As a matter of truth, however, we shall get at the secret of Carman’s unique singing quality if we ask what is the _method_ of his warbling. It is in his method that he differs from all modern English poets and has made an original and distinct contribution to English lyrical poetry. This is the fact: Bliss Carman is a belated troubadour or 16th century English lutanist or Keltic harpist. Lutanists and harpists created the text for their songs; and the prime end was melody or at least melodiousness. The ultimate element or unit in verbal melody with the lutanists or harpists was the _word_, and the core of the word, for melodic purposes, was the vowel. Poets arose in England, but more especially in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland, who aimed to make the melody of unaccompanied poetry imitate the melody of the lutanists’ and the harpists’ accompanied verses. The lutanists, harpists, and melodic poets, who aimed to imitate music, passed, and new generations of poets substituted metrical and stanzaic structure and alliterative arrangement of consonants for the old vowel-melody. The unit in English poetry, after the 16th century, became the _line_, not the word or the vowel in the word. It is the chief glory of Bliss Carman, as a creative poet, that he brought back into English poetry the _word_ and the pure unimpeded _singing vowel_, with the same intent as the Italian _bel canto_ composers, as the unit in verbal melody. Some critics have made considerable point of the fact that Carman is a ‘great’ poet, _in spite_ of the fact that he employs chiefly the rhymed octosyllabic line or measure, or iambic tetrameters and trimeters, with trochaic and anapaestic substitutions and other metrical mechanics for variety. The truth is that Carman wrote his poetry as a melodist, not as a technical musician; that he aimed to _sing_, like the lark or linnet, not to _compose_, like a musician. His measures were chosen, whenever he meant to be lyrical, because they were _singing_ measures and his diction was chosen for the melody inside the words, for the ‘vowel-chime’ in them. In Carman’s lyrical poetry the word determines the line, or rather the word alone counts, and the line is insignificant. Dulcet vowel-melody or delicate vowel-harmony is Bliss Carman’s chief original contribution to Canadian and English poetry. Examples are innumerable. Consider the clarion tones in this line, which as a line by itself is perfect:— The resonant far-listening morn. There are no closed vowels in those words, and the word ’resonant’ is precisely resonant in vowel-melody and harmony. It is the open vowels that count melodically in this stanza:— _But in the yule, O Yanna,_ Up from the round dim sea _And reeling dungeons of the fog,_ I am come back to thee!