Sidney Lanier
[Sidney] Lanier is the only professional musician in the annals of American poetry to achieve real fame as a poet. From 1873 on, a substantial portion of his income depended upon his abilities as an orchestral flutist and as a soloist. He was a kind of musical phenomenon, for when he came to Baltimore, he lacked the professional training that most orchestral musicians had, and he could scarcely sight-read orchestral material when he was hired to play the first flute with the Peabody Orchestra.1 But he had a flawless technique and a beautiful tone, and in literally a matter of weeks he was sight-reading material with the best of them.2 He had the signal honor of being asked by Theodore Thomas to play with the New York Philharmonic, and he was fortunate to have Leopold Damrosch encourage him as a composer of flute music. Because we have no recordings of Lanier's playing, it is easy to forget that he achieved high rank as a musician in a matter of four years, having come virtually untrained among the virtuosi of the century. There can be no doubt of his talent for music, and it is hardly conjecture what his musical future might have been had he been born in the North or East where symphonic music was frequently heard.
He did extensive Shakespearean research, writing the first comprehensive essay on music of Shakespeare's day, tracing musical references in his works, and sounding out the current theories on rhyme as an indication of chronology in his verse and drama. In addition, he explored, as scientifically as he was able to, the physics and acoustics of music, a subject which had fascinated him since his college days when his ambition was to occupy a chair of the Physics and Metaphysics of Music at some college.
It was natural too that a poet interested in music should do a prosodic study based upon musical analogies, which would point up clearly the virtues of quantity in verse. Though Lanier's theories were challenged by Saintsbury, The Science of English Verse is still regarded as the best exposition of the quantity theory in English.3
This chapter is devoted chiefly to a study of the part that music played in influencing, improving, and changing the forms and the content of Lanier's verse. It is a study in poetic growth, for from the time that Lanier became fully aware of the possibilities of musical analogies in poetry, he began to take giant strides; and his century, fascinated by the two arts, hailed him as a great original poet. Though Lanier was endowed with a fine metrical sensitivity from the beginning, his was a search for a subject, a style, and a message. He was, at his death, no inconsiderable master of poetic technique.
By examining his musical life and musical theories, we may hope to account for a certain obscurity and experimentalism in his verse, and vitiate the charge that he wrote “sound” without sense.
Born in Macon, Ga., in 1842, Lanier, like the troubadours and the “flock of singing birds,” had an early acquaintanceship with music. He said once in a letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne: “I could play passably well on several instruments before I could write legibly; and since then the deepest of my life has been filled with music, which I have studied and cultivated far more than poetry.”4
He began his musical education at five, and played, as a young child, piano, flute, guitar, violin, and organ.5 His ability as a violinist was as marked as his flute virtuosity; his father forbade his continuing the study of the violin because of its effect upon him.6 While still a school-boy, he organized an orchestra among his friends and directed it, as he was later to do when he was serving in the Confederate Army. His whole family was musical, and his sister learned music at boarding school, after the fashion of the day. Lanier commented upon the fact that in the South there were pianos, organs, flutes, and sundry other instruments in abundance in private homes.7
He early began making flute arrangements of music he liked, and adding flute parts to music already transcribed for some other instrument.8 He tried his hand at writing music to Tennyson's “The Song of Love and Death” from Lancelot and Elaine and, from The Miller's Daughter, “Love that Hath Us in the Net,” which was published three years after his death. While in prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, he entertained his fellow-sufferers by playing upon the flute as gladly as he had in his college days at Oglethorpe where he serenaded the ladies of evenings. (It was while he was in prison that he became the friend of Father Tabb, the famous poet-priest.) His only published piece of music from this period is a ballad dedicated to a child, Ella Montgomery, for locating him on the prison-ship and securing his release. The words and music to “Little Ella” were published by Offutt and Company in 1868.
While he was stationed with the Confederate troops at Norfolk, it was his habit to read German poetry, and he attempted a translation of Wagner's Das Rheingold, which has never been published. When he lost his German glossary to the enemy in 1863, he wrote his father for editions of Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, and Tieck. It may well be expected that the young poet absorbed from these readings many of his ideas for a literary life that would embrace music. He had tried his hand already at translations of Heine, Goethe, and Schiller. After Shakespeare, it is evident that the chief literary influence upon his life was that of German romantic poetry and prose. His first novel, Tiger Lilies, reveals the impress of his reading of the Germans and Carlyle, from whom he seems to have borrowed many ideas on trade. It should not be forgotten that though he read German at first laboriously, he had stood at the head of his graduating class at Oglethorpe, and that his literary gifts were so marked at this point and the desire for expression so strong his talent could have led him in purely literary directions.9
Tiger Lilies, published in 1867, was a young man's work and is filled with far too many ideas to achieve any harmonious arrangement as a novel. These ideas, by and large, center about the meaning that music had in the welfare of society, and reveal the musical knowledge which Lanier was early rather proud of in his continually interpolated musical passages, written just for this purpose of display. Most of Lanier's ideas on the art of music were formulated by the time he wrote this book, and he betrays his nineteenth century origin in his belief that music was The Art of that century.
Lanier was forced to try his hand at many kinds of work and writing, since he had many talents and was well endowed both as a teacher and lecturer. The fact that he did a little preaching on the side is revealing of his interest in man's “larger life”—a religious quality evident in his prose and verse. Certain large ideas seem to have been of such great importance to him that he expended his life demonstrating their truths. Like Whitman, whom he later frowned upon for his “formlessness,” Lanier used as the leitmotifs in all his poetry and writing the ideas first expressed in Tiger Lilies: beauty, nature, love, music (“Music means harmony, harmony means love, and love means God”), and metaphysics. These ideas rush and sweep through this first novel, much as they do through Leaves of Grass. Garland Greever wrote of this tendency in Lanier's novel:
The German prose romance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is a baffling genre. It is not primarily story. Though it rhapsodizes endlessly about art (especially music and poetry), it seeks rather than shuns incoherence and digression. … All of this was congenial to Lanier.10
Lanier's uncertainty as to his career was natural in one of strong and differing talents. For a while after his discharge from the Confederate Army he worked at being a clerk in his grandfather's hotel, at teaching, and finally, pressed by debt, at law, as his father wished. On a business trip to New York in 1869, however, he heard all of the music that he could, including a performance of Halevy's The Tempest. He wrote his wife ecstatically of this performance:
And my heart has been so full. … As the fair, tender notes came, they opened … like flower-buds expanding into flowers under the sweet rain of the accompaniment: kind Heaven! My head fell on the seat in front, I was utterly weighed down with great loves and great ideas and divine in-flowings and devout out-flowings, and as each note grew and budded and opened, and became a bud again and died into a fresh birth in the next bud-note, I also lived those flower-tone lives, and grew and expanded and folded back and died and was born again, and partook of the unfathomable mysteries of flowers and tones.11
In 1870 Lanier was stricken with tuberculosis and for the rest of his life he was constantly in search of a better climate. He went at once to New York for treatment, and while there he heard Christine Nilsson, who had just arrived in America, and Theodore Thomas's orchestra. His excitement over the music he was hearing is evident in the letters to his wife. Returning to New York for further treatment in 1871, Lanier gave every evidence of a desire, perhaps then unknown to himself, to be a part of the musical life of America. He wrote of the orchestra:
… I went … and the baton tapped and waved, and I plunged into the sea, and lay and floated. Ah! the dear flutes and oboes and horns drifted me hither and thither, and the great violins and small violins swayed me upon waves, and over-flowed me with strong lavations, and sprinkled glistening foam in my face, and in among the clarinet as among waving water-lilies, with flexible stems I splashed my easy way, and so, ever lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate.12
Certainly his was a soul hungry for music, and his descriptions here of music in terms of nature are much like Whitman's, if more “aesthetic.”
Lanier made valiant efforts to recover his health and to engage in the law practice which he apparently loathed with more than ordinary hatred. His entire association with the business world and law was one of protest, though occasionally he vowed to make a good lawyer. But his health continued to fail, and by December of 1872, Lanier had determined to forsake law and make what efforts he could to restore his health.
From December 1872 to April 1873, Lanier pined in San Antonio, Texas, for the life on the Eastern coast, but his health was now so dangerously impaired that the Texas visit was thought necessary. Here he attended meetings of the Männerchor Society and began again to play the flute carefully, hoping to rebuild the power of his lungs. He played often for the musically interested in Texas. But 1873 was a decisive year. He determined to give up his profession entirely and came to Baltimore where the Peabody Orchestra was being formed. There he played for Asger Hamerik, pupil of von Bülow, protégé of Hector Berlioz, and conductor of the newly formed orchestra. Hamerik, who was impressed by Lanier's abilities, sent him down to New York with a letter to Theodore Thomas, and wrote of him later:
To him as a child in his cradle music was given; the heavenly gift to feel and express himself in tones. His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute, on the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty out into the world. … His playing appealed to the musically learned and the unlearned, for he would magnetize the listener. … I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute concerto of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody Symphony concert in 1878: his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. … He stood, the master, the genius. …13
Lanier played for Hamerik his own compositions for flute, among them “Field Larks and Blackbirds.” Hamerik declared this to be the “composition of an artist.”14 Though he played also for Theodore Thomas, nothing seems to have come in the way of a professional engagement, and so in December of 1873 he was hired as first flutist by the Peabody Orchestra, formed under Hamerik's direction, and he moved to Baltimore for the season. His father and brother helped him financially at this point, since as a professional musician his earnings were exceedingly meagre. It may be assumed that Lanier felt, as his family probably did, that to delay longer in following his obviously “aesthetic” interests in music and poetry was unwise. His life span seemed definitely to be limited, and the move to Baltimore offered a rare opportunity to develop his two talents.
Lanier embarked almost immediately upon musical composition, for his midge dance or “Danse des Moucherons” was written for flute and orchestra during the first months in which he served with the orchestra. There seems to have been no happier period in Lanier's life than this first contact with the world of music. Despite the fact that at first he did not even know how to follow the conductor's beats, he was soon proving himself in the world of professional music. His sight-reading ability improved virtually overnight, and his letters home describe the delight he took in playing chamber music. Though there were petty jealousies about his position, Lanier's relationship with the men who had given their whole lives to the study of music is remarkable for its sanity and calm. There can be no doubt of his really fine talent for music.
