Low Tide on Grand Pré

Low Tide on Grand Pré had been called “the most nearly perfect single poem to come out of Canada” (by 20th century critic Desmond Pacey). It has been speculated that the poem refers to the death of a loved one, an illicit and clandestine romance or even the death of the author's mother. My own sense of it is that the poem is about karma or about things finishing how they should.

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.

And yet I know that not for us,

By any ecstasy of dream,

He lingers to keep luminous

A little while the grievous stream,

Which frets, uncomforted of dream--

A grievous stream, that to and fro

Athrough the fields of Acadie

Goes wandering, as if to know

Why one beloved face should be

So long from home and Acadie.

Was it a year or lives ago

We took the grasses in our hands,

And caught the summer flying low

Over the waving meadow lands,

And held it there between our hands?

And while the river at our feet--

A drowsy inland meadow stream--

At set of sun the after-heat

Made running-gold, and in the gleam

We freed our birch upon the stream.

There down along the elms at dusk

We lifted dripping blade to drift,

Through twilight scented fine like musk,

Where night and gloom awhile uplift,

Nor sunder soul and soul adrift.

And that we took into our hands

Spirit of life or subtler thing--

Breathed on us there, and loosed the bands

Of death, and taught us, whispering,

The secret of some wonder-thing.

Then all your face grew light, and seemed

To hold the shadow of the sun;

The evening faltered, and I deemed

That time was ripe, and years had done

Their wheeling underneath the sun.

So all desire and all regret,

And fear and memory, were naught;

One to remember or forget

The keen delight our hands had caught;

Morrow and yesterday were naught.

The night has fallen, and the tide . . .

Now and again comes drifting home,

Across these aching barrens wide,

A sigh like driven wind or foam:

In grief the flood is bursting home.

Bliss Carman, 1886