Poem of the Day: ‘A Vagabond Song’

Born in New Brunswick, the descendant of loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution, Bliss Carman (1861–1929) was the unofficial poet laureate of Canada — although he spent most of his life in the United States. Well-schooled for his backwater Maritimes location, the bright young man fled Canada after college for Boston and then New York, hoping to become a literary figure in America, supporting himself editing and writing poetry. In 1894, Songs from Vagabondia, a  collection of work from Carman and Richard Hovey, proved a large success, and he seemed set for life.

That’s rarely true for poets. By 1920, the man was broke, weakened by an attack of tuberculosis, and nearly forgotten. Embarking on a desperate reading tour of Canada, however, Carman suddenly found himself lionized. Across the nation, Canadian crowds turned out to cheer him and listen to him read, awarding him prizes, buying his books, and paying him for appearances. He was, they shouted, Canada’s great poet, and they crowned him with a laureate’s wreath made from maple leaves.

Carman may have deserved it. He was attempting seriousness in poetry in an age that was weakening into poetic decadence, much of its best work comic verse and sentimental romantic forms. In today’s Poem of the Day, the 1894 “A Vagabond Song,” the reader can discern Carman’s hunger to reach back to early romanticism, seeking something deeper in the commonplaces of sentimental thought. The lines of the poem vary from seven to three feet, but throughout there is a ballad feel, the middle lines broken to three and four feet to emphasize an unexpected internal rhyme. Here in the Poem of the Day feature of The New York Sun, we’ve been presenting October poems this week — for, as Carman notes, “There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir.”