A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 27

Who will say that Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan"

are not disembodied music? Lamb said that Coleridge repeated the latter poem "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlor when he says or sings it to me." Mr. Arthur Symons has recently said: "'Christabel' is composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening, 'largo vivacissimo', and as the general expressive signature, 'tempo rubato'."

Tennyson realized the musical effect of "Paradise Lost"

when he spoke of Milton as "England's G.o.d-gifted organ-voice"; and he himself in such lyrics as those in the "Princess"

and the eighty-sixth canto of "In Memoriam" wrought musical effects with verse. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton says of Poe's "Ulalume" that, if properly intoned, "it would produce something like the same effect upon a listener knowing no word of English that it produces upon us."

It needs to be said, in parenthesis, that in all these cases, while there is the musical effect from the standpoint of time and tone-color, there is still the perfection of speech. The theory will not hold, however, in much dramatic verse, or in meditative blank verse, as used by Wordsworth.

Much of the poetry of Byron, Browning, Keats, and Shakespeare, while supremely great from the standpoint of color, or dramatic power, or picturesqueness, or thought, is not musical. To bring some poems within the limit of musical notation would be impossible.

While then one must modify Lanier's theory, the book emphasizes a point that needs constantly to be emphasized, both by poets and by students of poetry.

Followed too closely by minor poets, it will tend to develop artisans rather than artists. Followed by the greater poets, -- consciously or unconsciously, -- it may prove to be one of the surest signs of poetry. This phase of poetical work needed to be emphasized in America, where poetry, with the exception of Poe's, has been deficient in this very element. Whatever else one may say of Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, he must find that their poetry as a whole is singularly lacking in melody. Moreover, the poet who was the most dominant figure in American literature at the time when Lanier was writing, prided himself on violating every law of form, using rhythm, if at all, in a certain elementary or oriental sense.

"I tried to read a beautifully printed and scholarly volume on the theory of poetry received by mail this morning from England,"

said Whitman, "but gave it up at last as a bad job." One may be thoroughly just to Whitman and grant the worth of his work in American literature, and yet see the value of Lanier's contention that the study of the formal element in poetry will lead to a much finer poetry than we have yet had in this country.

Other books will supplant the "Science of English Verse" as text-books, and few may ever read it understandingly; but the author's name will always be thought of in any discussion of the relations of music and poetry.

It is not only a scientific monograph, but a philosophical treatise on a subject that will be discussed with increasing interest.

While Lanier thus stated his conception of the formal element in poetry, he has, in many other places, given his ideas of the poet's character and his work in the world. If on the one hand he criticised Whitman for lack of form, on the other he blamed Swinburne for lack of substance.

Seemingly a follower of Poe, he yet would have incurred the displeasure of that poet for adopting the "heresy of the didactic".

He had an exalted sense of what poetry means in the redemption of mankind.

He had little patience with the cry, "Art for art's sake," or with the justification so often made for the immorality of the artist's life.

Milton himself did not believe more ardently that a poet's life ought to be a true poem. In the poems "Individuality", "Clover", "Life and Song", and the "Psalm of the West", Lanier expresses his view of the responsibility of the artist. In the first he says: --

Awful is Art because 't is free; The artist trembles o'er his plan Where men his Self must see.

In the "English Novel" he says: "For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet the great artist."

Lanier believed that he was, or would be, a great poet. While for a time he considered music as his special field of work and "poetry as a mere tangent,"

after 1875 his aspiration took the direction of poetry.

Criticism of his work only strengthened his conviction that it was of a high order. Letters to his father and to his wife indicate his positive conviction that he was meeting with the misunderstanding that every great artist has met since the world began: "Let my name perish, -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it."

"I KNOW, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet," he said again.

Accordingly he hoped that he would accomplish something different from the popular poetry of the period. Time and again he spoke of "the feeble magazine lyrics" of his time. "This is the kind of poetry that is technically called culture poetry, yet it is in reality the product of a WANT of culture. If these gentlemen and ladies would read the old English poetry . . . they could never be content to put forth these little diffuse prettinesses and dandy kickshaws of verse." And again: "In looking around at the publications of the younger American poets, I am struck with the circ.u.mstance that none of them even ATTEMPT anything great. . . . Hence the endless multiplications of those little feeble magazine lyrics which we all know: consisting of one minute idea each, which is put in the last line of the fourth verse, the other three verses and three lines being mere surplusage."

