Poetry
Low Tide on Grand Pré
Bliss Carman · 1893
Opening lines
The sun goes down, and over all
These barren reaches by the tide
Such unelusive glories fall,
I almost dream they yet will bide
Until the coming of the tide.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Twenty-two short poems, opened by the one that gives the book its title. On the expanses of Grand-Pré, at low tide, from sunset to nightfall, the poet returns to the places of a summer spent in a canoe with a beloved woman, now far from Acadia. The water recedes, the light falls, and memory merges with the emptied landscape. The other pieces follow the same vein: marshes, dusty roads, wandering, often with a refrain.
Context
The title poem, written in 1886, had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887. The collection appeared in New York in 1893, from Charles L. Webster; the bankruptcy of that publisher, the following spring, hampered its distribution, but Stone & Kimball took it over as early as March 1894, and a third edition followed in Boston. Grand-Pré is the land from which the Acadians had been deported in 1755; the volume carries a note by the author dated from that place, in September 1893.
Who it is for
A short collection, of very carefully worked music and simple vocabulary. A few words on the Acadian deportation are enough to set the scene.
Prizes and reception
Well received, the book made its author a Canadian poet of the first rank; he later came to be seen as the national poet, the country's unofficial poet laureate.
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