Select Poems of Sidney Lanier Part 13

"A deep coughing sound troubled the stillness, way toward a wooded cape that jutted into the stream a mile distant. All in an instant a fierce eye of fire shot out from behind the cape and sent a long brilliant pathway quivering athwart the dusky water. The coughing grew louder and louder, the glaring eye grew larger and still larger, glared wilder and still wilder. A huge shape developed itself out of the gloom, and from its tall duplicate horns dense volumes of smoke, starred and spangled with sparks, poured out and went tumbling away into the farther darkness. Nearer and nearer the thing came, till its long sides began to glow with spots of light which mirrored themselves in the river and attended the monster like a torch-light procession.

"'What is it? Oh! what is it, Uncle Dan'l?'

"With deep solemnity the answer came:

"'It's de Almighty! Git down on yo' knees!'

"It was not necessary to say it twice. They were all kneeling in a moment.

And then while the mysterious coughing rose stronger and stronger and the threatening glare reached farther and wider, the negro's voice lifted up its supplications.

"'O Lord, we's ben mighty wicked, an' we knows dat we 'zerve to go to de bad place, but, good Lord, deah Lord, we ain't ready yit, we ain't ready -- let dese po' chil'en hab one mo' chance, jes' one mo' chance. Take de ole n.i.g.g.ah if you's got to hab somebody. -- Good Lord, good deah Lord, we don't know whah you's a gwine to, we don't know who you's got yo' eye on, but we knows by de way you's a comin', we know by de way you's a tiltin' along in yo' charyot o' fiah dat some po' sinner's a gwine to ketch it. But, good Lord, dese chil'en don't 'blong heah, dey's f'm Obedstown whah dey don't know nuffin, an' you knows, yo' own sef, dat dey ain't 'sponsible. An' deah Lord, good Lord, it ain't like yo' mercy, it ain't like yo' pity, it ain't like yo' long-sufferin' lovin'-kindness for to take dis kind o' 'vantage o' sich little chil'en as dese is when dey's so many ornery grown folks chuck full o' cussedness dat wants roastin' down dah. O Lord, spah de little chil'en, don't tar de little chil'en away f'm dey frens, jes' let 'em off jes' dis once, and take it out'n de ole n.i.g.g.ah.

HEAH I IS, LORD, HEAH I IS! De ole n.i.g.g.ah's ready, Lord, de ole ----'

"The flaming and churning steamer was right abreast the party, and not twenty steps away. The awful thunder of a mud-valve suddenly burst forth, drowning the prayer, and as suddenly Uncle Dan'l s.n.a.t.c.hed a child under each arm and scoured into the woods with the rest of the pack at his heels. And then, ashamed of himself, he halted in the deep darkness and shouted (but rather feebly):

"'Heah I is, Lord, heah I is!'

"There was a moment of throbbing suspense, and then, to the surprise and comfort of the party, it was plain that the august presence had gone by, for its dreadful noises were receding.

Uncle Dan'l headed a cautious reconnoissance in the direction of the log.

Sure enough 'The Lord' was just turning a point a short distance up the river, and while they looked, the lights winked out and the coughing diminished by degrees and presently ceased altogether.

"'H'wsh! Well now dey's some folks says dey ain't no 'ficiency in prah.

Dis chile would like to know whah we'd a ben now if it warn't fo' dat prah?

Dat's it. Dat's it!'"

There follows a discussion as to whether or not the prayer caused the apparition to go by, of which of course Uncle Dan'l has no doubt.

The apparition reappears and Uncle Dan'l betakes himself to prayer again, this time a long way off.

I wrote the authors of 'The Gilded Age' and asked the source of 'Uncle Daniel's Apparition and Prayer'. Mr. Clemens kindly replied that he is the author of the piece, and that it is pure fiction without either history or tradition back of it.

A comparison of the two stories shows some differences.

The scene in the one case is the Alabama River, in the other the Mississippi.

Moreover, the PERSONNEL is different. The Negro man in Twain's story is about forty, in Lanier's he is old and has been blind for forty years.

Another difference Mr. Sidney Lanier points out to his wife in his letter of October 1, 1874: "Cliff's and my 'Power of Prayer'

will come out in the Scribner's; probably in the 'Etchings'

at the end of the Magazine. I wrote thee what Dr. Holland said anent its resemblance to something of Mark Twain's in plot.