Lanier was also something of an inventor, experimenting with a long flute with which it would be possible to reach a low G. He used to enter one of the music shops to while away the time playing on the bass-flute; his playing called forth this comment from the proprietor, Badger:
Lanier is astonishing. … But you ought to hear him play the bass-flute. You would then say, “let me pass from the earth with the tones sounding in my ears.” If he could travel with a concert troup and play solos on the bass-flute, I would get orders for fifty in a month. …15
In Baltimore he played with several Männerchor orchestras to supplement his income, as well as with the orchestra of the Concordia Theatre, in churches, and in private homes. He played as many out-of-town engagements as he could fill.16
His reactions to music were always dramatically emotional. He speaks repeatedly of the pain great music brought him, of the tears pouring from his eyes, and once after performing for a society in Texas he wrote his wife:
My heart which was hurt greatly when I went into the music-room, came forth from the holy bath of concords greatly refreshed, strengthened, and quieted. …17
The spiritual significance of music for Lanier was very great. He saw in music a great symbol of man's immortal yearnings, and some of the best writings in his letters are those concerned with music. In describing one of his concert performances he wrote to his wife:
… I had not played three seconds before a profound silence reigned … seeing which, and dreaming wildly of thee and feeling somehow, in an eerie and elfish and half-uncanny mood—I flew off into all manner of trills, and … cadenza monstrosities, for a long time, but finally floated down into La Melancholie (which, on the violin, ran everybody crazy some weeks ago here at a concert) which melted itself forth with such eloquent lamenting that it almost brought my tears:—and, to make a long story short, when I allowed the last note to die, a simultaneous cry of pleasure broke forth from men and women that almost amounted to a shout,—and I stood and received the congratulations that thereupon came in, so wrought up by my own playing with thoughts of thee I cd. but smile mechanically, and make stereotyped returns to the pleasant sayings, what time my heart worked falteringly, like a mouth that is about to cry. …18
The strongly “aesthetic” bent in Lanier, which revealed itself in his sentimental references to flowers and stars, coupled with the kind of emotional responsiveness to music apparent in these last quoted lines, seems almost effeminate, and repelled many of his readers. It was, however, this extreme sensitivity to sound and music which gave to his poetry its peculiar and original cast. But the fact that the poet could play as well as he did and stimulated the response from his audiences that he did, was, in many ways, a deterrent to his career as a poet, for here was also a kind of fame.
Lanier's best poetry dates from the year 1874 when he had finished his first season with the orchestra. Though the next seven years revealed a poetic growth almost unparalleled in American verse, the quantity of this poetry is not great. While Leopold Damrosch was encouraging the Georgia musician to further his musical studies, the Northern presses hailed his first major poem, “Corn,” published in 1875. The success of “Corn” so stimulated Lanier's fancy that he set about immediately to write “The Symphony,” wherein all of the instruments of the orchestra sing themes of various social significance in American life. This poem excited much curiosity in the art world, appearing as it did when synaesthesia had prompted tone poems, symphonic poems, and a variety of impressionistic musical studies. The possibilities of attempting musical form in verse stirred the creative imagination, and the poem passed for better than it was. Actually it was but an experiment.
However, the result was that Lanier achieved a kind of fame as a poet, while Charlotte Cushman and Bayard Taylor interested themselves in his behalf. It was Taylor who secured for Lanier the very envied opportunity to write the cantata ode for the first Centennial Celebration. The Centennial Cantata was performed May 10, 1876, with a chorus of 800 mixed voices and Thomas's orchestra of 150 musicians. The program opened with Richard Wagner's commissioned work, the Centennial Inaugural March, and it contained also a hymn by John Greenleaf Whittier, written for the occasion, and set to music by John Knowles Paine. The commission for the cantata came to Lanier as a special boon, since it gave him an opportunity to test his theories on the relationship of verse to music. Dudley Buck, the Connecticut musician whose compositions for the poetry of Poe are outstanding, shared honors with Lanier. The two worked well together and collaborated thereafter; particularly was Buck sympathetic to Lanier's theory that the poem for a cantata should be broad and general and that since it was to be primarily sung, with orchestral background, the words of the poem should be selected carefully “with reference to such quality as they will elicit when sung.”
Lanier had been fully influenced by Wagner's writings on the relationship of music and poetry, and by the original poetry Wagner offered as libretti for his own operas. The growing emphasis on the orchestra in the nineteenth century, its perfect instrumental balance, and the ability of various choirs of instruments to express what had before been sung by the human voice, brought the orchestra to the fore, a fact which Lanier as a symphonic musician had recognized as well as had Wagner. Lanier was unfortunate in that his poem was published before the performance, without the music, and its vagueness unfavorably commented upon. It was felt that the poem alone had no meaning. Lanier was forced to defend it as a poem written for musical setting, in the newest sense. The performance justified his experiment. Poets like Francis Hopkinson in the eighteenth century, who were musicians as well and who were called upon to write cantatas, had adhered to the song-conception, but Lanier wrote with the symphony orchestra and the large chorus always in mind. Starke said of that occasion:
… neither Wagner's march nor the Whittier-Payne hymn was so acclaimed, as Lanier's and Buck's cantata. … The acclaim was not solely of Lanier's words nor of Buck's music, but of the music and words perfectly-wedded, and for this wedding Lanier was chiefly responsible.19
Daniel Coit Gilman, then president of Johns Hopkins University, said:
Lanier had triumphed. It was an opportunity of a life-time to test upon a grand scale his theory of verse. He had come out victorious.20
Gilman attempted at that point to arrange for Lanier a lectureship at Johns Hopkins on music and poetry, but was unsuccessful. But other success did come from the cantata. Theodore Thomas engaged him for the following season (1877) to play with his orchestra. Lippincott's Magazine accepted for publication “Psalm of the West” as its centennial feature for the July issue, paying three hundred dollars for the ode. They also purchased the essay “From Bacon to Beethoven.” Scribner's bought “The Orchestra of Today.”21
In 1877 Lanier was seriously ill and unable to fill either his position with the Thomas orchestra or the Peabody orchestra; but, settled in Tampa, Florida, he turned out some “nine or ten first-rate poems,” among them two to Beethoven on the semi-centennial of his death. He also wrote “A Dream of the Age to Richard Wagner,” wherein he pictured Wagner as the prophet of a new age when all work would be performed to strains of music. He returned to Baltimore “out of necessity” and played the following seasons, while his taste for literature and poetry increased. Though he wrote musical criticism for Baltimore papers and belonged to the music, not the literary society, he gave a course of “literary” lectures in a private home in the spring of 1878 to a group of ladies and gentlemen interested in Elizabethan literature. These were repeated successfully in successive years at Peabody Institute and eventually at Johns Hopkins where Gilman had finally (1879) succeeded in gaining him an appointment. Starke said that these lectures were based upon extensive research, during which time the poetic muse was all but silenced, except for the very fine “Sunrise” and “The Marshes of Glynn.”22
But Lanier was burning himself out. He wrote, during this period, four books for boys,23 numerous essays on Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Middle English authors, as well as unpublished textbooks on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the English sonneteers. Starke said these were not “produced merely as pot-boilers,” but grew out of a deep and permeating interest in our older English literature.24 In 1879 he wrote in eight weeks The Science of English Verse, a work in gestation for over two years. It was published the following year.
Lanier's death (1881) was exceedingly untimely, for his poetic ideas were in such a state of growth, and his final poems, “Sunrise” and “The Marshes of Glynn,” in every way so new and excellent, that they seemed to prophesy a period of poetic fulfillment that Lanier never really lived to achieve. He left but one volume of verse, published in 1876 when many of his best poems were still to be written. The growth in these last years, the steadily developing feeling for rhythm and sound, for treatment of idea, for scope and breadth of form indicates that Lanier's poetic life should have been longer. He did not leave any explanation for the type of writing he finally came to, nor were these later efforts even widely known. His fame has rested, unfortunately, upon such poetic curiosities as “The Symphony” and such lighter works as “Tampa Robin.”
At the time of his death Lanier was well regarded by his contemporaries as a talented poet, a capable musician, a successful lecturer and teacher, and something of an essayist. He wrote frequently for the Baltimore papers and was in demand in civic affairs concerned with the arts. Despite, however, his frantic efforts in many directions to devote his life to the arts, he never earned enough money even to support himself. His high moral earnestness marks him as a Victorian and this “moral tone” weighted down a great portion of poetry obviously lyrical. It was an anomaly that Lanier felt poetry too to be a criticism of life, and a kind of discordant quality marks these didactic poems because of his naturally rich and sensuous imagery and his glittering poetic techniques. Some of the admiration he excited in his day grew out of the battle he waged for art and morality under the most trying of circumstances.
He left a considerable number of musical compositions and pieces in preparation, the best of these being “Swamp Robins,” “Sacred Memories,” “Longing,” and “Wind Song.” His verses, in turn, have inspired the effort of a host of composers, whom Anderson lists in the Centennial Edition.
It is often difficult to determine, when one looks at Lanier's life, which was of greater importance to him personally—music or poetry. It should be noted that he wrote much of his verse early, and apparently always hoped for a literary life, as the publication of these early poems in lesser Southern journals would indicate. Also, his study of German and the publication of Tiger Lilies may be taken as some proof that the Baltimore musician was but earning money to pursue his literary life more fully. On the other hand, Lanier did write much of music from the beginning, and several of his statements to friends indicate that he himself thought he was more musician than poet. But he questioned early, in typical Victorian fashion, what service music might be in the social order.
I am more than all perplexed by this fact: that the prime inclination—that is, natural bent … of my nature is to music. … I have an extraordinary musical talent, and feel it within me plainly that I could rise as high as any composer. But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things, which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: “What is the province of music in the economy of the world?”25
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A large portion of Lanier's contributions to our understanding of the rhythms of poets and poetry has been substantiated by the passage of time; though some of his insights still have not been scientifically proved and wait upon our further experiments in the physics of sound, it can be claimed that Lanier was the first prosodist to make completely clear the fact that poetry is not a written art, but always a sound art.26 This realization Poe was conscious of when he wrote: “As yet written verse does not exist.”27 But Lanier was the first to make indubitably clear what that fact meant for poetry. Calvin S. Brown, the most recent critic and writer in the allied fields, drew heavily upon Lanier here.28
In some ways recognition of the fact that poetry is a sound art makes the quantity theory more understandable, for reading verse aloud slows down the tempo and exaggerates the values of the syllables to such an extent that even the “pure” accentualist must realize that syllables are being forced to occupy the time relationships that the poet had in mind. The mind's voice in reading poetry, as in reading music, is rapid and does not supply the proper values of either form of notation. It was for this reason that Poe always insisted upon an exaggeration of the time values in reading “The Raven,” or any of his verse, and this quality marks verse like Vachel Lindsay's “Congo,” where a correct reading demands that the strictly defined rhythms be made obvious.29
Lanier's understanding of music led him to differentiate between prosodical length (duration) and accent (stress or emphasis). In verse, until Lanier's time, length and accent or stress had been treated as though they were one and the same thing. Lanier's belief that they are different poses a new prosodic problem. If he is right—and it was for this failure to differentiate between the two that Lanier criticized Poe's prosodic markings—prosodists are faced with a need for another method of marking scansions. This new means for such markings Lanier found in the musical notation. He said Poe's essay was “permeated by a fundamental mistake—Namely, that the accent makes every syllable long. …”30 However, what is true of music may not be as true of verse. Even Lanier admits that the average ear is badly trained to detect any subtle differences in intensity (or, in verse, heavy and light stress) except those at the far ends of each scale.31 Is the stressed syllable in verse necessarily the long syllable, and if so, is that lengthening a matter of habit or is the more intense sound actually a lengthened sound? Questions such as these still abide in prosody and wait upon acoustical experiment. If the long syllable can be something other than the stressed syllable, and if the stressed syllable can be actually a short syllable in point of time, perhaps Lanier's rhythms would appear less varied than they do now. It may also be that an answer to this question would obviate many of the existent difficulties in prosodic terminology. It would account for lines in modern verse where the so-called “hovering accent” appears, quite apart from the length of the syllables. This is what Coleridge was groping toward when he eschewed foot forms and wrote on a principle of accent groupings, quite apart from long and short syllables. In music the repeated stress occurs on the first of every measure, though stress can be shifted anywhere in the unit of time (measure) at the will of the composer. It is the repetition of this stress at expected places that makes syncopation such a delight in music when a kind of counter rhythm is suddenly interpolated, occurring on the half or unstressed beat. In poetry this syncopation results from the sudden shift of foot form or pattern of stress after such a long period of regularity has occurred that the rhythms seem to have an established pattern. The best syncopation of verse results from a flow of, perhaps, iambs suddenly interrupted by a cross current of dactyls which move “three” against “two.”
