Students of English literature from the Romantic period will easily recognize Sir Charles G. D. Roberts’ “Tantramar Revisited” (1883) as a “crisis lyric.” As in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” the crisis lyric offers a poet’s reflection upon a troubled or questioning moment in his life, concluding in a resolution or at least a temporary relief from the questions that have proven vexing.
That same student will also recognize some other principle at work here, something that distinguishes “Tantramar Revisited” from its notable predecessors and models. It may open in the fashion of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” with the evocation of a time frame, but it concludes with far more skeptical assertion. This lyric presents a late Romantic viewpoint, one marked by a high degree of self-reflexiveness and emotional complexity. This outlook leads the speaker into a willed rather a spontaneous solution to the crisis driving the poem. While the poem in typical Romantic fashion maps the landscape according to the poet’s own emotional contours, the view that emerges remains fundamentally disillusioned and provisional, rather than reassuringly definitive.
This brief commentary focuses on two of the poem’s features, its prosody and imagery, as a way of outlining its strengths as a lyric. Reading the poem slowly and aloud impresses you with its reliance upon a dactylic-spondaic phrase-rhythm (SUM mers and SUM mers HAVE COME//SUN shine and THUN der HAVE BEEN). These are the basic prosodic building blocks of the poem. Strung together in lengthy sequences, they compose a rhythm of ample reflection followed by pause, which parallels the development of the poem’s thought.
Examining the imagery discloses how lovingly the speaker focuses upon the distinctive features of the scene he views. Drying nets, tides, dykes, hay, barns, fishing boats: these elements remind us of a realistically-depicted painterly landscape in which the local details cohere into a setting convincing in its perspective as the viewer moves from distant to close-up detailing. The place names (Minudie, Tantramar, Westmoreland) serve also to ground the depiction within the scope of actuality.
But only the careless reader would conclude his examination at this point. Because the most prominent feature of all these details lies in their refusal to maintain the degree of separation that individuated being requires. Instead, the fishing nets hang in the barns like hay; the tide leaves its mark on the pastures. The poem’s very geographic setting—the intermixed marshland—militates against sharpness of definition. This low-density perspective, seen also in the seasonal light and its transformation throughout the lyric, parallels the speaker’s own tentativeness.
If we reduce the poem’s message to a prose statement, we can now understand that the reassurance that the troubled speaker sought to find in the fixity of what is viewed cannot be gained. Only in distance—temporal, spatial, emotional—can relief from psychic turmoil be attained. The “outer” world can present the troubled “inner” with an pattern of order and purpose only at the price of the speaker’s subjection of the outer to his own inner distortion and control. He has to stand back if he is to maintain the admittedly illusive vision of immutability.
Roberts re-orders Canadian space here in a highly sophisticated fashion, subjecting it at once to viewer control and at the same time admitting to the falsity of that conviction of control. The cultural implications of this viewpoint/point-of-view are enormous. The space now denoted by the term “Canada” has been denoted and established through centuries of Western European cultural and technological reshaping of that material. Yet the poem implies that all of this imposition, this overlay laid upon a territorial map, is sustainable only through reliance upon a willed conviction of actuality.
Lewis Carroll wrote of a professor who came up with a map that bore a 1:1 relationship with reality. Its only problem was that the map covered reality. Is Roberts implying to his readers that such a map is inescapable when we attempt to order experience, as does the speaker in this poem?
Seldom has a poet such as Roberts, one viewed as instrumental in promulgating the concept of a national literature, put forward an epistemology whose implications are so subversive to any nationalist ideology. For this reason alone, “Tantramare Revisited” requires a searching visitation from anyone investigating Canadian literature and its implications for a national consciousness.
The text of “Tantramar Revisited” can be found online at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1726.html
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