Poetry
Matins
Francis Sherman · 1896
Opening lines
Swing open wide, O Gate,
That I may enter in
And see what lies in wait
For me who have been born!
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
About thirty poems of varied forms: sonnets, ballads and long meditations in free stanzas. The title refers to the morning office, and one of the pieces is a prayer. The seasons structure the book, from the declining summer to the passing of winter into spring, in a nameless countryside. Ballads and medieval scenes, knights, battles, the house of a king being made ready, follow the manner of Rossetti and the early Morris; female figures, a lady, a mother in mourning, run through the whole.
Context
The collection appeared in Boston in 1896, from Copeland and Day, Bliss Carman's publisher, in a print run of five hundred copies. Sherman produced others until 1900, including a sequence of sonnets in memory of William Morris, then stopped writing around the age of thirty; no poem by him is known after 1901. His complete poems were collected in 1935 by Lorne Pierce, with a preface by his elder Roberts.
Who it is for
A short collection, in a language readily archaising, alternating lyric pieces and medieval ballads.
Prizes and reception
Its author was designated a national historic person in 1945 for his mastery of the sonnet; a sculpture shows him with Carman and Roberts at the University of New Brunswick.
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