Lanier also pointed out, long before others, that the chief distinction between music and verse lay in “the difference between the scale of tones used in music and the scale of tones used by the human speaking voice.”32 And he wrote at some length on the fact that whereas the musical scale is tempered and made up of arbitrarily selected tones, the speaking voice is limited in scale only by sounds the ear can clearly distinguish; and while the voice has a more limited range, it has also many tones of less than a half step.33
The question of primary and secondary rhythms, as Lanier understands them, has already been touched upon. He made a further contribution in pointing out that any two speech sounds bear some time relationship to each other such as 1 to 3, 1 to 4, etc. In prose this relationship may be so close as not to be apparent, but it is the chief characteristic of poetry that this ratio should be quite obvious, the rhythms thus forced into this relationship. Foot forms limit the ratio between sounds somewhat; modern verse is inclined to the view that subtlety of rhythmic pattern, such as occurs in music and prose, is more interesting. Thus the ratios are usually less apparent in modern verse than the older 1 to 2 form; and modern verse lines, for this reason, have a kind of unhampered flow down the page like prose, because of this more subtle rhythm. Eighteenth century forms, and even, for that matter, Poe's rhythms, point up the exact ratios more clearly than later verse.
Lanier's work with logical as well as rhythmic accent is provocative. His statement that rhythmical accent establishes the rhythm while logical accent “disestablishes” it is perspicuous. He was conscious of the “rest” in verse, which Poe termed, ambiguously, the “caesura,” and he too pointed out that it was this quality in verse which made the quantity theory so necessary. He was not, however, enlightening about the stanza, though his own verses came to fall into freer forms than most poets approved. However, he must have felt that his stanzas were “organic” because he deplored lack of form; and yet he failed to realize how closely he was paralleling Whitman, whom he had criticized for “formlessness.”
Many of Lanier's insights are worth repeating, though it is impossible to do so in any detail. He said, for instance, that written English words “constitute a system of notation for rhythm, precise as to the larger orders but susceptible of varying interpretations as to the primary rhythms to the extent of minute differences of utterance. …”34 Few poets, outside of Poe, ever made better use of the English language as a notational system, distributing syllables like notes.
He said that “the liberty of arranging at pleasure the individual time-relations (or primary rhythms) … is availed of by poets to make their rhythms melodious, varied, and characteristic.”35 Like Poe he illustrated his quantity thesis best by reference to the silences in poetry which are intrinsic to a line, not part of either a foot or accentual system and wholly dependent upon time. He illustrates this through Tennyson's “Break, break, break. …”36 He pointed out how often poets like to use the triplet in verse, just as the musician does, to stretch (elongate) a time unit to its utmost.37 He also pointed out that the good poet immediately makes known to his reader his metrical system by the first lines of verse and the syllabic distribution of the words. He warned poets particularly against the use of a single word as a rhythmic unit since the lines constructed from such units are thus open to several possible interpretations. It should be noted that Lanier did actually very little with logical accent, a field in which Bayard Q. Morgan has done much recent exploration. Lanier, however, at least recognized the power of logical accent, as he did of pronunciation accent.
Lanier's work with “three rhythm,” by which he means the iamb and the trochee, is based largely upon excerpts and readings from Old English verse, for which he established a strong temporal rhythm in a day when some scholars were still denying that Old English verse even had a distinguishable rhythm. His contribution here lay largely in the work with the unaccented syllables which too many nineteenth century scholars considered a matter of indifference. Since the quantity system is quite as much concerned with the values of unaccented as with accented rhythmic units, Lanier's work pioneered in Leonard's direction. One of the most surprising developments in this chapter is the obvious ease with which Old English falls into musical scansion.38 That much of Old English verse was a kind of chant or recitative is known, and its inherent musical properties make musical scansions most satisfactory. Anglo-Saxon rhythmic patterns are usually readily apparent from the opening words, and the parallels Lanier drew between this verse and that of Swinburne and Whitman are happy ones. Music like “Sumer is icumen in / Lhude sing Cucu” naturally adapts to musical scansion. One might take issue with scansions of Piers Plowman, wondering why the bar was not so arranged that the accented beat formed trochees rather than iambs, but so might one wonder at the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the “Knightes Tale,” as well as Hamlet's soliloquy; but musical scansion is perfect for Longfellow's verse, the “Fight at Finnesburg,” Tennyson, and, of course, Poe. Ballad rhythms, as in “Agincourt” and Coleridge's “Christabel,” take on a crystalline quality under notational scansions. And surely one of his finest contributions lay in the section on Shakespeare's use of the rhythmic accent when, in discussing his blank verse, Lanier wrote:
We can see him [Shakespeare] learning to think in verse … he finally made his whole technic a constitutional grace, so that his passion flowed with a hereditary pre-adaptation to rhythm.
… This method of working with a constant inward reference to the great average and sum of men, and with an absolute reliance upon their final perception, is the secret of that infinitely varied rhythm which we find plashing through all the later blank verse of Shakespeare. …
Perhaps every one has observed that particularly in Shakespeare's later plays he seems absolutely careless as to what kind of word the rhythmic accent may fall on. Sometimes it is on the article the, sometimes the preposition of, sometimes the conjunction and. …
This apparent carelessness is really perfect art. It is the consummate management of dramatic dialogue in blank verse, by which the wilder rhythmic patterns of ordinary current discourse are woven along through the regular strands of the orderly typic lines.39
At this point Lanier illustrates one of his most brilliant insights into Shakespearean blank verse, writing it first with musical notation for its underlying (typic, he calls it) rhythms, which the reader is at once in absolute disagreement with, and then noting rhythmically the actual reading of the lines according to meaning. By a comparison of the two he illustrates, with amazing clarity, that the typic form does underlie the actual, and that the variations from the typic are what most please us because the typic rhythms sound through the actual unconsciously.40
In this most prescient chapter, Lanier, unfortunately, since this is the fullest exposition of his ideas through application of notational values to familiar verse, fails to make clear that his musical scansions often are basic rhythmic scansions rather than reading patterns or secondary rhythms themselves. He does not sufficiently stress this fact, and it is not until one has reached nearly the end of that chapter and has waded through his re-appraisal of metrical tests to determine the chronology of Shakespeare's plays that the key or clue is dropped that makes his musical scansions, when they seem at fault, only the raw material from which the poet worked and possibly departed. And when the readings are happy it is because that poet was consciously adhering to or forcing a “typic” rhythm. Lanier, the musician, is often suggestive rather than explanatory, and though much of his material in these early chapters is done in too much detail, most of his ideas suffer from lack of development. That he must have realized this, after reading the first review, can be gathered from the fact that he set about instantly to revise the work—a revision hindered by his early death.
The succeeding chapters in section I, following the climax reached in chapter three on rhythm in English verse, are a vast emptiness in which Lanier does nothing whatsoever with the line, the stanza, and logical accent. Here his poor organization is most apparent, for he had already said originally in the first chapter much of what he had to say, and he did not wish to repeat himself, even by way of illustration. Then he had placed alliterative groupings with logical accent when they undeniably belonged to the section on “The Tunes of English Verse.” His final chapter in this section on rhythm is exceedingly weak; and it is difficult to see why a separate chapter had to be made of three or four pages for four rhythms in English, which are but dactyls and anapests and could have been illustrated along with three rhythms in a chapter on basic rhythmic patterns in English. It is obvious that the writer, in sketching the whole thing out hastily in eight weeks, did himself a terrible injustice.
By the time Lanier reached section II of his work he was exhausted, and it is true that this section was slighted by the poet.41 But haste is not the only reason that section II is not well written. Actually the whole field of speech tunes is just now being explored, and Lanier's genuine prophetic recognition that rhyme belongs in a discussion of speech tunes and not only in a discussion of rhythm is typical of the thought that did go into the book. He began with a most prescient discussion of speech tunes, pointing out “what delicate variations in meaning were effected by uttering the same words to a different tune,”42 and illustrating how much of the meaning of a given sentence or question is altered by the tones in which it is spoken, which have a pre-arranged and understood meaning. He reiterated that the range of the speaking voice was limited and employed variations of less than half steps; he even suggested a possible scale constructed on the basis of these smaller intervals for the average two octave voice. Further than this the poet does not go, though men like Bayard Q. Morgan are continuing research along these lines.43
The colors of speech, beginning with the section on rhyme, had a short and unhappy development, for Lanier threw out the pregnant suggestion that harmony and melody differed in verse, and then, rather than force himself into thinking through what he had begun, he did a kind of history of rhyme which is of little value to students today. He revealed a partiality for internal rhyme while cautioning the poet against too many rhymes too near each other in “tone color.” In his brief discussion of vowel-colors he applauded the careful and fairly wide distribution of vowel sounds in a line. He was wholly conscious of the effect of alliteration upon the rhyme scheme, and spoke of its purpose as that of varying the pattern. He was favorable to mild and hidden alliterative patterns rather than those which were “loud.” Again his conclusion is weak, and he seems to have ended the book at the point where hopes were highest that an ear trained as his was and an imaginative faculty fertile as his was, coupled with a rather astonishing breadth of knowledge, would lead far into the exploration of those mysteries of verse which, until his few chapters, had remained almost untouched.
It is easy to fall into the habit of saying that “the trouble with Lanier was. …” The trouble does not lie so much with Lanier as it does with the fact that art is long, and two arts twice as long. Had he lived much longer, he might have given us the final word prosodically, and then again he might not have. His book as we have it has many inaccuracies in it, and fails at many points. It is not always clear; it is poorly organized, and, at the most inauspicious moments, Lanier begins to wave the blue flower, which in his case is the rose, and quite confounds his logic with transcendental theories about the nature of rhythm in the universe, all of which date his work and his thinking. However, no one else in the English language on either side of the ocean had written anything nearly so comprehensive, so thoughtful and thought-provoking about verse in the year 1880, and even Saintsbury's work can not be compared, for it is an historical approach like that of the Renaissance prosodists and not a probing of what constitutes poetry.
This book was not a handbook for beginners nor was it actually by a beginner in the fullest sense of that term, for Lanier had written his “Physics of Music” for publication and almost had it in the press when he decided to amplify the material and make a book of it. It does not purport to teach how to write poetry, nor does it lay down rules for the writing of verse. What it actually is is an analysis of verse, laying bare those constituents that had so far defied analysis or treatment, such as the quantity element in modern English, the question of the relationship of typic and reading rhythms in verse, the matter of rhyme as both a rhythmic and “color” function in verse, and alliteration and syzygy.
