slim, grey masts of fishing boats dry on the flats

[Image source: http://bevsnatureblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/birding-tantramar.html .]

Summers and summers have come, and gone with the flight of the swallow;

Sunshine and thunder have been, storm, and winter, and frost;   . . .

. . . Here, from my vantage-ground, I can see the scattering houses,

Stained with time, set warm in orchards, meadows, and wheat,

Dotting the broad bright slopes outspread to southward and eastward,

Wind-swept all day long, blown by the south-east wind.

Skirting the sunbright uplands stretches a riband of meadow,

Shorn of the labouring grass, bulwarked well from the sea,

Fenced on its seaward border with long clay dykes from the turbid

Surge and flow of the tides vexing the Westmoreland shores.

Yonder, toward the left, lie broad the Westmoreland marshes, --

Miles on miles they extend, level, and grassy, and dim,

Clear from the long red sweep of flats to the sky in the distance,

Save for the outlying heights, green-rampired Cumberland Point;

Miles on miles outrolled, and the river-channels divide them, --

Miles on miles of green, barred by the hurtling gusts.

Miles on miles beyond the tawny bay is Minudie.

There are the low blue hills; villages gleam at their feet.

Nearer a white sail shines across the water, and nearer

Still are the slim, grey masts of fishing boats dry on the flats.

Ah, how well I remember those wide red flats, above tide-mark

Pale with scurf of the salt, seamed and baked in the sun!

Well I remember the piles of blocks and ropes, and the net-reels

Wound with the beaded nets, dripping and dark from the sea!

Now at this season the nets are unwound; they hang from the rafters

Over the fresh-stowed hay in upland barns, and the wind

Blows all day through the chinks, with the streaks of sunlight, and sways them

Softly at will; or they lie heaped in the gloom of a loft.

Now at this season the reels are empty and idle; I see them

Over the lines of the dykes, over the gossiping grass.

Now at this season they swing in the long strong wind, thro' the lonesome

Golden afternoon, shunned by the foraging gulls.  . . .

(About half of "The Tantramar Revisited" by Charles G.D. Roberts, a poem in his second collection In Divers Tones (1886))

Complete text:
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/tantramar-revisited

The Tantramar River runs past Sackville, New Brunswick and into Chignecto Bay, a sub-basin of the Bay of Fundy. It's surrounded by the Tantramar Marshes. 

Many of the Roberts poems I've been enjoying recently are set in this landscape. His elaborate centennial ode to Shelley, Ave! (1892),  begins and ends on the Tantramar (see especially the first eight stanzas). 

There are 37 sonnets of "common outdoor life" in Songs of the Common Day, and Ave! (1893), seven of which had previously appeared in In Divers Tones (1886). Here's a few of them:

The Sower (1886)

The Cow Pasture (1893)

The Salt Flats (1893)

The Potato Harvest (1886)

The Autumn Thistles (1893)

In an Old Barn (1893)

The Herring Weir (1893)

The Herring Weir

Back to the green deeps of the outer bay

The red and amber currents glide and cringe,

Diminishing behind a luminous fringe

Of cream-white surf and wandering wraiths of spray.

Stealthily, in the old reluctant way,

The red flats are uncovered, mile on mile,

To glitter in the sun a golden while.

Far down the flats, a phantom sharply grey.

The herring weir emerges, quick with spoil.

Slowly the tide forsakes it. Then draws near,

Descending from the farm-house on the height,

A cart, with gaping tubs. The oxen toil

Sombrely o'er the level to the weir,

And drag a long black trail across the light.

Complete text of In Divers Tones on Project Gutenberg

Complete text of Songs of the Common Day, and Ave! on Project Gutenberg.

It was close upon high tide, and the creek that wound in through the diked marshes was rapidly filling to the brim with the swirling, cold, yellow-gray waters of Minas. The sun, but half risen, yet lingered on the wooded crest of the Gaspereau hills; while above hung a dappled sky of pink and pale amber and dove-color. A yellow light streamed sharply down across the frost-whitened meadows, the smouldering ruins of Grand Pré village, and out upon the glittering expanse of Minas Basin. The beams tinged brightly the cordage and half-furled sails of two ships that rode at anchor in the Basin, near the shore. With a pitilessly revealing whiteness the rays descended on the mournful encampment at the creek's mouth, where a throng of Acadian peasants were getting ready to embark for exile.

                        "Late grew the year, and stormy was the sea."

Already had five ships sailed away with their sorrowful freight, disappearing around the towering front of Blomidon, from the straining eyes of friends and kinsfolk left behind. Another ship would sail out with the next ebb, and all was sad confusion and unwilling haste till the embarkation should be accomplished. The ship's boats were loaded down with rude household stuff, and boxes full of homespun linens and woollens.

Children were crying with the cold, and a few women were weeping silently; but the partings which had succeeded each other at intervals throughout the last few weeks had dulled the edge of anguish, and most of the Acadians wore an air of heavy resignation. The New England soldiers on guard gave what help they could, but sullenly; for they were weary of the misery that they had so long been forced to watch.

The people were huddled on a little patch of marsh within a curve of the dike. Beyond the dike there spread a stretch of reddish brown salt-flats, covered with water only at the highest spring-tides, and now meagrely sprinkled with sharp-edged blades and tufts of the gray salt-grasses. The flats were soft between the bunches of the grass, and a broad track was trampled into mire by the passing down of many feet from the dike's edge to the boats.

(Beginning of "The Eye of Gluskâp", a story in the first of Roberts' story collections, Earth's Enigmas (1896). The Minas Basin is the other sub-basin of the Bay of Fundy, separated from Chignecto Bay by Cape Chignecto. 

Complete text of Earth's Enigmas (1896) on Project Gutenberg

David Jackel: "Roberts' 'Tantramar Revisited': Another View" in Canadian Poetry Vol 5 (Fall/Winter 1979): 

http://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol5/jackel.html

Sergiy Yakovenko: "The Tantramar, Revisited yet Again: Charles G.D. Roberts' Agon with the Wordsworths" in Studies in Canadian Literature Vol 42 No 1 (2017):

https://www.academia.edu/42670284/The_Tantramar_Revisited_yet_Again_Charles_G_D_Robertss_Agon_with_the_Wordsworths

[Image source: http://www.fundy-biosphere.ca/en/amazing-places/mud-monster-riding-the-tantramar-marshes.html .]