William Bliss Carman FRSC was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada’s poet laureate during his later years.
In Canada, Carman is classed as one of the Confederation Poets, a group which also included Charles G.D. Roberts (his cousin), Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. “Of the group, Carman had the surest lyric touch and achieved the widest international recognition. But unlike others, he never attempted to secure his income by novel writing, popular journalism, or non-literary employment. He remained a poet, supplementing his art with critical commentaries on literary ideas, philosophy, and aesthetics.”
In 1906 Carman received honorary degrees from UNB and McGill University. He was elected a corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1925. The Society awarded him its Lorne Pierce Gold Medal in 1928. He was awarded a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1929. (via Wikipedia)
On Love:
And we perceive, not awe
But love is the great law
That binds the world together safe and whole.
(From: On Love)
The splendid planets run
Their courses in the sun;
Love is the gravitation of the soul.
(From: On Love)
There is no period
Between the soul and God;
Love is the tide, God the eternal sea.
(From: On Love)
On Life:
I am the splendid impulse
That comes before the thought,
The joy and exaltation
Wherein the life is caught.
(From: Earth Voices)
On Success:
Have little care that Life is brief, And less that Art is long. Success is in the silences; Though Fame is in the song.
On God:
And with the verbal creed
That God is love indeed,
Who dares make Love his god before all men?
(From: On Love)
On Nature:
On the shining yards of heaven
See a wider dawn unfurled. . . .
The eternal slaves of beauty
Are the masters of the world.
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.
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary. (From: The World’s Best Poetry, Volume 3: Sorrow and Consolation)
Let the red dawn surmise
What we shall do,
When this blue starlight dies
And all is through.
If we have loved but well
Under the sun,
Let the last morrow tell
What we have done.
In the slow ample beauty of the world,
And the unutterable glad release 15
Within the temple of the holy night. (From: Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics)
But more than all sounds,
Surer, serener,
Fuller with passion
And exultation,
Let the hushed whisper 40
In thine own heart say,
How I adore thee.