Whole schools of prosodic theory were spurred by Lanier's little book. J. C. Pope, after years of working with Old English verse, came to the conclusion that a line was best scanned by musical notation. He concluded that if verse was rhythmic one should be able to beat time to it, and he spoke highly of his debt to Lanier.44 Baum lists the many contemporary critical opinions on the book, concluding that the prosodic consensus today is favorable to The Science of English Verse.45 Gay W. Allen wrote favorably of it46 and Bayard Q. Morgan is continuing research along lines suggested in Lanier's work on speech tunes. Evelyn H. Scholl, writing in PMLA, in 1948, on the conflicting theories of prosody, bore out the quantity theory in her study of Renaissance verse.47 Wilbur Schramm's recent experiments in rhyme indicate that Lanier was moving in the right direction,48 and the heavy dependence on Lanier of Calvin S. Brown's fine work proves how prophetic the book actually was.49 Compounded of naively stated truths and of startling bits of erudition, the book remains today the only outstanding prosodic work of a poet writing in his own field of an art he knew intimately. He had a finer background for writing than we can expect to find again.
In any discussion relating Lanier's verse to music, the element of paradox must at once be recognized. For though Lanier was a professional musician as well as poet, and thus might be expected to represent the ultimate virtues of musical-poetic productions, he must not be thought of as the successor to the symphonic conceptions of Whitman. For Whitman had so early an exposure to symphonic music of the best sort that the accounts Lanier leaves of hearing the symphony in New York in 1871-72 seem, by comparison, pathetic. And though Lanier was brought up in a musical family, so much of his early youth was given to war and so many of the following years were spent in the South during Reconstruction when the arts began a serious lag, that he may be said to have spent the formative years of a poet's life in a kind of musical drought.50 His early verses, for this reason, exhibit only those musical tendencies natural to a lyrical poet interested in music, and his was initially a song conception for verse, not a symphonic one. His interests in the beginning were in the poetic conceits and musical sounds of the syllables, this though he was nearly a quarter century younger than Whitman.
It is also significant that Lanier's location virtually segregated him from the mainstream of nineteenth century verse in America. Most of his poetic readings were in German and French literatures, and aside from a friendship with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who was similarly situated, and imitations of Poe, Coleridge, and Byron, the young poet could not be said to be widely read in modern verse. He did not even read Whitman's verse until 1878, when his own was largely written. Thus Lanier's growing awareness of musical forms for verse runs parallel, in many respects, to Whitman's own recognition of the symphony and its form. That Lanier moved into another later musical conception for verse, impressionism, comes almost too late in his life to be anything but provocative. It does indicate, however, how rapidly the poet transformed musical ideas and art concepts into poetry.
Lanier served a long apprenticeship to poetry, however, and from his earliest youth was writing his father for criticisms on his more serious poetic efforts. His father seems to have been quick to recognize the extravagances of the young poet, and Lanier realized early that his was to be, among other things, a pruning job. Before he even began the study of law in 1868, he had written over seventy poems, nearly half of all the poems he was ever to write. It is impossible here, and unnecessary, to treat in any detail any large portion of Lanier's verse, but in order to show the linguistic and poetic growth which the poet made away from his earliest completely aesthetic terminology to a kind of love for Anglo-Saxon phrasings, it will be necessary to look at some of these early poems. The influence of Chaucer upon the poet in 1872 was salutary, for he came to love the diction of our native tongue. And he wrote in 1873 to Peacock, when the influence of the symphony began its hold upon him: “… but one cannot forget Beethoven, and somehow all my inspirations came in these large and artless forms, in simple Saxon words, in unpretentious and purely intellectual conceptions. …”51
Lanier's poetic growth is one of the most exciting and promising in our language. From imitations of Poe and Coleridge, and later efforts imitative of Swinburne, Tennyson, Morris, and Browning, Lanier gradually evolved, by a series of experiments, and in distinct stages, his own style peculiarly related to his interest in music and his growing recognition of the relationship of the two arts. In 1864 the young Lanier was writing of his determination to see if he had the talent to make a poet of himself; ten years later, in 1875 with the publication of “Corn,” he received the answer, after a long period devoted to teaching, law, and music.52
The lyrical elements in Lanier's verse are strongly evident from the very beginning, and his first verse appears in Poe-like stanzas with already marked attention to rhythmic variation and subtle combinations of sound:
A lone wolf by a castle-ruin howled,
A moon between black drift-clouds scowled
With baleful leer—
Wind through age-eaten port holes moaned
And weirdly shrieked wild wailings, toned
Like cries of fear—(53)
The Gothic quality in this sixteen-year-old's verse is more imitative than the instinctive artistry with which his ear directed him into a smooth pattern where “wolf,” “with,” “wind,” “weirdly” and “wild wailings” bind the two stanzas together. Then the shift of o sounds from the initial position in the first stanza to the final position in the first lines of stanza two gives sound unity to the grouping. He apparently knew intuitively how to space sounds in a line, for the melody leans heavily upon o, e, i, and the alliterative l sounds. His fine innate rhythmic sense led him to write the fore-shortened third lines.
Three years later, however, the writer was trying his hand at his “three-fold” metaphors which result often in unpleasant conceits. Here the alliterations are exaggerated and the poem is deficient in taste.
Thou rippleless, dim lake, enspelled
By the basilisk eyes of stars, at night:
With thy lilies calm as sweet thoughts, upheld
On thy bosom's waveless chrysolite. …
Float the Unloved to the lilies, O Lake,
And cover the Loveless with lilies, Good Lake;
No flowers on land (in life!) had she:
Let her have flowers (in death!), in thee.(54)
This tendency toward a style that is an elaborate weaving of sounds began to characterize a good portion of Lanier's writing from this time on. Here the poet is exaggerating the l sounds without too much regard for the total effect upon the reader. The poem, in many ways, is in poorer taste than the first because of words like “rippleless” and “enspelled” which appear in one line, and phrases like “waveless chrysolite” which offer a plethora of “l” sounds. It is a mistake, however, to think the poet here is only carried away with the musical sounds of the liquids, or with questions of balance like “in life” and “in death,” etc. Actually, this poem is also heavily weighted by the poet's sentimental message, so like Thomas Hood's, which stultifies the flow of the lines, while his meaning, because of the welter of sounds, evades the reader as completely as possible. Poe's attempt at indefiniteness was a quite different matter. Lanier's is no attempt to imitate music, but rather an effort to be ultra profound, to “impact” into every word and phrase meaning that is in no wise clarified by the extreme music of the sounds he writes in. This “impacted” quality is in every way foreign, as an element in verse, to the truly lyrical, but it was Lanier's misfortune that he had both sound and sense in some of his verse beyond the limit of enjoyment.
Since Lanier was always conscious of music, almost any of his early poems have some connection with music. One of his first poems to receive recognition outside the South was “Life and Song.” Written in 1868, it was reprinted in Baltimore and New York periodicals, and it represents the second style in which Lanier wrote his verse: the clearer of the two, the less impacted, and the less concerned with melody within the line. It uses the clarinet as the symbol of Song:
If life were caught by a clarionet,
And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
Should thrill its joy and trill its fret
And utter its heart in every deed,
Then would this breathing clarionet
Type what the poet fain would be;
For none o' the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,
Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
Or utterly bodied forth his life,
Or out of Life and Song has wrought
The perfect one of man and wife;
Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
Might each express the other's all,
Careless if life or art were long
Since both were one, to stand or fall:
So that the wonder struck the crowd,
Who shouted it about the land:
His song was only living aloud,
His work a singing with his hand!(55)
The poem is chiefly characterized by a more judicious separation of alliterative sounds so that l, b, d, f, and s are scarcely prominent sounds, while t and th are rather apparent. It was natural that this poem should achieve some wider popularity since it was simple in form and rhythmic concept and maintained a unity of tone that he was not, at this time, always successful in maintaining.
More typical of the “aesthetic” poems from this period is “Betrayal,” which embodies much that was best in this style of writing, and much that was bad. A far more lyric poem than “Life and Song,” and one that in its colors and references immediately suggests Villon, the poem adds to its imitative qualities a certain artistic surety that is promising.
The sun has kissed the violet sea,
And burned the violet to a rose.
O Sea, O Sea, mightst thou but be
Mere violets still? Who knows? who knows?
Well hides the violet in the wood:
The dead leaf wrinkles her a hood,
And winter's ill is violet's good;
But the bold glory of the rose,
It quickly comes and quickly goes—
Red petals whirling in white snows,
Ah me!
The sun has burnt the rose-red sea:
The rose is turned to ashes gray.
O Sea, O Sea, mightst thou but be
The violet thou hast been to-day!
The sun is brave, the sun is bright,
The sun is lord and love and light;
But after him it cometh night.
