The name of Lanier is often associated with that of Timrod, and the two
southern poets were outwardly alike in that they struggled against physical
illness and mental depression; but where we see in Timrod the tragedy of a
poet broken by pain and neglect, the tragedy of Lanier's life is forgotten
in our wonder at his triumph. It is doubtful if any other poet ever raised
so pure a song of joy out of conditions that might well have occasioned a
wail of despair.
The joyous song of Lanier is appreciated only by the few. He is not popular
with either readers or critics, and the difficulty of assigning him a place
or rank may be judged from recent attempts. One history of American
literature barely mentions Lanier in a slighting reference to "a small cult
of poetry in parts of America"; [Footnote: Trent, History of American
Literature (1913), p. 471.] another calls him the only southern poet
who had a national horizon, and accords his work ample criticism;
[Footnote: Moses, Literature of the South (1910), pp 358-383] a
third describes him as "a true artist" having "a lyric power hardly to be
found in any other American," but the brief record ends with the cutting
criticism that his work is "hardly national." [Footnote: Wendell,
Literary History of America (1911), pp 495-498.] And so with all
other histories, one dismisses him as the author of a vague rhapsody called
"The Marshes of Glynn," another exalts him as a poet who rivals Poe in
melody and far surpasses him in thought or feeling. Evidently there is no
settled criticism of Lanier, as of Bryant or Longfellow; he is not yet
secure in his position among the elder poets, and what we record here is
such a personal appreciation as any reader may formulate for himself.
Life
America has had its Puritan and its Cavalier writers, but
seldom one who combines the Puritan's stern devotion to duty with
the Cavalier's joy in nature and romance and music. Lanier was such
a poet, and he owed his rare quality to a mixed ancestry. He was
descended on his mother's side from Scotch-Irish and Puritan
forbears, and on his father's side from Huguenot (French) exiles
who were musicians at the English court. One of his ancestors,
Nicholas Lanier, is described as "a musician, painter and engraver"
for Queen Elizabeth and King James, and as the composer of music
for some of Ben Jonson's masques.
Early Traits
His boyhood was spent at Macon, Georgia, where he was born in 1842.
A study of that boyhood reveals certain characteristics which
reappear constantly in the poet's work. One was his rare purity of
soul; another was his brave spirit; a third was his delight in
nature; a fourth was his passion for music. At seven he made his
first flute from a reed, and ever afterwards, though he learned to
play many instruments, the flute was to him as a companion and a
voice. With it he cheered many a weary march or hungry bivouac;
through it he told all his heart to the woman he loved; by it he
won a place when he had no other means of earning his bread. Hence
in "The Symphony," a poem which fronts one of life's hard problems,
it is the flute that utters the clearest and sweetest note.
In War Time
Lanier had finished his course in Oglethorpe University (a
primitive little college in Midway, Georgia) and was tutoring there
when the war came, and the college closed its doors because
teachers and students were away at the first call to join the army.
For four years he was a Confederate soldier, serving in the ranks
with his brother and refusing the promotion offered him for gallant
conduct in the field. There was a time during this period when he
might have sung like the minstrels of old, for romance had come to
him with the war. By day he was fighting or scouting with his life
in his hand; but when camp fires were lighted he would take his
flute and slip away to serenade the girl who "waited for him till
the war was over."
We mention these small incidents with a purpose. There is a
delicacy of feeling in Lanier's verse which might lead a reader to
assume that the poet was effeminate, when in truth he was as manly
as any Norse scald or Saxon scop who ever stood beside his chief in
battle. Of the war he never sang; but we find some reflection of
the girl who waited in the poem "My Springs."
War's Aftermath
Lanier was at sea, as signal officer on a blockade runner, when his
ship was captured by a Federal cruiser and he was sent to the
military prison at Point Lookout (1864). A hard and bitter
experience it was, and his only comfort was the flute which he had
hidden in his ragged sleeve. When released the following year he
set out on foot for his home, five hundred miles away, and reached
it more dead than alive; for consumption had laid a heavy hand upon
him. For weeks he was desperately ill, and during the illness his
mother died of the same wasting disease; then he rose and set out
bravely to earn a living,--no easy matter in a place that had
suffered as Georgia had during the war.
