The Uncollected Prose of Pauline Johnson

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The Singer of Tantramar

“Beyond the marsh, and miles away,
The great tides of the tumbling bay
Swing glittering in the golden day,
    Swing foaming to and fro.”

It was afternoon; warm, yellow, sun-shiny. The August sun slipped down the western heavens, and beneath his big lazy disk the whole world drowsed.

All sound seemed dulled, indefinite, smothered. Even the never-ceasing rumble of the train on its south-eastern journey from Quebec grew vague and velvety.

Backward from the smoking department floated a faint, sweet suggestion of tobacco, and the occasional intimation of masculine laughter. Apart from that nothing, save summer sounds, intruded.

Some one touched my shoulder lightly. I started from a half sleep to realize the porter was beside my chair saying:

“Sorry to 'waken you, ma'm, but we are nearing Tantramar, and your friend in the smoking room said as how you'd want to see it.”

“Tantramar? I started up, rubbing my eyes, with a sense of self-accusing shame as I thought what a heathen I was to sleep up to its very borders. I raised the car window and looked out; we were swinging down the Inter-Colonial railroad through the last half mile of New Brunswick, and—yes, at last, there it lay, one of the now most famous spots in the Maritime Provinces. Tantramar! with its mile upon mile of low, level, salt marsh, outreaching to the far pale horizon—that giant tract of reclaimed land that Roberts has sung into fame, whose peculiar beauties he has voiced in the lyric music that can only come in sea-notes.

Tantramar! That hitherto great salt waste, unheard of, unknown, until this clear Canadian singer caught its atmosphere of sea-beauty, and with his strangely magnetic pen

“Made dull familiar things divine.”

Whose poetic insight saw

            “What beauty clings
In common forms, and found the soul
Of unregarded things!”

Tantramar! The erstwhile undiscovered, until Roberts made the name familiar to the greater portion of the poetry-loving world, until its wide sea-wastes and tide-washed margins have become an almost national pride.

The prosaic see but little in Tantramar, only leagues and leagues of unbroken flats, rimmed on all sides by the pearl blue Maritime skies, with a thin streak of liquid light along the southern border, which the map shows us is Chignecto Bay. Only leagues and leagues of salt grass, intersected with irregular dykes and far reaches of red mud flats, where the sea washes perpetually, at times caressing, then beating its breast against the protecting walls, that like strong human arms wrap about and shelter the low fields from the demon tides.

And always, and everywhere those strange little stacks of harvested salt-hay, perched upon wooden elevations, and seeming like huge plump, brown birds, wading half-high in rush-grown lagoons; for notwithstanding the dykes, the land is too moist and the low slopes of hills too distant for the haymakers to garner it there, so the quaint little haystacks seem to have climbed up out of the wet, curling their paws up beneath them as a pussy does when asleep. And yet what was it that the whole scene mirrowed? To me a strange mist gathered in the summer sunlight, not the fogs from the ever restless distant Bay of Fundy, but only a memory—a something—an inexpressible. Ah! it is the reflection of the great, wide western prairies, rolling out to the infinite, baring their beauties for ever, and ever, to the territorial skies.

Instead of the little stacks on Tantramar, I saw the far-off tepees of the Crees, the dykes melted away into russet-colored coulees, and the glittering Chignecto took the windings of the far Saskatchewan, for they are strangely, unaccountably alike, those two vast slumber lands of nature, the great north-western prairies, and the marshes of Tantramar.

And this is the spot that every lover of Canadian literature longs to see. It is not grand scenery, to some it may not even be distinctive, but it is more than these, it is Roberts. The marsh-lands are himself, the sea voices, the tides, the sands, the wet salt breath of the margin winds—all are Roberts, and all are his atmosphere. None sings as he of the grey sea-mists, none has so caught the color, the pulse, the promise of the shore-lands, and no voice but his has transmitted their breathing and sweet low murmuring into our far inland country, that without him would be so imperfect, so sealess.