Dim anguish of the lonesome dark!—
Once a girl's body, stiff and stark,
Was laid in a tomb without a mark,
Ah me!(56)
Here the rhymes have an interesting pattern, with a quatrain at the beginning and two sets of lines rhyming in threes. The lines themselves are rhythmically pleasing with occasional foot substitutions, and the imagery, while vivid, does not carry any intellectual burden. The only lines over which the reader really hesitates are the fourth lines in each stanza—those which change the color violet of the sea to the flower, violet, so that the whole first sequence seems a badly mixed metaphor. The sentimental touch at the close, the ever-recurrent death of young ladies, pleased Lanier as it had Poe and later many a Victorian. But young Lanier never seems to know quite what the significance of the death is, so that his poems are not made more effective by the reference. It has been pointed out that Lanier, who believed in a message for verse, really had very little to say in his early poetry.57
The two rhyme schemes most characteristic of Lanier are the alternate rhyming lines of the quatrain, usually employed in his simpler lyrics, and the three-line rhyming stanza, which seems to have been a favorite pattern of Whitman's too. This particular pattern was effective in that it made possible a repetition or a balanced phrasing with the third line usually directed toward the next unit of three lines, or else gave a kind of finish to the first two. In “Nirvana,” for instance, he employed this technique, usually with the third line acting in the nature of a revelation, while its patterning was already established as a familiar one:
Through seas of Dreams and seas of Phantasies,
Through seas of Solitudes and Vacancies,
And through myself, the deepest of the seas,
I strive to thee, Nirvana, etc.(58)
Another noticeable characteristic of Lanier's work, which he found troublesome at first but which toward the end of his life was becoming one of his most pleasing stylistic devices, was the conversational line. By this I mean that the poet sometimes departed from any ordinary poetic pattern and began to write a blank verse of marked sincerity and heightened expression. At first the employment of this non-poetic personal approach was stilted and spotty, since the poet employed the personal style in the most personal of matters and the poem reflected a kind of self-pity. Later, as his understanding grew of what was to be, for him, the most fortunate choice of subject matter—nature—the personal element took on the color of a prophetic voice, separated from the material, and yet perfectly conscious of judging it. The earliest employment of the personal blank verse line in Lanier can be seen in “June Dreams, in January.” Written as the direct outgrowth of the poet's sadness at his inability to earn his livelihood by writing, and immediately preceding the period devoted to the study of law—a profession taken up in dire necessity—Lanier exhibits his sentimental style in the introductory little poem which deals with June, flowers, night, winds, and night sounds. It is better in its actual imagery than it at first appears to be—like most of Lanier's work—and it is followed by almost perfect blank verse rhythms. The final section, not quoted here, completes the story, in which a friend, “Dick Painter,” comes in and carries off the poem to a critic who happily approves it; and so the final scene deals with the happiness of the poet. It is interesting that the little domestic scenes ensue as they do, because it indicates that Lanier, even though he failed at dialect writing, certainly had some talent for the narrative poems so popular in the gift annuals of the time. The poem opens with regular enough quatrains:
O tender darkness, when June-day hath ceased,
—Faint odor, of the crushed day-flower born,
—Dim, visible sigh out of the mournful East
That cannot see her lord again till morn:
And many leaves, broad-palmed towards the sky
To catch the sacred raining of star-light:
And pallid petals, fain, all fain to die,
Soul-stung by too keen passion of the night:
And short-breath'd winds, under yon gracious moon
Doing mild errands for mild violets,
Or carrying sighs from the red lips of June
What aimless way the odor-current sets:
And stars, ring'd glittering in whorls and bells,
Or bent along the sky in looped star-sprays,
Or vine-wound, with bright grapes in panicles,
Or bramble-tangled in a sweetest maze,
Or lying like young lilies in a lake
About the great white Lotus of the moon,
Or blown and drifted, as if winds should shake
Star-blossoms down from silver stems too soon, …
And long June night-sounds crooned among the leaves,
And whispered confidence of dark and green,
And murmurs in old moss about old eaves,
And tinklings floating over water-sheen!(59)
However, in fairness to Lanier it should be pointed out that even this little poem, compounded of sights, scents, and sounds, is superior in many respects to the ordinary verse of less talented writers. Quatrain one with its image of “tender darkness” as an “odor” “crushed” from the “day-flower” is a better than average sensuous image. That it lies next to another idea—that dark is the “visible sigh” of “mournful East” separated from the sun—does not, of course, help either image. The delineation of the light upon leaves in the next stanza is sure promise of the fine, almost superfine, nature detail that was to characterize the last and best of Lanier's verse. Here is the repetition of compound words like “star-light” and “soul-stung.” Two images again surfeit the line: the “sacred raining” of star-light upon broad palms, and the color of the leaves lying pallid under the “too keen passion of the night.” The third quatrain misses rather badly, but the next, with its imagery surely depending upon the sight of decorations of a Christmas tree, is quite successful, as is the re-shaped lilies-on-lakes material with the happy phrasing of the “great white lotus of the moon.” In these verses it should be noted that the poet introduces considerable variation within the line and that the words are many syllabled so that the rhythm is unmistakable; it should also be obvious that the poet has set up a springing, bounding line, caught at each end—at one by the rhymes, at the other by the introductory “ands” and “ors,” while the fullness of the line billows out between. The poet is obviously skillful, for he has no difficulty with either rhyme or rhythm. Like most of Lanier's early verse, and this belongs to his early period, it errs in having a too-muchness—always the sign of a youthful but important talent. The same ease is observable in the fine blank verse lines—fine that is, rhythmically, though the telling of the story here is also quite successful:
Then he that wrote, laid down his pen and sighed;
And straightway came old Scorn and Bitterness …
“I'll date this dream,” he said: “So: Given, these,
On this, the coldest night in all the year,
From this, the meanest garret in the world,
In this, the greatest city in the land,
To you, the richest folk this side of death,
By one, the hungriest poet under heaven,
—Writ while his candle sputtered in the gust,
And while his last, last ember died of cold,
And while the mortal ice i' the air made free
Of all his bones and bit and shrunk his heart …
—Read me,” he cried, and rose, and stamped his foot
Impatiently at Heaven, “read me this”
(Putting th' inquiry full in the face of God)
“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 …”
And, late, just when his heart leaned o'er
The very edge of breaking, fain to fall,
God sent him sleep. …(60)
The remarkable thing about this essentially unpoetic matter is that because of a certain well-placed repetitiveness and a wonderful ear for alliterative spacing, it remains poetry.
Lanier was one of the masters of the single line refrain, which he usually modified in successive strophes of the poem. “On Huntingdon's ‘Miranda’” is a good example of this sort of thing. However, aside from a keener awareness of rhythmic possibilities in verse and a noticeable ease in grouping rhythms in a line, Lanier does not exhibit until 1874 more of a tendency than other lyric poets to fuse music and verse.
By 1874 Lanier had had access to the superior cultural life of Baltimore with its newly founded conservatory of music and its new university, Johns Hopkins. He had been a professional symphonic musician for a season, and was already experimenting in the physics of sound with the apparatus available at Peabody. He had written more music in that year than he had written before, and there was a marked growth in the technical quality of the poems published in this period. “Corn,” written in 1874, is the most maturely conceived of any of Lanier's poems and exhibits all of the virtues and the vices that were to characterize his best verse.
“Corn” was inspired by a return to his native Georgia, whose war-scarred and deserted cotton lands seemed to him a symbol of all that had become wasted in the South. In the hope of restoring the productivity of the South by arousing interest in the planting of corn he wrote this poem, the most complex he had yet conceived. Its success grew directly out of its fine nature descriptions, the subtlety of the rhythms, and the message which the poet intended to convey. Again there is the surfeit of detail which may be likened to that of certain tapestries, each corner of which is elaborated, and whose intricacies are such that the eye at close range is wearied by an attempt to discern the fuller meaning in the weaving. Yet the curious and interested find in the poem a kind of finical perfection, a latter-day baroque quality which seems hardly indigenous either to the English tongue or to the period in which Lanier wrote. This quality in Lanier's verse, which differentiates it wholly from anything written before or after, so that he seemed to have struck off in the direction of an originality almost divorced from standard conceptions of verse, was fed upon springs too hidden for imitation and repels some readers while it fascinates others.
To talk of ordinary poetic considerations in the poems from 1874 on is to offer only a partial appraisal of Lanier's work, for though his rhymes had given patterns, though he used recognizable rhythms, and though all that can be said of the work of any lyrical poet can be said of Lanier, these are not the distinctive features of his work. One must initially recognize that here is an exercise of the intellect, an exercise of the fancy, of the understanding, of the ear, and of the memory. Here are threads from many different skeins; and in attempting to trace their rightful source, one is likely to become lost in a blur of color. There is almost a disfigurement of the original conception of the poem in the bloating which takes place in every portion. There is a probing of particulars that often reveals too much, so that some details stand starkly forth which seem to need muting. And the complexity of key ideas and their treatment take on a character—since they are worked out in such detail—like baroque music; the lines fairly spring from the page in a whirling concatenation of sound and sense.
This element in Lanier's work is so far removed from the poetic tradition—though when Lanier read Whitman late in life he was fascinated and instantly recognized the musical quality of his verse—it can only be said to have originated from a musical mind, a mind trained in subtleties beyond ordinary comprehension, a mind given to indefinitely defined general impressions with detailed treatment of portions of ideas, a mind full of the endless varieties which make up the sudden shifts of emotion we experience in music and of the repetitions which give pleasure. Lanier's ideas dip and merge after the fashion of music; the stanzas form and change. With “Corn” a certain complexity in his verse becomes a settled style which runs parallel to the simplicity and beauty of his song style. “Corn” is by no means the best example of this tendency toward the complex structure in Lanier: it is simply the first of the important poems in this genre.
The poem opens with a detailed comparison of the green woods and human characteristics like sight, touch, breath, and sound, a comparison that is inverted before the strophe ends, so that the human is described in terms of nature. This device of inversion is common musical treatment of an idea. It should be noted immediately that this is a kind of descriptive verse, depending upon light and shadow and the human senses for the totality of the impression.
To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
The beech dreams balm, as a dreamer hums a song;
Through that vague wafture, expirations strong
Throb from young hickories breathing deep and long
With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring
And ecstasy of burgeoning.
Now since the dew-plashed road of morn is dry,
Forth venture odors of more quality
And heavenlier giving. Like Jove's locks awry,
Long muscadines
Rich-wreathe the spacious foreheads of great pines,
And breathe ambrosial passion from their vines.
I pray with mosses, ferns and flowers shy
That hide like gentle nuns from human eye
To lift adoring perfumes to the sky.
I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green
Dying to silent hints of kisses keen
As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.
I start at fragmentary whispers, blown
From under-talks of leafy souls unknown,
Vague purports sweet, of inarticulate tone.(61)
The three-line rhyme pattern here, with its interpolated duple rhymes, the pacing of the rhythms as they move toward a rhyme ending, the balance in the lines themselves and between lines, depending upon compound words or participial or prepositional phrases, carry along the vivid and richly descriptive imagery. Lines such as appear in “Corn” will probably never achieve any widespread popularity because every part of them contains pockets of sustained interest and demands more attention from the reader than he is likely to give to lyrical verse. This strange hybrid creation of Lanier's, compounded of sound and sense, is at times so minutely realistic as to defy the term poetry, yet is always couched in the most musical sounds. The colors, hues, and scents that mingle in the verse are obviously aesthetic. The message is an anomaly. Yet the poem succeeds, despite a surfeit of rich imagery that calls up a comparison to young Keats. Here are “dew-plashed roads” and “muscadines” whose vines “rich-wreathe” the “foreheads” of great pines. Here is almost a naturalist's interest in nature that bespeaks not only his Southern origin but an original, personal viewpoint of nature. The next, more prosaic strophe, comes as a relief in its simplicity:
I wander to the zigzag cornered fence
Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense,
Contests with stolid vehemence
The march of culture, setting limb and thorn
As pikes against the army of the corn.
There, while I pause, my fieldward-faring eyes
Take harvest, where the stately corn-ranks rise,
Of inward dignities
And large benignities and insights wise,
Graces and modest majesties.
Thus, without theft, I reap another's field;
Thus, without tilth, I house a wondrous yield,
And heap my heart with quintuple crops concealed.(62)
There is nothing in these lines to repel the reader; as a matter of fact syzygy is subtle, the rhymes obvious, and the images sharpened and clear. The “zigzag fence” and “sassafras” present an interesting tonal combination, while the poet elevates with ease the thought from the ranks of corn to the soul's harvesting. The simplicity of these lines suggests the work that Frost has done in our own time with the same kinds of subjects.
Lanier begins to draw his moral from the tallest stalk of corn and compares the creative soul with the corn:
Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
By double increment, above, below;
Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
Teaching the yeoman selfless chivalry
That moves in gentle curves of courtesy;
Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense,
By every godlike sense
Transmuted from the four wild elements. …
As poets should,
Thou hast built up thy hardihood
With universal food,
Drawn in select proportion fair
From honest mould and vagabond air;
From darkness of the dreadful night,
And joyful light;
From antique ashes, whose departed flame
In thee has finer life and longer fame;
From wounds and balms,
From storms and calms,
From pots-herds and dry bones
And ruin-stones.
Into thy vigorous substance thou hast wrought
Whate'er the hand of Circumstance hath brought;
Yea, into cool solacing green hast spun
White radiance hot from out the sun.
So thou dost mutually leaven
Strength of earth with grace of heaven;
So thou dost marry new and old
Into a one of higher mould;
So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold,
The dark and bright
And many a heart-perplexing opposite,
And so,
Akin by blood to high and low,
Fitly thou playest out thy poet's part,
Richly expending thy much-bruiséd heart
In equal care to nourish lord in hall
Or beast in stall:
Thou took'st from all that thou might'st give to all.(63)
The constant creation of metaphor came only too often to the poet, who was immersing himself in Shakespeare studies, together with some occasional affectations of the Elizabethans, their vivid colors, and their multi-voiced music. The last strophe of “Corn” contains these initial lines addressed to the over-worked land, which lead to a powerful conclusion.