The Gleam
We shall not enter into his struggle for bread, or into his
wanderings in search of a place where he could breathe without
pain. He was a law clerk in his father's office at Macon when,
knowing that he had but a slender lease of life, he made his
resolve. To the remonstrances of his father he closed his ears,
saying that music and poetry were calling him and he must follow
the call. The superb climax of Tennyson's "Merlin and the Gleam"
was in his soul:
O young mariner,
Down to the haven
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam!
Thus bravely he went northward to Baltimore, taking his flute with
him. He was evidently a wonderful artist, playing not by the score
but making his instrument his voice, so that his audience seemed to
hear a soul speaking in melody. His was a magic flute. Soon he was
supporting himself by playing in the Peabody Orchestra, living
joyously meanwhile in an atmosphere of music and poetry and books;
for he was always a student, determined to understand as well as to
practice his art. He wrote poems, stories, anything to earn an
honest dollar; he gave lectures on music and literature; he planned
a score of books that he did not and could not write, for he was
living in a fever of mind and body. Music and poetry were surging
within him for expression; but his strength was failing, his time
short.
The Struggle
In 1879 he was appointed lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and
for the first time he had an assured income, small, indeed, but
very heartening since it was enough to support his family. He began
teaching with immense enthusiasm; but presently he was speaking in
a whisper from an invalid's chair. Under such circumstances were
uttered some of our most cheering words on art and poetry. Two
years later he died in a tent among the hills, near Asheville,
North Carolina, whither he had gone in a vain search for health.
There is in all Lanier's verse a fragmentariness, a sense of
something left unsaid, which we may understand better if we
remember that his heart was filled with the noblest emotions, but
that when he strove to write them his pen failed for weariness.
Read the daily miracle of dawn in "Sunrise," for example, and find
there the waiting oaks, the stars, the tide, the marsh with its
dreaming pools, light, color, fragrance, melody,--everything except
that the hand which wrote the poem was too weak to guide the
pencil. The rush of impressions and memories in "Sunrise," its
tender beauty and vague incompleteness, as of something left
unsaid, may be explained by the fact that it was Lanier's last
song.
Works of Lanier
Many readers have grown familiar with Lanier's name in
connection with The Boy's Froissart, The Boy's King Arthur,
The Boy's Mabinogion and The Boy's Percy, four books in which
he retold in simple language some of the old tales that are forever young.
His chief prose works, The English Novel and The Science of
English Verse, are of interest chiefly to critics; they need not detain
us here except to note that the latter volume is devoted to Lanier's pet
theory that music and poetry are governed by the same laws. Of more general
interest are his scattered "Notes," which contain suggestions for many a
poem that was never written, intermingled with condensed criticisms. Of the
poet Swinburne he says, "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and
gold, but no food therein except salt and pepper." One might say less than
that with more words, or read a whole book to arrive at this summary of
Whitman's style and bottomless philosophy: "Whitman is poetry's butcher;
huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind the
gristle, is what he feeds our souls with.... His argument seems to be that
because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is a god."
His Best Poems
Those who read Lanier's poems should begin with the simplest, with his love
songs, "My Springs" and "In Absence," or his "Ballad of Trees and the
Master," or his outdoor poems, such as "Tampa Robins," "Song of the
Chattahoochee," "Mocking Bird," and "Evening Song." In the last-named
lyrics he began the work (carried out more fully in his later poems) of
interpreting in words the harmony which his sensitive ear detected in the
manifold voices of nature.
Next in order are the poems in which is hidden a thought or an ideal not to
be detected at first glance; for to Lanier poetry was like certain oriental
idols which when opened are found to be filled with exquisite perfumes.
"The Stirrup Cup" is one of the simplest of these allegories. It was a
custom in olden days when a man was ready to journey, for one who loved him
to bring a glass of wine which he drank in the saddle; and this was called
the stirrup or parting cup. In the cup offered Lanier was a rare cordial,
filled with "sweet herbs from all antiquity," and the name of the cordial
was Death:
Then, Time, let not a drop be spilt:
Hand me the cup whene'er thou wilt;
'T is thy rich stirrup cup to me;
I'll drink it down right smilingly.
