Select Poems of Sidney Lanier Part 5

"The dew-drop morn may fall from off the petal of the sky."*10*

-- *1* In 'Clover'.

*2* 'Corn', ll. 185-187.

*3* See on this point the remarks of Professor Trent in his admirable life of 'Simms' (Boston, 1892), p. 149.

*4* 'June Dreams', l. 21 ff.

*5* 'Psalm of the West', l. 183 ff.

*6* 'Sunrise', ll. 80-81.

*7* Ibid., ll. 82-85.

*8* Ibid., ll. 114-115.

*9* Ibid., ll. 134-136.

*10* 'The Ship of Earth', l. 5.

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As to versification, Lanier uses almost all the types of verse -- iambic, trochaic, blank, the sonnet, etc. -- and with about equal skill.

Three features, however, specially characterize his verse: the careful distribution of vowel-colors and the frequent use of alliteration and of phonetic syzygy,*1* by which last is meant a combination or succession of identical or similar consonants, whether initially, medially, or finally, as for instance the succession of M's in Tennyson's

"The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees."

All of these phenomena are ill.u.s.trated in Lanier's 'Song of the Chattahoochee', which has often been compared to Tennyson's 'The Brook', and which alone proves the author a master in versification. To be sure, Lanier occasionally gives us an improper rhyme, as 'thwart: heart',*2* etc., but so does every poet.

No doubt, too, his love of music sometimes led him, not "to strain for form effects", but to indulge too much therein, or, in the words of Mr. Stedman, "to essay in language feats that only the gamut can render possible."*3* But, as Professor Kent admirably puts it, "Lanier was a poet as well as an artist, and if at times his artistic temperament seemed to eclipse his poetic thought, grant that to the poet mind the very manner of expression may indicate the thought that lies beneath, while to the duller ear the thought must come in completed form."*4* Moreover, as we shall see later, this extraordinary musical endowment gave Lanier a unique position among English poets.

-- *1* See 'The Science of English Verse', p. 306 ff.

*2* 'In the Foam', ll. 6, 8. See, too, Kent's 'Study of Lanier's Poems', which gives an exhaustive treatment of Lanier's versification.

*3* Stedman's 'Poets of America', p. 449.

*4* 'Kent', p. 60.

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After what has been said the qualities of style may be briefly handled.

As we have already seen, Lanier sometimes fails in clearness, or, more precisely, in simplicity. This comes partly from infelicitous sentence-construction, partly, perhaps, from Lanier's extraordinary musical endowment, but chiefly, I think, from over-luxuriance of imagination. But this occasional defect has been unduly exaggerated. Thus Mr. Gosse*1* declares that Lanier is "never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza," -- a statement so clearly hyperbolic as hardly to call for notice. As a matter of fact, Lanier has written numerous poems that offer little or no difficulty to the reader of average intelligence, as 'Life and Song', 'My Springs', 'The Symphony', 'The Mocking-Bird', 'The Song of the Chattahoochee', 'The Waving of the Corn', 'The Revenge of Hamish', 'Remonstrance', 'A Ballad of Trees and the Master', etc. More than this, Lanier at times manifests the simplicity that is granted only to genius of the highest order: thus an English critic,*2*

who by the way declares that Lanier's volume has more of genius than all the poems of Poe, or Longfellow, or Lowell (the humorous poems excepted), and who considers Lanier the most original of all American poets, and more original than any England has produced for the last thirty years, says that "nothing can be more perfect than --

'The whole sweet round Of littles that large life compound,'"*3*

lines in 'My Springs', and that "the touch of wonder in the last two lines,

'I marvel that G.o.d made you mine, For when he frowns, 'tis then ye shine,'*4*

is as simple and exquisite as any touch of tenderness in our literature."

I frankly admit that several of Lanier's best poems, as 'Corn', 'The Marshes of Glynn', and 'Sunrise', are not simple; but the same thing is true of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and of Browning's 'The Ring and the Book', and yet this fact does not exclude these two works from the list of great poems. Mr. Gosse, however, declares that 'Corn', 'Sunrise', and 'The Marshes of Glynn' "simulate poetic expression with extraordinary skill. But of the real thing, of the genuine traditional article, not a trace"! What do these poems show, then?

