Alexander J.A. Munro
May 28th, 2010
English 222
Professor Alex Hart
Just as the Tantramar River flow gently through what was once referred to as the largest hayfield in the world, towards its home the sea, so does Charles G.D. Roberts successfully manages to foster the notion of slow and inevitable homecoming of the young man, himself it seems.
Roberts' Tantramar Revisited, written at the age of 26 in 1886 illustrates, through concrete examples and repetition, the tendency towards an existentialist perception of nature and the human condition within that realm. The thematic relevance of loss and altogether absence that opens the poem reiterates itself at the close:
"Summers and summers have come, and gone with the light of the swallow / Sunshine and thunder have been, storm, and winter, and frost; / many and man a sorrow has all but died from remembrance, / Many a dream of joy fall'n in the shadow of pain"
(ln. 1-4, Bennett 146).
"Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland, - / Muse recall far off, rather than see, - / Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion, Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change."
(ln. 62-5)
Though the beauty of Roberts' measured and evocative stanzas are plain to see, the poems prefix and suffix first inform and then remind the reader that this seemingly nostalgic return remains tempered by the dynamism of the natural world. Even the voltas in place force each line to ward away any notion of a static state.
Roberts, as Tantramar Revisited alludes to, would not remain static in New Brunswick's Tantramar region. After leaving the Tantramar at fourteen when his father's work moved him to Fredricton, Roberts studied at the University of New Brunswick. Shortly thereafter his first collection of poetry was published, and by the time of this poem, two more had been made public. Though Roberts would go on to associate with the proto-nationalistic Canada First movement, the title draws focus to a specific site. That said, any river reaching towards the sea could be, for some poet or some young man, an invocation of the malleability of Canada, making this an example of early Canadian existentialism.
Does the authorial invocation of nostos, or homecoming, fully realize itself inTantramar Revisited, or does the combination and blurring of the natural and the ephemeral negate this? Is the choice of setting (ie: New Brunswick, the Maritimes, versus the Rockies or the Arctic) important foremost for the author or the reader?
Work Cited:
Bennett, Donna and Russell Brown. A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Oxford: 2002. Pages 144-6.
Roberts, Charles G.D. "Tantramar Revisited", in A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. Oxford: 2002. Pages 146-7.