In four stanzas of "Night and Day" he compresses the tragedy of
Othello, not the tragedy that Shakespeare wrote but the tragedy that
was in the Moor's soul when Desdemona was gone. In "Life and Song" he
sought to express the ideal of a poet, and the closing lines might well be
the measure of his own heroic life:
His song was only living aloud,
His work a singing with his hand.
In "How Love Looked for Hell" the lesson is hidden deeper; for the profound
yet simple meaning of the poem is that, search high or low, Love can never
find hell because he takes heaven with him wherever he goes. Another poem
of the same class, but longer and more involved, is "The Symphony." Here
Lanier faces one of the greatest problems of the age, the problem of
industrialism with its false standards and waste of human happiness, and
his answer is the same that Tennyson gave in his later poems; namely, that
the familiar love in human hearts can settle every social question when
left to its own unselfish way:
Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it,
Plainly the heart of a child might solve it.
Marshes of Glynn
The longer poems of Lanier are of uneven merit and are all more or less
fragmentary. The chief impression from reading the "Psalm of the West," for
example, is that it is the prelude to some greater work that was left
unfinished. More finely wrought and more typical of Lanier's mood and
method is "The Marshes of Glynn," his best-known work. It is a marvelous
poem, one of the most haunting in our language; yet it is like certain
symphonies in that it says nothing, being all feeling,--vague,
inexpressible feeling. Some readers find no meaning or satisfaction in it;
others hail it as a perfect interpretation of their own mood or emotion
when they stand speechless before the sunrise or the afterglow or a
landscape upon which the very spirit of beauty and peace is brooding.
The Quality of Lanier
In order to sympathize with Lanier, and so to
understand him, it is necessary to keep in mind that he was a musician
rather than a poet in our ordinary understanding of the term. In his verse
he used words, exactly as he used the tones of his flute, not so much to
express ideas as to call up certain emotions that find no voice save in
music. As he said, "Music takes up the thread that language drops," which
explains that beautiful but puzzling line which closes "The Symphony":
Music is Love in search of a word.
Music and Poetry
We have spoken of "The Symphony" as an answer to the problem of industrial
waste and sorrow, but it contains also Lanier's confession of faith;
namely, that social evils arise among men because of their lack of harmony;
and that spiritual harmony, the concord of souls which makes strife
impossible, may be attained through music. The same belief appears in
Tiger Lilies (a novel written by Lanier in his early days), in which
a certain character makes these professions:
"To make a home out of a household, given the raw
materials--to wit, wife, children, a friend or two and a house--two
other things are necessary. These are a good fire and good music.
And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year, I may
say music is the one essential."
"Late explorers say they have found some nations that have no God;
but I have not read of any that had no music." "Music means
harmony, harmony means love, love means--God!"
One may therefore summarize Lanier by saying that he was poet who used
verbal rhythm, as a musician uses harmonious chords, to play upon our
better feelings. His poems of nature give us no definite picture of the
external world but are filled with murmurings, tremblings, undertones,--all
the vague impressions which one receives when alone in the solitudes, as if
the world were alive but inarticulate:
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-witholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man that hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.
His poems of life have similar virtues and weaknesses: they are melodious;
they are nobly inspired; they appeal to our finest feelings; but they are
always vague in that they record no definite thought and speak no downright
message.
Lanier and Whittier
The criticism may be more clear if we compare Lanier with Whittier, a man
equally noble, who speaks a language that all men understand. The poems of
the two supplement each other, one reflecting the reality of life, the
other its mysterious dreams. In Whittier's poetry we look upon a landscape
and a people, and we say, "I have seen that rugged landscape with my own
eyes; I have eaten bread with those people, and have understood and loved
them." Then we read Lanier's poetry and say, "Yes, I have had those
feelings at times; but I do not speak of them to others because I cannot
tell what they mean to me." Both poets are good, and both fail of greatness
in poetry, Whittier because he has no exalted imagination, Lanier because
he lacks primitive simplicity and strength. One poet sings a song to cheer
the day's labor, the other makes a melody to accompany our twilight
reveries.
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