Day before yesterday I called and asked Dr. Holland what work of Mark Twain's he referred to. 'Well,' said he, 'I know nothing about it myself: I read the poem to a friend, and he suggested that the plot was like something of Mark Twain's. But yesterday I read him your note, and he then recollected that in Twain's version it is G.o.d Almighty that is coming up the bend. In yours it is the Devil: -- which certainly makes a little difference!' and here he broke into a great laugh.

'Yes,' I rejoined, 'a difference toto coelo,' whereat he laughed again, and told me he had already ordered a check to be sent me for the poem."

Mr. Clifford Lanier was born at Griffin, Ga., April 24, 1844, entered business in Montgomery, Ala., at fourteen, subsequently attended college for a year and a half, and in May, 1862, joined his brother in the Confederate Army. His soldier life has been detailed in connection with that of the poet. In October, 1864, Mr. Clifford Lanier was a.s.signed as signal officer to the blockade-runner 'Talisman', which, after two successful runs to the Bermuda Islands, was wrecked in December, 1864. He escaped, however, and surrendered to the Federal authorities at the end of April, 1865.

He has been successively lawyer, hotel manager, and superintendent of schools in Montgomery, Ala. For several years past he has been a director of the Bank of Montgomery and other corporations. All the while, however, he has been deeply interested in literature and has written some graceful sketches and poems, among which may be mentioned the following: 'Thorn-fruit' (1867), 'Love and Loyalty at War' (1893), 'Biding Tryst' (1894), prose; 'Greatest of These is Love', 'The American Philomel', 'Keats and f.a.n.n.y B----', 'The Spirit of Art', 'Antinous to Hadrian', 'Time', 'Tireless', 'Tramp' (in Stedman and Hutchinson's 'Library of American Literature'), 'Love and Life', 'Edgar Allan Poe', etc. As stated in the 'Introduction', the Chautauquans of 1898 have named themselves "The Laniers"

in honor of Messrs. Sidney and Clifford Lanier. The motto of the cla.s.s is the first line of Mr. Clifford Lanier's 'Transformation'

('Sunday-school Times', Phila., June 30, 1894):

"The humblest life that lives may be divine."

8. The complete 'Poems' has 'the' before 'world', but Mrs. Lanier thinks the poet must have used 'de' here as elsewhere.

Rose-morals

I. -- Red

Would that my songs might be [1]

What roses make by day and night -- Distillments of my clod of misery Into delight.

Soul, could'st thou bare thy breast As yon red rose, and dare the day, All clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest?

Say yea -- say yea!

Ah, dear my Rose, good-bye; The wind is up; so; drift away.

That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly, [11]

I strive, I pray.

II. -- White

Soul, get thee to the heart Of yonder tuberose: hide thee there -- There breathe the meditations of thine art Suffused with prayer.

Of spirit grave yet light, How fervent fragrances uprise Pure-born from these most rich and yet most white Virginities!

Mulched with unsavory death, [21]

Grow, Soul! unto such white estate, That virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath, Thy work, thy fate.

____ Baltimore, 1875.

Notes: Rose-morals

Rose-morals in English literature probably begin with Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century. At any rate, in the eighteenth chapter of his 'Voyage and Travels' he professes to tell us the origin of red and white roses. A fair maid had been unjustly accused of wrong-doing and doomed to die by fire.

"And as the woode began to brenne (burn) about hir, she made hir prayer to our Lorde as she was not gyltie of that thing, that he would helpe hir that it might be knowne to all men. And whan (when) she had thus sayde, she entered the fyre and anone the fyre went out, and those braunches that were brenninge (burning) became red Roses and those braunches that were not kindled became white Rosiers (rose bushes) full of white roses, and those were the fyrst roses and rosyers that any man sawe, and so was the mayden saved through the grace of G.o.d."

Thomas Carew has several rose-moralities, as 'The True Beauty', beginning "He that loves a rosy cheek," and his exquisite 'Red and White Roses':

"Read in these roses the sad story Of my hard fate and your own glory: In the white you may discover The paleness of a fainting lover; In the red, the flames still feeding On my heart with fresh wounds bleeding.

The white will tell you how I languish, And the red express my anguish: The white my innocence displaying, The red my martyrdom betraying.

The frowns that on your brow resided Have those roses thus divided; Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather, And then they both shall grow together."*

-- * See Saintsbury's 'Elizabethan Literature' (Macmillan & Co., New York, 1887), p. 363.

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Rollicking Robert Herrick, too, draws his morals, now advising the virgins to make much of time, as in his 'Gather ye rose-buds while ye may', now preaching a rarely pathetic sermon, as in 'To Blossoms':