From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics
As, on a morn, a traveller might emerge
From the deep green seclusion of the hills,
By a cool road through forest and through fern,
Little frequented, winding, followed long
With joyous expectation and day-dreams,
And on a sudden, turning a great rock
Covered with frondage, dark with dripping water,
Behold the seaboard full of surf and sound,
With all the space and glory of the world
Above the burnished silver of the sea,—
Even so it was upon that first spring day
When time, that is a devious path for men,
Led me all lonely to thy door at last;
And all thy splendid beauty, gracious and glad,
(Glad as bright colour, free as wind or air,
And lovelier than racing seas of foam)
Bore sense and soul and mind at once away
To a pure region where the gods might dwell,
Making of me, a vagrant child before,
A servant of joy at Aphrodite’s will.
– Bliss Carman
April happiness and spring fever
The first day of Spring falls in March, but in English poetry the month of Spring is almost always April.
Geoffrey Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales “Whan … Aprill with her shoures soote / The droght of March hath perced to the roote.” In “Home-thoughts, from Abroad,” Robert Browning yearns “to be in England / Now that April’s there.” “Awake,” exclaims Robert Bridges in “Awake, My Heart, To Be Loved,” “the land is canopied with light … And blossoming boughs of April in laughter shake.” To the inhabitants of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, “April is the cruellest month” because it rouses them from the comfortable torpor of winter by stirring “Dull roots with spring rain” and awakening “memory and desire.”
In Canadian poetry, Spring and April are almost synonymous.
Charles G.D. Roberts envisages April as the season when “Earth” “Put[s] off her dumb display of snow” and “b[ids] all her unseen children grow” and then rejoice in the sheer joy of being alive. Archibald Lampman personifies April as a “Maid month” who waits patiently “Betwixt wild March’s humored petulance / And the warm wooing of green-kirtled May.” To Isabella Valancy Crawford, writing at the same time as Roberts and Lampman, “April [is] the weaver / Of delicate blossoms, / The molder of red buds,” but with the twentieth century came detachment and ennui. With an eye on Chaucer and Eliot, Patrick Anderson saw April as an ambivalent month of “green and cruel[ty]” and John Glassco moaned of the return of “April again, and its message, the same old impromptu / Dinned in our ears by the tireless chortling of Nature ….”
No Canadian poet has written more frequently and thoughtfully about Spring and April and their significance than the New Brunswick-born Bliss Carman (1861- 1929).
Spring brings “the renewal of the ancient rapture of earth, the old Aprilian triumph,” he writes in one essay, and in another: “long inheritance of April happiness has given us [Canadians] that peculiar malady we call Spring fever; has given us, too, a special spiritual sympathy or wonder in the reviving year.”
Of the dozens upon dozens of Carman’s poems that focus wholly or partly on Spring and April, the most famous is in questionably “Spring Song,” which, unfortunately, has not survived the test of time unscathed: its descriptions of migrant birds “Making northward” and the “Shrilling pipe” of frogs in Spring still read well enough, but its widely quoted opening lines – “Make me over, mother April, / When the sap begins to stir” – carry a disconcerting whiff of incest.
The poem that I have chosen is spoken by the classical Greek poet Sappho as Carman imagined and recreated her in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1903). As much a celebration of awakened love as of the arrival of Spring, the poem’s first stanza consists of a long simile that prepares the way for Sappho’s recollection of her transforming love for the beautiful (but here unnamed) Atthis in the second stanza.
Perhaps drawing upon his own memories of hiking in the hills and woods of New Brunswick and New England, Carman creates a vivid sense of a lovely and lush landscape of “deep green seclusion,” “a cool road through forest and through fern,” and “frondage, dark with dripping water.”
From this enclosed and enclosing landscape, the “traveller” suddenly emerges in the final lines of the first stanza to look out on the bright immensity of the sea and the sky. When we encounter love, Carman suggests, ordinary day-to-day reality, however beautiful and enjoyable, opens onto something of even greater and more breathtaking beauty and profound significance – something divine, joyful, and transformative. In both parts of the poem, the cadences move slowly, as if Sappho is savouring the pleasures of both anticipation and fulfilment, or, as Carman has her say in another poem about Atthis, the “keen desire … And the unutterable glad release / Within the temple of the holy night.”
Unobtrusively embedded in Sappho’s statement that her love for Atthis “Bore sense and soul and mind at once away” is the Unitrinian philosophy of mind-body-spirit harmonization that Carman evolved in the late 1890s from the French philosopher of acting and dance François Delsarte, who also influenced, among many others, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis.
Love bears “sense and soul and mind away” “at once” not merely because its effect on lovers is instantaneous, but also because it involves and harmonizes every aspect of their being. So at least Bliss Carman believed, especially, one suspects, when he was under the spell of “the ancient rapture of earth, the old Aprilian triumph.”
The writer teaches in the English Department and is founding editor of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews.