that sold over 80,000 copies in the United States alone, Barbara Ladd isn't nearly as common as one might expect. A decent copy of the first edition will likely set you back C$50. As usual, library users will find universities to be the best bet. Here's to the public libraries of Toronto and Vancouver for keeping it on their shelves.
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