Mr. Gosse answers: "I find a painful effort, a strain and rage, the most prominent qualities in everything he wrote;" which strikes me as the reverse of the facts. In one of his letters*5* to Judge Bleckley, Lanier wrote this sentence: "My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache, purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." If, then, he committed an error (and I am far from considering him faultless), it was not that he beat and spurred on Pegasus, but that he failed to rein him in. Still, I repeat that I prefer the embarra.s.sment of riches to the embarra.s.sment of poverty. Finally, just as Milton tells us that the music of the spheres is not to be heard by the gross, unpurged ear, so I believe that many intelligent ears and eyes are at first too gross to hear and see what Lanier puts before them, whereas a bit of patient listening and looking reveals delights. .h.i.therto undreamed of.

-- *1* See 'Bibliography'.

*2* 'The Spectator' (London); see 'Bibliography'.

*3* 'My Springs', ll. 49-50.

*4* 'My Springs', ll. 55-56.

*5* It is to be hoped that these letters may yet be published.

I quote from one dated November 15, 1874.

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If not always simple, Lanier is often forcible in the extreme, as in 'The Symphony', 'The Revenge of Hamish', 'Remonstrance', and 'Sunrise'.

Of course, it is open to any one to see in these poems the "rage"

attributed to Lanier by Mr. Gosse, but I prefer to consider it divine wrath in all but the last, and in it wonder unutterable, which yet is so uttered that ears become eyes. I allude to the stanzas* describing the break of dawn and the rising of the sun.

-- * 'Sunrise', ll. 86-152.

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Of the poet's marvelous euphony, 'The Song of the Chattahoochee'

speaks clearly enough. As we have seen in our treatment of versification, it is here a question not of too little but of too much.

But, despite an occasional too great yielding to his pa.s.sion for music, his extraordinary endowment in this direction gave Lanier a unique position among English poets. I quote again from Professor Kent:*

"But if his sense of beauty made him a peer of our great poets, it was the heavenly gift of music that distinguished him from them.

Milton, it is true, whom he most resembles in this respect, had a knowledge of music, but not the same pa.s.sion for it. Milton's music was more a recreation, an accompaniment of reverie; Lanier's was a fiery zeal; a yearning love, a chosen and adequate form of expression of his soul's deepest feeling. Combined with this pa.s.sion for music was his technical knowledge of the art, and these combined formed at once the foundation and the framework of his poetry. He seems literally to have sung his poems; they are essentially musical, tuneful, and melodious.

Surcharged with music, he overflows in mellifluous numbers. Here, then, Lanier stands out differentiated in the choir of poets, and here we find that distinctive quality which is the very flavor of his writing."

-- * P. 62.

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While most of Lanier's poems are in a serious strain, several disclose no mean sense of humor. I refer to his dialect poems, such as 'Jones's Private Argyment', 'Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn', and 'The Power of Prayer', especially the last, written in conjunction with his brother, Mr. Clifford Lanier.

There are pa.s.sages in the poems no less pathetic than the poet's life.

In discussing his love of nature we have seen that he was a pantheist in the best sense of the term. So delicate was his sensibility that we do not wonder when we hear him declaring,

"And I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered,"*

a saying as felicitous as the Roman's "I am a man, and, therefore, nothing human is stranger to me." The tenderness of the 'Ballad of Trees and the Master' must touch all readers.

Few pa.s.sages are more pathetic, I think, than that, in 'June Dreams in January', telling of the poet's struggle for bread and fame, while "his worshipful sweet wife sat still, afar, within the village whence she sent him forth, waiting all confident and proud and calm."

And, if there occurs therein a plaintive tone, let us remember that it is the only time that he complained of his lot, and that here really he has more in mind his dearer self, his wife, and that calm succeeded to unrest just as it does in this pa.s.sage:

"'Why can we poets dream us beauty, so, But cannot dream us bread? Why, now, can I Make, aye, create this fervid throbbing June Out of the chill, chill matter of my soul, Yet cannot make a poorest penny-loaf Out of this same chill matter, no, not one For Mary, though she starved upon my breast?'

And then he fell upon his couch, and sobbed, And, late, just when his heart leaned o'er The very edge of breaking, fain to fall, G.o.d sent him sleep."**

-- * 'A Florida Sunday', ll. 102-103.

** 'June Dreams in January', ll. 68-78.

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V. Lanier's Theory of Poetry

It is now time to say a word about Lanier's theory of art, especially the art of poetry. His views upon the formal side of poetry have already been noticed in the consideration of his 'Science of English Verse', and hence receive no further comment here.

That Lanier keenly appreciated the responsibility resting upon the artist, appears from 'Individuality', where he tells us,

"Awful is art because 'tis free,"*1*

and,