His characterizations of contemporary poetry are strikingly like those of Walt Whitman. Different as they were in nearly every respect, the two poets were yet alike in their idea that there should be a reaction against the conventional and artificial poetry of their time, -- the difference being, that Whitman's reaction took the direction of formlessness, while Lanier's was concerned about the extension and revival of poetic forms. In both poets there is a range and sweep, both of conception and of utterance, that sharply differentiates them from all other poets since the Civil War.

The question then is, whether Lanier, with his lofty conception of the poet's work, and with his faith in himself, succeeded in writing poetry that will stand the test of time. He undoubtedly had some of the necessary qualities of a poet. He had, first of all, a sense of melody that found vent primarily in music and then in words which moved with a certain rhythmic cadence. "A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep; it was going when I awoke. This melody is always moving along in the background of my spirit. If I wish to compose, I abstract my attention from the things which occupy the front of the stage, the 'dramatis personae' of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear." "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great s.p.a.ce of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he writes at another time. His best poems move to the cadence of a tune.

He probably heard them as did Milton the lines of "Paradise Lost".

Sometimes there was a lilt like the singing of a bird, and sometimes the lyric cry, and yet again the music of the orchestra.

"He has an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an answer, or an echo, or a compensating note," says Mr. Higginson. Sometimes, as in the "Marshes of Glynn" and in the best parts of "Sunrise", there is a cosmic rhythm that is like unto the rhythmic beating of the heart of G.o.d, of which Poe and Lanier have written eloquently.

Besides this melody that was temperamental, Lanier had ideas.

He was alive to the problems of his age and to the beauties of nature.

One has only to think of the names of his poems to realize how many themes occupied his attention. He wrote of religion, social questions, science, philosophy, nature, love. "My head and my heart are both [so] full of poems,"

he says. "So many great ideas for art are born to me each day, I am swept into the land of All-delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind."

"Every leaf that I brush against breeds a poem." "A thousand vital elements rill through my soul." So he is in no sense a "jingle man".

There is a note of healthy mysticism in his poetry that makes him akin to Wordsworth and Emerson. A series of poems might be selected that would ent.i.tle him to the praise of being "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit."

With the spiritual endowment of a poet and an unusual sense of melody, where was he lacking in what makes a great poet? In power of expression.

He never attained, except in a few poems, that union of sound and sense which is characteristic of the best poetry. The touch of finality is not in his words; the subtle charm of verse outside of the melody and the meaning is not his -- he failed to get the last "touches of vitalizing force."

He did not, as Lowell said of Keats, "rediscover the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary." He did not attain to "the perfection and the precision of the instantaneous line."

Take his poem "Remonstrance", for instance. It is a strong utterance against tyranny and intolerance and bigotry, hot from his soul; but the expression is not worthy of his feeling. A few lines of Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about freedom are better.

The same may be said of his attack on agnosticism in "Acknowledgment".

"Corn", while representing an extremely poetical situation, leaves one with the feeling of incompleteness: the ideas are not adequately or felicitously expressed. There is melody in the "Marsh Song at Sunset", but the poem is not clear.

Or take what many consider his masterpiece, "Sunrise".

There is one of the most imaginative situations a poet could have, -- the ecstasy of the poet's soul as he rises from his bed to go to the forest, the silence of the night, the mystery of the deep green woods, the coming of "my lord, the Sun." There is nothing in American poetry that goes beyond the sweep and range of this conception. But look at the words; with the exception of the first stanza and those that describe the dawn, there is a nervousness of style, a strain of expression. If one compare even the best parts with the "Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty"

by Wordsworth, he sees the difference in the art of expression.

There is in Wordsworth's poem the romantic mood, -- the same uplift of soul in the presence of the greater phenomena of nature, -- but there is a cla.s.sic restraint of form; it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

What, then, is the explanation of this defect in Lanier?

Undoubtedly lack of time to revise his work is one cause.

Speaking of one of his poems, he said, "Being cool next day, I find some flaws in my poem." And again, "On seeing the poem in print, I find it faulty; there's too much matter in it." Sickness, poverty, and hard work prevented him from having that repose which is the proper mood of the artist.