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, reaching through its color-soul the real meaning of the master that created it, so with passing through Tantramar you learn of the man who identified himself with it ere he could glorify it in song and story. There is no condition under which it has not touched him, under which he has not responded with all the wondrous tenderness that nature in her moods has found in him. He tells of it in an idle day, when the fisher folks' reels

“Over the gossiping grass
Swing in the long, strong wind.”

He tells of it in the still night-time when

“Under the moon, all the calm night long,
Winnowing soft grey wings of the marsh-owls wander, and wander.”

He tells of it

“As the blue day mounts and the low shot shafts of the sunlight
Glance from the tide to the shore, gossamers jewelled with dew.”

Then of

“The salt raw scent of the margin.”

And when tempest-swept it crouches “beneath a stormy star,” he sings:

“To-night the wind roars in from sea,
The crow clings in the straining tree,
Curlew, and crane, and bittern flee
    The dykes of Tantramar.”

And when you see the wide lone lowlands you, too, catch the spirit of its minstrel, and when they slip past and you leave them far behind, you have an odd sense of loss, you feel that you have left the presence of the greatly simple man who has taught us how to see below its surface—desolation and emptiness.

But we had not stepped beyond his presence, for but a few hours more brought us to Fredericton, and as we left the train someone came quickly towards us with outstretched, welcoming hands. We knew him at once, that eager, tenderly-strong face, that firmly-knit athletic figure, that easy Bohemian manner of dress, that happy trick of absolute good fellowship, it was undoubtedly he, of Tantramar, Roberts himself, with as warm a handclasp for us both as though we had all known each other for years. We had rather expected to stand in awe of him. We knew him to be professor of all sorts of heavyweight subjects in King's College; we had heard London, and Boston, and New York speak of him as of a discoverer of great things in literature; but with the first glimpse his genial camaraderie dissipated whatever ideas we hitherto held, and within an hour he and my philistine fellow-artist were addressing each other sans ceremonie, as “Old fellow,” and “Say, old man,” which shows that of all things, Roberts is first a man, among men. And yet, what is there in the man, and in his work that is so distinctive! unless it be that his “songs of the common day” are keynotes to himself. In the friendly days that followed, he often reminded me of the “Professor” in that sweet cameo-like book of Ruskin's, “The Ethics of the Dust,” for to him nothing in nature is meaningless, nothing that has beauty is lost to him, and to him all things are beautiful.

Nothing is too insignificant to attract his notice, and for him to recognize therein great pulses of the Divine. The commonest things of daily living are not too threadbare for him to extract response from, for he who discovered the soul of Tantramar, and taught that soul to sing, has never missed the little homely voices in the “dull, familiar things.”

Perhaps if his whole, great poetic genius were summed up in words, his own unconscious expression “revealing gift,” alone could compass it. In his exquisite little lyric, “Across the fog the moon lies fair,” he asks:

“O grant that a revealing gift
Be some small portion mine.”

The lines have been as unintended prophesy, for more than all others has Roberts revealed the wonder of “unregarded things,” and after we turn the last pages of his books, or have left the sea marshes and the summer behind us, we, who perhaps have thought we understood and absorbed all beauty that could be gathered into our dull and daily lives, realize with shame and self-censure how blinded we have been, until his hands have parted the common grasses with their rime and moisture, and have pointed out to us the throb of life that lies beating in their plain and homely midst.

So with regretful hearts we left him. There was another warm, sincere, understanding handclasp, a good-bye waving from the rear platform of the out-going train, a strange yearning in my fellow-artist's eyes, as the distance widened between us and the genial Bohemian figure in the station doorway, for Roberts is a man that men love, and those two—Poet and Artist—had grown singularly attached to each other. We watched the distance slip between us, then left him with his sea-mists and his songs.

And when we re-crossed Tantramar, the moon was sailing up a pale October sky, the hay had been garnered long ago, and the lowlands lay asleep; no more swathing of the harvesting sickle, no more droning of the summer songs, only a night that was very, very still, with its white thin moonlight slumbering in the marshes, and we slipping through its reaches for the last time. And now but a memory, and an ever recurring refrain:

“Tantramar! Tantramar!
I see thy cool, green plains afar,
Thy dykes where grey sea grasses are—
    Mine eyes behold them yet.”