poets not only should essay the elegiac monody but also write that species of poetry with genuine distinction. The subjects of all Canadian elegiac monodies are either presented against a background of Nature or are suffused with ‘the color of life’ and the beauty of Nature. The first, and in many ways the noblest, Canadian monody is Charles G. D. Roberts’ _Ave!_ (sub-titled _An Ode for the Centenary of Shelley’s Birth_). It is a poem of thirty-one ten-line stanzas, in decasyllabics, closing with a rimed couplet, iambic pentameter. The poem is not so much, as Roberts called it, an ‘ode’ as an elegiac monody, with the subject presented against a pastoral background. That it was written ostensibly to commemorate Shelley’s birth, not his death, must not cause us to conceive the poem as other than an elegy. The centenary of Shelley’s birth occurred in 1892, when Roberts was 32 years of age. Naturally he seized the opportunity to memorialize in verse the spirit of one of his masters, but he also laments the passing of Shelley and his influence, after the manner of the true elegiac monody. The poem divides not strophically but symphonically. The first theme is a picture of the naturalistic beauties of the Tantramar marshes and the tides that rush in over it from the Bay of Fundy, and the influences that Nature about Tantramar had on Roberts as a poet. He develops this theme by marking how ‘strangely akin’ Tantramar’s marshes seem to him whose birth One hundred years ago With fiery succor to the ranks of song Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong; and how, like these marshes, with the incoming and the outgoing floods of Fundy’s tides, Shelley’s compassionate breast, Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace, Was tortured with perpetual unrest. Now loud with flood, now languid with release, Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife Of tides from the salt sea of human pain That hiss along the perilous coasts of life Beat in his eager brain; But all about the tumult of his heart Stretched the great calm of his celestial art. A few stanzas are devoted, as they say in symphonic music, to the ‘working out’ of this similitude in all its aspects. Then in stanza XXII Roberts formally announces the elegiac theme as such:— Lament, Lerici, mourn the world’s loss! Mourn that pure light of song extinct at noon! Roberts develops the lyrical genius of Shelley in eight stanzas, and in the final two stanzas returns to the original theme of the Tantramar marshes where on the inner ear of the Canadian poet once more Resounds the ebb with destiny in its roar.