Old hill! old hill! thou gashed and hairy Lear
Whom the divine Cordelia of the year,
E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer. …(64)
“Corn” was certainly one of the best poems of 1875 (the year it was published). Not only did the poet handle his themes with greater ease than before, but he began to find a style which, though ornate, carried important ideas and many memorable images.
The change in stanza form which dates from “Corn” must be ascribed to Lanier's interest in music, for before this poem, his stanzas have recognizable metrical groupings. With “Corn,” however, the poet's stanzas become markedly “organic.” Actually here they represent different views of the subject: first the descriptive, then the personal ones, and finally those which deal with various phases of the comparison of the “Corn-captain” with the poet. Though Lanier continued also to write quatrains and other verse forms, after this point his stanzas achieve greater length and no longer are metrical in grouping, for, as often as not, any one stanza may have any number of metrical shifts in it.
The musician's knowledge, which Lanier wisely did not push too fully in poetry, can be seen in poems like “In Absence.” Here the nearness of the poet again to his Renaissance models exhibits itself in his preoccupation with love, the physical presence of love, and with God, who now plays a very important role in the life of Lanier, who knows that his time is measured. And though Lanier's excessive love for this life in all its forms of nature, humanity, and art remains unchanged, there appears persistently in the poetry from 1874 on an awareness of God as something quite apart from music—which he once felt was a quite adequate substitute. Here the poet writes of his wife:
I
The storm that snapped our fate's one ship in twain
Hath blown my half o' the wreck from thine apart.
O Love! O Love! across the gray-waved main
To thee-ward strain my eyes, my arms, my heart.
I ask my God if e'en in His sweet place,
Where, by one waving of a wistful wing,
My soul could straightway tremble face to face
With thee, with thee, across the stellar ring—
Yea, where thine absence I could ne'er bewail
Longer than lasts the little blank of bliss
When lips draw back, with recent pressure pale,
To round and redden for another kiss—
Would not my lonesome heart still sigh for thee
What time the drear kiss-intervals must be?
II
So do the mottled formulas of Sense
Glide snakewise through our dreams of Aftertime;
So errors breed in reeds and grasses dense
That bank our singing rivulets of rhyme.
By Sense rule Space and Time; but in God's Land
Their intervals are not, save such as lie
Betwixt successive tones in concords bland
Whose loving distance makes the harmony.
Ah, there shall never come 'twixt me and thee
Gross dissonances of the mile, the year;
But in the multichords of ecstasy
Our souls shall mingle, yet be featured clear,
And absence, wrought to intervals divine,
Shall part, yet link, thy nature's tone and mine.(65)
This second strophe is the first actual sustained use Lanier made of musical metaphor. Here music serves as an illustration of his belief that in Heaven there is no separation from the loved one. The figure begins with a reference to the musical staff where “by Sense” we rule the time and the distance or space between notes. Lanier points out that no such staff appears in Heaven where intervals are not measured unless they be in “harmony” and where no dissonances of any kind separate note from note and love from love. In this divine land souls will exist like notes in harmony, each a part of a common chord and yet remain separate “featured clear” and individual elements in the perfect melody. And absence—or separation—will link the chords as a result of the just intervals which make for greater harmony.
Comparisons like these in Lanier's verse are well conceived and carried through. It is rarely, indeed, in his mature verse, that Lanier ever fails to sustain a figure, and yet it is, in some senses, to his disadvantage that as a poet he possessed either more erudition or, in some cases, simply more scientific and aesthetic interest in the subjects upon which his figures are based than readers generally care about. Lanier suffers from what so great a poet as Shakespeare once suffered: charges of irregularity, obscurity, and complexity. Each gradually began to find his audience limited, and in our time, unless some further evaluation of Lanier's work is attempted, his reputation will probably suffer a complete eclipse, for Lanier seems apart from the main stream of contemporary writing, despite the modernity of his rhythmic patterns. Like Bach, to draw another eminent comparison, Lanier composed with something of an academician's quality in his early work, and with an appeal to the intellect and the abstract which immediately limits his audience. However, he also treated contemporary questions with seriousness in his verse—a treatment rendered almost anomalous by his obviously lyrical bent.
Lanier's best verse moves toward two large stylistic groupings: the complex, impressionistic treatment of nature, and the simpler, beautiful song structures. The first came to have all the heightened emotional quality of the baroque; the second the simple dignity of the classical song.
It was, of course, inevitable that a man who was playing symphonic music every day, and attempting the composition of flute music, should eventually come to grips with the idea of writing a symphony in verse. It should be noted, however, that despite Lanier's recent acquaintance with the symphony, this was never a familiar poetic medium for him, and that he excelled at verse “pieces” rather than the lengthy profound symphony. He does not even mention such a relationship of forms in The Science of English Verse, and though, had he lived, he might have returned to and mastered the style of the symphony, he had abandoned the attempt in his last efforts.
It is evident though, for a while, that the symphony seemed to Lanier to open up new possibilities for verse. He was a-tremble at these possibilities and wrote to Peacock that writing “The Symphony” had seized him like a “James river ague,”
And I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since. I call it “The Symphony”: I personify each instrument in the orchestra and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished: and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit.66
The success of “The Symphony” rests on its rhythmic superiority and on its originality and experimental nature.67 In his letters to his wife, written during the frequent separations made necessary by the travels for his health and his trips as a musician, Lanier had written for her virtually programme notes of the music that he played; in short, he readily transcribed the feeling of the music into words. “The Symphony,” however, is less successful as a poem than it might have been had he developed his ideas here much as he had in the letters, as, for instance, we see Whitman doing where an aria or a symphony is only the structure on which that poet improvised. Lanier was eminently suited to do the same thing. Instead, he turned, in “The Symphony,” to the mechanical and less successful, if more obvious, experimental device of announcing each instrument in the orchestra and letting it sing a certain definite theme. Now this simply cannot be done successfully, for the announcement of the instrument automatically cuts in upon the introspection of the symphony with something that is no part of it; and Lanier's experiment must always be regarded as something far beneath what he was capable of. However, he was the first American poet to move consciously into these pastures, and it is as an experiment that his poem must be considered. It is unfortunate that far too many critics, intrigued by the possibilities of new poetic form and the freshness of this approach, have taken “The Symphony” as an example of Lanier's best work. They have written well of it, better probably than it deserves, for Lanier moved a long distance from this effort in two years. One critic said:
The most concise definition of art is unity in variety. Surely “The Symphony” admirably fulfils that definition. There is a great variety in the subject matter: a severe condemnation of trade with a plea for the poor, by the violin; the beauties of nature, sung by the flute; a searching denunciation of man's inhumanity to woman, by the clarionet; an offer of knightly service to women by the horn; a plea for innocence in life by the hautboys; a final paean of victory for love by the bassoons. All this variety of subject is given with the varying effects of the different instruments, now fast in short, snappy lines, now slow, stately, sonorous in long full lines, now in the depths of despair and misery, now on the heights of faith and love. The thread of unity in it all is the common attack on Trade and the plea for heart and love in life. It is by no means perfect in execution, and fails in many points in diction and in rhythm, but as a whole it is a wonderful poem in the greatness of its idea and the adequacy and fitness with which it is carried out, and the wonderful harmony that it contains, to say nothing of individual lines of striking beauty in thought and melody. It is furthermore very significant in its suggestion as to the possibilities of poetry in the future.68
The last line of this critique is the most significant, for Lanier's verse has made possible the finer work of Conrad Aiken with the symphony, and surely those efforts of John Gould Fletcher in the same direction.
“The Symphony” is extremely uneven in quality and cannot in any way be compared with the larger design by which Whitman shaped his Leaves of Grass.69 Lanier's effort is a minor poem, not approximating the symphony in either length or style, except for some rather obvious overtures in that direction. However, his was a pioneering work, and he had the vision of a symphonic poem, if not the fulfillment of it. His attempts to create, in verse, themes for each instrument are—aside from the flute theme—such mechanical efforts that they are almost laughable. The creaking of the machinery is evident throughout the poem, and Lanier realized how bad the effort was almost immediately. However, he did succeed in illustrating in verse “bridge” passages in music, and the flute's “song” is memorable. Of the passage which illustrates the tone of the flute in the orchestra what criticism can be offered? Nature, of which the flute sings, is beautifully described:
But presently
A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
Upon the bosom of that harmony,
And sailed and sailed incessantly,
As if a petal from a wild-rose blown
Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone …
From the warm concave of that fluted note
Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float,
As if a rose might somehow be a throat:
“When Nature from her far-off glen
Flutes her soft messages to men,
The flute can say them o'er again;
Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone,
Breathes through life's strident polyphone
The flute-voice in the world of tone.
Sweet friends,
Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends.
For I, e'en I,
As here I lie,
A petal on a harmony,
Demand of Science whence and why
Man's tender pain, man's inward cry,
When he doth gaze on earth and sky?
I am not overbold:
I hold
Full powers from Nature manifold.
I speak for each no-tongued tree
That, spring by spring, doth nobler be,
And dumbly and most wistfully
His mighty, prayerful arms outspreads
Above men's oft unheeding heads,
And his big blessing downward sheds.
I speak for all-shaped blooms and leaves …
Grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves;
Broad-fronted ferns and keen-leaved canes,
And briery mazes bounding lanes,
And marsh-plants, thirsty-cupped for rains,
And milky stems and sugary veins …
All shynesses of film-winged things
That fly from tree-trunks and bark-rings; …
All limpid honeys that do lie
At stamen bases, nor deny
The humming-birds' fine roguery,
Bee-thighs, nor any butterfly;
All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiralings,
Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings;
Each dial-marked leaf and flower-bell
Wherewith in every lonesome dell
Time to himself his hours doth tell;
All tree-sounds, rustlings of pine cones,
Wind-sighings, doves' melodious moans …
Yea, all fair forms, and sounds, and lights,
And warmths, and mysteries, and mights,
Of Nature's utmost depths and heights,
—These doth my timid tongue present,
Their mouthpiece and leal instrument. …(70)
The interludes, or the “bridge” passages that occur in the music as Lanier has conceived it, are fortunate. He wrote passages like these (the first marks the throbbing undertone the orchestra sets up for the flute melody):
And then, as when from words that seem but rude
We pass to silent pain that sits abroad
Back in our heart's great dark and solitude,
So sank the strings to gentle throbbing
Of long chords change-marked with sobbing—
Motherly sobbing, not distinctlier heard
Than half-wing openings of the sleeping bird,
Some dream of danger to her young hath stirred.(71)
and the different pacing to introduce the clarinet:
Thereto a thrilling calm succeeds,
Till presently the silence breeds
A little breeze among the reeds
That seems to blow by sea-marsh weeds. …(72)
But the poorness of the concept that has each instrument sing of social problems can best be seen if the reader thinks of the nature of the symphony, what its appeal is, and how, like the long passage quoted, the mind may dream of elements in nature. But it is difficult to imagine the human mind busying itself with such sentiment as makes up a portion of “The Symphony.” Passages which illustrate the voices beside the flute are dialogues, which Lanier probably hoped would take care of the difficulty he encountered in attempting to make many voices sound together as they actually do in a symphony. But these are not the introspective dialogues, the conversations between instruments that one might expect. They lack the sweep and meaning found in Whitman's work. Here, instead, the instruments sing exactly worded and limited themes, such as trade, the protection of womanhood, etc., themes which are noble enough but far too exact for musical parallels. Note here how the “Lady Clarionet” begins her song, and her song doesn't improve later:
“O Trade! O Trade!” the Lady said,
“I too will wish thee utterly dead
If all thy heart is in thy head. …”(73)
.....There thrust the bold straight forward 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 God shall right thy grievous wrong. …(74)
The poem is replete with such “pathetic fallacies,” and it is Lanier's misfortune that, because this early experiment in musico-poetic structure piqued the curiosities of many people, it has been more often found in anthologies and thus has had wider fame than it deserves. Unfortunately, the poem is often regarded as Lanier's best work since it fits in with what is known of the dual interests of his life. That he never regarded it as such is evident from his early abandonment of the purely symphonic structure as unsuited to his style. But later poems give evidence that he realized how fully he had failed here, for never again does he write like this in terms of music:
And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
And ever Love hears the women's sighing,
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.”(75)
This sentimental approach which makes “The Symphony” so uneven a poem, and which obviously would repel many who might otherwise have admired his experiment, is offset in the poem by occasional successful figures of speech, one of which, near the close of “The Symphony,” is based upon music:
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,
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.(76)
Here we have a successful reference to life, as a sea-fugue, written horizontally on music paper, which only Love can make melody of since the flux, “the dissolving score” of life, makes it a record of errors, blottings, and welter.
The real contribution of “The Symphony” lies in Lanier's effort to follow the form of the symphony with its bridge passages. The title, “The Symphony,” appearing widely as it did in 1875, undoubtedly led other poets to make the more recent efforts in the direction of this form. Since music has rarely been divorced from poetry, it was natural that in the nineteenth century the form of the symphony should inspire imitation. Certainly composers were already doing tone poems. Lanier was the first poet to title his poem a symphony, though he actually did little work with the symphony as a form, and borrowed eventually only its breadth and sweep. From 1875 on, his poems take on considerably greater length, unless they are song poems. “The Symphony,” however, brought Lanier considerable notice and the friendships of Charlotte Cushman and Bayard Taylor, the latter then a major literary figure. Taylor was impressed by Lanier's combinations of talents, and exerted his influence to see that the offer to write the Centennial cantata for the Centennial celebration came to the one American skilled in both arts. And on the merits of “Corn” and “The Symphony” the offer was made to him.
Lanier's “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia” marks the high tide of his obvious musico-poetic interest, and all of the experimentation that went into it moved in the direction of freer forms for poetry.77
“The Centennial Meditation of Columbia” made Lanier's name famous. It also acquainted him fully, for the first time, with the musico-dramatic principles of Richard Wagner and the free forms he evolved as libretti for his operas, for Lanier was writing his first “libretto.” The influence of Wagner is apparent in the poem.78 It is a short poem for the amount of thought, care, and heartbreak that went into it. It wasn't written to be published separately, and is not a good “occasional” poem. Its concept was musical from start to finish. Invited to write the verses for the music of Dudley Buck, New York composer, to be performed by Theodore Thomas's chorus and orchestra for the Fourth of July Centennial Celebration, and included among such already famous names as Whittier, Taylor, Lowell, and Wagner (who was commissioned to write an overture for the occasion), Lanier was selected to do the cantata because of his familiarity with both music and poetry.79 There was much excitement among the newspaper critics over the first Centennial celebration and the forthcoming poem, and it was published in advance of its performance with near-disastrous results. As a poem, it was too diffuse. As a poem for music, it was overwhelmingly successful. Lanier wrote Peacock about the first draft of it:
I've written the enclosed. Necessarily I had to think out the musical conceptions as well as the poem, and I have briefly indicated these along the margin of each movement. I have tried to make the whole as simple, and as candid as a melody of Beethoven's. At the same time expressing them in such a way as could not be offensive to any modern soul. I particularly hope you'll like the Angel's Song, where I have endeavored to convey, in one line each, the philosophies of Art, of Science, of Power, of Government, of Faith, and of Social Life. Of course I shall not expect that this will instantly appeal to tastes peppered and salted by Swinburne and that ilk; but one cannot forget Beethoven. … I adopted the trochees of the first movement because they compel a measured, sober, and meditative movement of the mind; and because too they are not the genius of our language. When the trochees cease and the land emerges as a distinct unity, then I fall into our native iambics. …80
Lanier continued, pointing out that “the words of the poem ought to be selected carefully with reference to such quality of tone as they will elicit when sung.” He was not interested in writing a poem to be read, but writing one that would fit the orchestra of one hundred and fifty and the chorus of eight hundred singers. Lanier felt, quite rightly, that “only general conceptions” were “capable of being rendered by orchestral music,” and that “the subordinate related ideas must be sketched in gigantic figures” contrasting with each other in “broad outlines of tone color.”
Knowing this, he composed in terms of sound rather than idea, in movements rather than in words or even lines; and he wrote his text not with the reader but the musical composer in mind.81
Dudley Buck was pleased with the poem he had to set to music, and he cautioned Lanier against undue anger at critics who understood none of the complex ideas that had led to the creation of the poem. He asked for many more Lanier poems to set to music. That Lanier never republished the poem does not mean he felt it was a failure; only that it would not be understood if merely read.
During the writing of the poem Lanier maintained constant correspondence with Bayard Taylor, who originally was to write the “Hymn” for that occasion. One of Lanier's first letters about his other intentions in the poem stated that it “afforded room to give the musical composer an opportunity to employ the prodigious tone contrasts of sober reflection, the sea, lamentation, a battle, warning, and magnificent yet sober and manly triumph and welcome …, that it [the poem] ought to be, not rhymed philosophy, but a genuine song, and lyric outburst. …82
Bayard Taylor, perhaps because he understood the pioneering effort of Lanier, liked the idea from the beginning and praised the poem for its “originality and lyric fire.” Lanier was delighted and replied:
… I'm particularly charmed to find that you don't think the poem too original. I tried hard to think—in a kind of average and miscellaneousness. …
You see, I had to compose for the musician as well as the country; and had to cast the poem into such a form as would at once show well in music (where contrast of movement between each adjacent part, in broad bands of color, was, from the nature of the art, a controlling consideration). … I wished, indeed, to make it as large and as simple as a Symphony of Beethoven's. If it does not come up to this, I've failed. …83
But Taylor was not pleased with the first version in its complete form; so on January 15, 1876, Lanier wrote Taylor again:
… hoping that you will let me know if it seems to you entirely large, simple and melodious. … I have had constantly in mind those immortal melodies of Beethoven, in which, with little more than the chords of tonic and dominant, he has presented such firm, majestic ideas. … Of course, with the general world … I do not expect to obtain the least recognition of the combination of child-like candors and colossal philosophies which I have endeavored here to put in words: but I do wish to know whether to you the poem, as you now see it, comes near this ideal. I desire the poem to be perfect.84
Some indication of the care that went into this short poem of sixty lines is illustrated by Lanier's careful adaptation of metre to various meanings of the poem:
I put the Farewell, dear England, into the Mayflower strophe, because Mather relates that the people on the vessel actually stood up and cried out these words as they were departing. I also rewrote the stanza you did not like: and then inserted a whisper chorus, (of the Huguenot and Puritan, in dactyllic measure) to prepare by its straining pianissimo, for the outburst of jubilation. …85
Taylor responded to this by saying it was “in every way better than the first draft” and was what it “purports to be,—a cantata, not an ode—with the musical character inherent in its structure.”
The cantata ode tells really very little about the history of America, aside from the original colonists' arrival and the hardships endured. This is somewhat unexpected since the poem might have dealt with the formation of the Union or the Revolutionary War or any other phase of American life. However, the poet chose those subjects most powerfully suited to musical accompaniment, and when it is recalled that the cantata was to last about twenty minutes, and in its final form had about eight divisions in it for the composer to illustrate, it can be immediately seen that it is excellent for musical setting. The introduction is written in large generalities suited to music of the graver sort; the first chorus has behind it the weltering sound that the symphony so well achieves. The next division is more specifically choral, depending upon the quality of the human voice, weeping, wailing, and prophesying a kind of disaster. Then all of the voices sound from the forces that attempt to thwart the great dream, coming in a minor key, followed by full symphony and chorus to represent the various trials, war, terror, and evils in various shapes. All these sweep to a mighty climax: “No, Thou shalt not be!” This commands silence, and then “Hark,” the forces form to fight for survival and swell finally to a “jubilant chorus” which flowers into the Angel's song warning America that only so long as Art is used for a good end, in the name of love; that only so long as Science is so dedicated; that only so long as the power of America “harms no Dove”; that only so long as law is respected among men will America maintain her greatness and her leadership. This was Lanier's message to America, and he was to say much of the same thing in his “Psalm of the West.” One look at the poem titled “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia” will convince the reader that it should not have been published without the music. It is more a libretto than a poem.
“A CANTATA”
Musical Annotations, Full Chorus: sober, majestic progression of chords.
From this hundred-terraced height,
Sight more large with nobler light
Ranges down yon towering years:
Humbler smiles and lordlier tears
Shine and fall, shine and fall,
While old voices rise and call
Yonder where the to-and-fro
Weltering of my Long-Ago(86)
Moves about the moveless base
Far below my resting-place.
Chorus: the sea and the winds mingling their voices with human signs.
Mayflower, Mayflower, slowly hither flying,
Trembling westward o'er yon balking sea,
Hearts within Farewell dear England sighing,
Winds without But Dear in vain replying,
Gray-lipp'd waves about thee shouted, crying
No! It shall not be!
Quartette: a meagre and despairing minor.
Jamestown, out of thee—
Plymouth, thee—thee, Albany—
Winter cries, Ye freeze: away!
Fever cries, Ye Burn; away!
Hunger cries, Ye starve: away!
Full chorus: return of the MOTIVE of the second movement, but worked up with greater fury, to the climax of the shout at the last line.
Vengeance cries, Your graves shall stay!
Then old Shapes and Masks of Things,
Framed like Faiths or clothed like Kings—
Ghosts of Goods once fleshed and fair,
Grown foul Bads in alien air—
War, and his most noisy lords,
Tongued with lithe and poisoned swords—
Error, Terror, Rage, and Crime,
All in a windy night of time
Cried to me from land and sea,
No! Thou shalt not be!
Hark!
A rapid and intense whisper—chorus.
Huguenots whispering yea in the dark,
Puritans answering yea in the dark!
Yea, like an arrow shot true to his mark
Darts through the tyrannous heart of Denial.
Patience and Labor and solemn-souled Trial,
Foiled, still beginning,
Soiled, but not sinning,
Toil through the stertorous death of the Night,
Toil when wild brother-wars now-dark the Light,
Toil, and forgive, and kiss o'er, and replight.
Chorus of jubilation, until the appeal of the last two lines introduces a tone of doubt; it then sinks to pianissimo.
Now Praise to God's oft-granted grace,
Now Praise to Man's undaunted face,
Despite the land, despite the sea,
I was: I am: and I shall be—
How long, Good Angel, O how long?
Sing me from Heaven a man's own song!