He had to write as long a poem as "The Symphony" in four days, the "Psalm of the West" in a few weeks. "Sunrise" was dictated on his death-bed. The revision of "Corn" and of all other poems which I have been able to compare with the first drafts shows conclusively that he had the power of improving his work. With more time he might have achieved with all of his poems some of the results attained by such careful workmen as Tennyson and Poe.

But lack of time for revision will not explain all.

There were certain temperamental defects in Lanier as poet.

There was a lack of spontaneous utterance. Writing once of Swinburne, he used words that characterize well one phase of his own work: "It is always the Fourth of July with Mr. Swinburne. It is impossible in reading this strained laborious matter not to remember that the case of poetry is precisely that where he who conquers, conquers without strain. There was a certain damsel who once came to King Arthur's court, 'gert' (as sweet Sir Thomas Malory hath it) 'with a sword for to find a man of such virtue to draw it out of the scabbard.' King Arthur, to set example to his knights, first essayed, and pulled at it eagerly, but the sword would not out.

'Sir,' said the damsel, 'ye need not to pull half so hard, for he that shall pull it out shall do it with little might.'"

This is not to say that Lanier simulated poetic expression, but his words are not inevitable enough. He often lacked simplicity.

Furthermore, he suffered from a tendency to indulge in fancies, "sucking sweet similes out of the most diverse objects."

He was inoculated with the "conceit virus" of the seventeenth century.

In a letter already quoted, he pointed out this defect to his father, and he never overcame it. He did not restrain his luxuriant imagination.

The poem "Clover" is almost spoiled by the conceit of the ox representing the "Course-of-things" and trampling upon the souls (the clover-blossoms) of the poets. "Sunrise" is marred by the figure of the bee-hive from which the "star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee, . . . the great Sun-Bee," emerges in the morning.

Such examples might be easily multiplied.

Lanier was undoubtedly hampered, too, by his theory of verse. The very poem "Special Pleading", in which he said that he began to work out his theory, is a failure. Alliteration, a.s.sonance, compound words, personifications, are greatly overused. Some of the rhymes are as grotesque as Browning's.

Instead of the perfect union of sound and sense, there is often a mere chanting of words.

It is futile to deny these tendencies in Lanier. They vitiate more than half his poems, and are defects even in some of the best.

Sometimes, in his very highest flight, he seems to have been winged by one of these arrows. But it is equally futile to deny that he frequently rises above all these limitations and does work that is absolutely unique, and original, and enduring. Distinction must be made, as in the case of every other man who has marked qualities of style, between his good work and his bad work. He has done enough good work to ent.i.tle him to a place among the genuine poets of America.

No American anthology would be complete that did not contain some dozen or more of his poems, and no study of American poetry would be complete that did not take into consideration twice this number.

It is too soon yet to fix upon such poems, but surely they may be found among the following: such lyrics as "An Evening Song", "My Springs", "A Ballad of Trees and the Master", "Betrayal", "Night and Day", "The Stirrup-Cup", and "Nirvana"; such sonnets as "The Mocking-Bird" and "The Harlequin of Dreams"; such nature poems as "The Song of the Chattahoochee", "The Waving of the Corn", and "From the Flats"; such poems of high seriousness as "Individuality", "Opposition", "How Love looked for h.e.l.l", and "A Florida Sunday"; such a stirring ballad as "The Revenge of Hamish"; the opening lines and the Columbus sonnets of the "Psalm of the West"; and the longer poems, "The Symphony", "Sunrise", and "The Marshes of Glynn".

The first may be quoted as an ill.u.s.tration of Lanier's lyric quality.

Those who have heard it sung to the music of Mr. Dudley Buck can realize to some extent Lanier's idea of the union of music and poetry: --

Look off, dear Love, across the shallow sands, And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea, How long they kiss in sight of all the lands.

Ah! longer, longer, we.

Now in the sea's red vintage melts the sun, As Egypt's pearl dissolved in rosy wine, And Cleopatra night drinks all. 'T is done, Love, lay thine hand in mine.

Come forth, sweet stars, and comfort heaven's heart; Glimmer, ye waves, round else unlighted sands.

O night! divorce our sun and sky apart, Never our lips, our hands.

Throughout his poems -- some of them imperfect enough as wholes -- there are lines that come from the innermost soul of poetry: --

But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill.

The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep.

Happy-valley hopes Beyond the bend of roads.