Select Poems of Sidney Lanier Part 11

I would my lover kneeling at my feet [241]

In humble manliness should cry, 'O sweet!

I know not if thy heart my heart will greet: I ask not if thy love my love can meet: Whate'er thy worshipful soft tongue shall say, I'll kiss thine answer, be it yea or nay: I do but know I love thee, and I pray To be thy knight until my dying day.'

Woe him that cunning trades in hearts contrives!

Base love good women to base loving drives.

If men loved larger, larger were our lives; [251]

And wooed they n.o.bler, won they n.o.bler wives."

There thrust the bold straightforward horn To battle for that lady lorn, With heartsome voice of mellow scorn, Like any knight in knighthood's morn.

"Now comfort thee," said he, "Fair Lady.

For G.o.d shall right thy grievous wrong, And man shall sing thee a true-love song, Voiced in act his whole life long, [261]

Yea, all thy sweet life long, Fair Lady.

Where's he that craftily hath said, The day of chivalry is dead?

I'll prove that lie upon his head, Or I will die instead, Fair Lady.

Is Honor gone into his grave?

Hath Faith become a caitiff knave, And Selfhood turned into a slave [271]

To work in Mammon's cave, Fair Lady?

Will Truth's long blade ne'er gleam again?

Hath Giant Trade in dungeons slain All great contempts of mean-got gain And hates of inward stain, Fair Lady?

For aye shall name and fame be sold, And place be hugged for the sake of gold, And smirch-robed Justice feebly scold [281]

At Crime all money-bold, Fair Lady?

Shall self-wrapt husbands aye forget Kiss-pardons for the daily fret Wherewith sweet wifely eyes are wet -- Blind to lips kiss-wise set -- Fair Lady?

Shall lovers higgle, heart for heart, Till wooing grows a trading mart Where much for little, and all for part, [291]

Make love a cheapening art, Fair Lady?

Shall woman scorch for a single sin That her betrayer may revel in, And she be burnt, and he but grin When that the flames begin, Fair Lady?

Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea, 'We maids would far, far whiter be If that our eyes might sometimes see [301]

Men maids in purity,'

Fair Lady?

Shall Trade aye salve his conscience-aches With jibes at Chivalry's old mistakes -- The wars that o'erhot knighthood makes For Christ's and ladies' sakes, Fair Lady?

Now by each knight that e'er hath prayed To fight like a man and love like a maid, Since Pembroke's life, as Pembroke's blade, [311]

I' the scabbard, death, was laid, Fair Lady, I dare avouch my faith is bright That G.o.d doth right and G.o.d hath might.

Nor time hath changed His hair to white, Nor His dear love to spite, Fair Lady.

I doubt no doubts: I strive, and shrive my clay, And fight my fight in the patient modern way For true love and for thee -- ah me! and pray [321]

To be thy knight until my dying day, Fair Lady."

Made end that knightly horn, and spurred away Into the thick of the melodious fray.

And then the hautboy played and smiled, And sang like any large-eyed child, Cool-hearted and all undefiled.

"Huge Trade!" he said, "Would thou wouldst lift me on thy head And run where'er my finger led! [331]

Once said a Man -- and wise was He -- 'Never shalt thou the heavens see, Save as a little child thou be.'"

Then o'er sea-lashings of commingling tunes The ancient wise ba.s.soons, Like weird Gray-beard Old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes, Chanted runes: "Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss, [341]

The sea of all doth lash and toss, One wave forward and one across: But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest, And worst doth foam and flash to best, And curst to blest.

"Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west, Love, Love alone can pore On thy dissolving score Of harsh half-phrasings, Blotted ere writ, [351]

And double erasings Of chords most fit.

Yea, Love, sole music-master blest, May read thy weltering palimpsest.

To follow Time's dying melodies through, And never to lose the old in the new, And ever to solve the discords true -- Love alone can do.

And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying, And ever Love hears the women's sighing, [361]

And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying, And ever wise childhood's deep implying, But never a trader's glozing and lying.

"And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word."

____ Baltimore, 1875.

Notes: The Symphony

The 'Introduction' (pp. xxviii f., x.x.xiii ff. [Part III], xlvii [Part IV]) gives, besides the plan of 'The Symphony', a detailed statement of its two themes, -- the evils of the trade-spirit in the commercial and social world and the need in each of the love-spirit.

These questions preyed on the poet's mind and were to be treated at length in 'The Jacquerie' also, which he expected to make his great work, but which he was unable to complete. This he tells us in a n.o.ble pa.s.sage to Judge Bleckley, in his letter of November 15, 1874. After deploring the lack of time for literary labor (see quotation in 'Introduction', p. xlvi [Part IV]), he continues: "I manage to get a little time tho'

to work on what is to be my first 'magnum opus', a long poem, founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century in France, called 'The Jacquerie'. It was the first time that the big hungers of 'the People' appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose, and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but which is a revelation from G.o.d of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise, as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of meanness; -- it is this which must in these latter days organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society.

-- This is about the plan which is to run through my book: though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."

Mr. F. F. Browne is doubtless right in saying that 'The Symphony' recalls parts of Tennyson's 'Maud', but the closest congeners of 'The Symphony'

in English are, I think, Langland's 'Piers The Plowman' in poetry and Ruskin's 'Unto This Last' in prose. Widely as these two works differ from 'The Symphony' in form, they are one with it in purpose and in spirit. All three voice the outcry of the poor against the hardness of their lot and their longing for a larger life; all three show that the only hope of relief lies in a broader and deeper love for humanity. a.n.a.logues to individual verses of 'The Symphony'

are cited below.

1-2. See 'Introduction', p. xxviii [Part III].

31-61. See 'Introduction', p. xxix [Part III].

42-43. See St. Matthew 4:4.

55-60. It is precisely this evil that Ruskin has in mind, I take it, when he condemns the commercial text, "Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," and when he declares that "Compet.i.tion is the law of death"

('Unto This Last', pp. 40, 59).

117. Compare 'Corn', l. 21 ff.

161. For 'lotos-sleeps' see Tennyson's 'The Lotos-eaters', which almost lulls one to sleep, and 'The Odyssey' ix. 80-104.

178. See St. Matthew 19:19.

182. See St. Luke 10:29, ff.

183-190. Compare 'Corn', ll. 4-9, and see 'Introduction', p. x.x.xii [Part III].

232-248. See 'Introduction', p. x.x.xiv f., and Peac.o.c.k's 'Lady Clarinda's Song' (Gosse's 'English Lyrics').

294-298. See 'Tiger-lilies', p. 49, and 'Betrayal' in Lanier's complete 'Poems', p. 213. These lines of 'The Symphony' show clearly that Lanier did not believe that G.o.d made one law for man and another for woman, or that one very grievous sin should forever blight a woman's life.

What Christ himself thought is clear from St. Luke 7:36-50, and St. John 8:1-11.

302. See 'Introduction', p. liv [Part VI].

326. For a full account of the 'hautboy' and other musical instruments mentioned in the poem see Lanier's 'The Orchestra of To-day', cited in the 'Bibliography'.

359. See 'Introduction', p. x.x.xvi [Part III]. Compare 1 Corinthians 13; Drummond's 'The Greatest Thing in the World'; William Morris's 'Love Is Enough'; 'Aurora Leigh', Book ix.:

"Art is much, but Love is more!

O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more!