Basso Solo: the good Angel replies:
“Long as thine Art shall love true love,
Long as thy Science truth shall know,
Long as thine Eagle harms no Dove,
Long as thy Law by law shall grow,
Long as thy God is God above,
Thy brother every man below,
So long, dear Land of all my love,
Thy name shall shine, thy fame shall glow!”
Full chorus: jubilation and welcome.
O Music, from this height of time my Word unfold,
In thy large signals all men's hearts Man's Heart behold:
Mid-heaven unroll thy chords as friendly flags unfurled,
And wave the world's best lover's welcome to the world.(87)
The printing of this poem six weeks before it was performed as a cantata subjected Lanier to much unjust criticism. He thought of replying to one of the Tribune critics, saying that many people would otherwise come to its final perusal with the “prepossession that the author of it was stupidly ignorant of the first principles which should guide a writer of text for music. This prepossession is a wrong on the public.”88 It was reasonable that he should be offended by such comments as “Walt Whitman with the jim-jams,” “Jabberwocky in its sententious Gravity,” and a “communication from the spirit of Nat Lee, rendered through a Bedlamite medium.”89 He wanted to print his defense. Writing Taylor, he defended the poem as only sixty lines long, containing the broad outlines of the past, present, and future of the country. He said further that rhythms were chosen for their descriptive characters:
… the four trochaic feet of the opening strophe measure off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe swings and yaws like a ship, the next I made outré and bizarre and bony simply by the device of interposing the line of two and a half trochees amongst the four trochee lines; the swift action of the Huguenot strophe of course required dactyls: and having thus kept the first part of the poem (which describes the time before we were a real nation) in metres which are as it were exotic to our tongue, I now fall into the iambic metre—which is the genius of English words—as soon as the Nation becomes secure and firm.90
Lanier also mentioned attempting to produce in the Jamestown stanza the ghostly effects of the bassoon “by the use of the syllable ee sung by a chorus.” He hoped in the future that whenever the papers carried the complete poem without printing at least the “piano score,” his explanation of the poem might appear with it.91
Dudley Buck attempted to assuage Lanier's despair. He asked Lanier if there were “any little bits” lying around which he could set to music, and pointed out to Lanier that the more intelligent the reader of the poem was, the more he appreciated it. Shortly after the performance Theodore Thomas made his offer to Lanier to join the New York Philharmonic Society as additional flutist. Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, wrote most favorably of the poem after passing through a period of some doubt as to its meaning:
At length came the cantata. From the overture to the closing cadences it held the attention of the vast throng of listeners, and when it was concluded loud applause rung through the air. A noble conception had been nobly rendered. Words and music, voices and instruments, produced an impression as remarkable as the rendering of the Hallelujah Chorus in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Lanier had triumphed.92
The actual performance of the cantata marked Lanier for success. It meant a lectureship at Johns Hopkins and wide-spread fame as a poet with a new and practical theory. Buck's music was fully equal in quality to the verse and seemed admirably suited. The recording that was made of this cantata in 1936 reveals that Lanier understood the technique that today is so freely employed on the radio by cantata writers for special occasions. As a matter of fact, its dramatic and musical appeal is such that it is the natural progenitor of “Ballad for Americans” and in no way is less effective.
It may be said that it was the Centennial ode which gave greatest impetus to Lanier's musical conceptions for verse, for in writing it he became conscious for the first time of the possibilities of suiting rhythms exactly to the sense of the verse—and this stood him in good stead in all his later writings. He excelled as a matter of fact, thereafter, in rhythmic descriptions in lines of verse, altering the rhythms with the sense.
The other contribution to his creative thought came in the impression that he was able to give in words of some mood or large idea. This writing in general terms, this suitable “impressionism” was an intimate part of the style which he finally realized in his last poems.
After “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia,” Lanier's ideas on the possibilities for music-poetic verse were formed. This is the period when he wrote freely a number of fine lyrics, and poems like “The Bee,” “Clover,” and “Psalm of the West.”
“Psalm of the West” was consciously intended as a symphony in verse. Its length, his determination that it should “carry or create its own musical accompaniment,” and his intention of writing additional music to go along with this “Choral Symphony,”93 prove how deeply preoccupied he was with verse of a musical nature. If many of his late poems are ballad-like, perfect song-structures, “Psalm of the West” is his best effort at symphonic structure, and far superior technically to the poem titled “The Symphony,” if we remember that it was to be also a “choral idiom.” For “Psalm of the West” was written to fulfill a commission for a Centennial Ode in Scribner's Magazine. It was an even more ambitious work than the earlier ode and is several steps further along in artistic concept than was the original Symphony.94 Here the movements between choral elements are bridge passages inherent to the poem. The length of “Psalm of the West” prohibits detailed discussion.95 It is actually a choral medium, for many of the lines are italicized for the actual singing of them. It concerns the growth of America, from its birth as an idea in nature to its discovery and population. It is the longest poem Lanier ever wrote, and in this respect more nearly approximates the scope and breadth of the symphony, but like his other ode, it does not and cannot read too well, because of his theories of a proper “libretto” for music. The stanzas and the rhythmic patterns follow the shifts in idea in the poem, much like movements in a symphony. It was Lanier's effort to sum America in song, using the scope and breadth of the symphony as a pierre de touche.
These poems, the two choral odes and “The Symphony,” inspired Lanier and it is natural that he wrote most of his best lyrics in 1876-77. He said:
As for me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I want to get upon paper as many as possible of the poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket.96
During the Southern period when the poet was making a final fight for health in Georgia and Florida he wrote those few poems which were to give him any lasting fame: “The Bee,” “The Stirrup Cup,” “To Beethoven,” “To Richard Wagner,” “Song of the Chattahoochee,” “The Mocking Bird,” “Tampa Robins,” and “Evening Song.” The simple forms of these poems, with the opportunity for nature descriptions or praise of music, seem to be the best Lanier had so far conceived. “Evening Song” has had some remarkably beautiful song settings, and it was written for such a purpose. Its song-like simplicity is noticeable as well as the ease with which the nature metaphor is handled:
Look off, dear Love, across the sallow 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. 'Tis done!
Love, lay thine hand in mine.
Come forth, sweet star, 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.(97)
Lanier listened to Schubert's songs and defined the perfect poetic song as “expressing but a single idea … in the simplest, noblest, most beautiful, and most musical words. …”98 Always a good song poet, Lanier's poems for music improved with his connection with Dudley Buck and through the collaboration they so happily achieved. Buck regarded “Evening Song” as nearly a perfect lyric: “simply lovely.” The imagery here is exceedingly simple, yet rich in color. The mood is quiet, reflective, and ideally suited to the treatment of music, which deals best in large simplicities and introspective ideas. Each stanza of this lyric—and it took Lanier years of practice to learn to write so simply—is capable of being treated as a “tone mood” since one technique which Lanier surely learned from his study of Schubert was that the mood of love and descriptions of nature are ideally suited to musical settings. In 1876 he wrote his poem “To Beethoven” and in 1877 “To Richard Wagner.” A part of his tribute to Beethoven is quoted here.
O Psalmist of the weak, the strong,
O Troubadour of love and strife,
Co-Litanist of right and wrong,
Sole Hymner of the whole of life,
I know not how, I care not why,—
Thy music sets my world at ease,
And melts my passion's mortal cry
In satisfying symphonies. …
Yea, it forgives me all my sins,
Pits life to love like rhyme to rhyme,
And tunes the task each day begins
By the last trumpet-note of Time.(99)
This poem is quite lengthy, as is the tribute “To Richard Wagner.” Wagner, who shared with Lanier advanced ideas on the composition of poetry for music and who wrote many essays on the subject of the interaction of the arts, also interested Lanier because of his strong opinions on the subjects of economics and politics. Lanier wrote:
O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art.
No trifler thou: Siegfried and Wotan be
Names for big ballads of the modern heart.
Thine ears hear deeper than thine eyes can see.
Voice of the monstrous mill, the shouting mart,
Not less of airy cloud and wave and tree,
Thou, thou, if even to thyself unknown,
Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone.(100)
“Song of the Chattahoochee” has been universally accepted as one of the most unusual poems in American poetry. Most of the inherent musicality does not stem from repetitive consonants or rhyme or alliteration; it is not, in short, melodious—but it has a structure that is repetitive, impetuous, and ideally suited to the subject. Half of the wonder in Lanier's verse surely grows from the unmusical subjects of which he makes a kind of pure music. His similarity to Whitman can be noticed in the construction of prepositional phrases in “Song of the Chattahoochee,” written in 1877 after his ideas on music and poetry had crystallized:
Out of the hills of Habersham,
Down the valleys of Hall. …
In the clefts of the hills …
In the beds of the valleys. …
This parallelism of pattern is borne out in the rest of the structure, where even many of the lines attain a singular balance.
The most important thing about “Song of the Chattahoochee,” and the quality which differentiates it from all previous nature writing, is the poet's approach to the river itself, which approach is extremely personal, and yet altogether lacking in any ordinary descriptiveness on the poet's part. Here the verse lines become the river's voice, just as Debussy's music became the wind's voice. This is an “impression” of the river told in the flow and ebb of rhythm. The poem excels in its rhythmic freedom. While the larger foot patterns may be thought of as running dactyls, there is a constant releasing of sounds through these, followed by a springing return to the shorter leaps of trochees, interrupted at points by sluggish spondees, etc., so that the poet is obviously more interested in the movement to the two repetitious lines at the end of each stanza than he is concerned with foot patterns. He is writing in musical or (rather here) in poetic phrases—prepositional and verbal—and balanced clauses.
Both his alliterative patterns and the use he made of equal time units rather than foot patterns are everywhere noticeable. The important concern of the poet was with the rush and flow of the river, and his effort was expended to keep the stanza in a fluid shape, with occasional little springing phrases to push the metrical pattern down the page. His use of parallel structure, alliteration, and logical syllabic groupings can be seen in this stanza as well as any other:
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attend the plain
Far from the hills of Habersham,
Far down the valleys of Hall.(101)
The series of verb phrases culminating in “and flee,” move the poem downward to the completion of that stanza. The alliterative devices in “run the rapid and leap the fall,” and “flee from folly” are only the apparent links in the stanza; not quite so obviously alliterative is “hurry amain” and “reach the plain,” and “lover's pain,” “narrow or wide,” etc. The rhyming device, suspending a return to “fall” until the last word in the stanza, moves through a pattern inverted from -am, -all, -ain, to -ain, -am, -all. This pattern of rhyme inversion works in every stanza. Lanier was fond of varying rhythms from iambs:
The rushes cried Abide, abide,
The willful waterweeds held me thrall
to dactyls. Note also his consciousness of a choral element in nature.
Another device used here is that of making the first stanza the voice of the Chattahoochee, and the second and third the voices, successively, of the rushes and reeds, and the various “overleaning” trees. The fourth strophe introduces not only colors and gemlike minerals, but spondaic rhythms which lengthen the line and widely space the emphases; these really slow down the flow of the movement and impede, just as the sense of the poem signifies:
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
And many a luminous jewel lone
—Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet and amethyst—
Made lures with lights of streaming stone
In the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
In the beds of the valleys of Hall.(102)
The imagery here is sharply cut, clear, sparkling. Then the final strophe occurs with the voice of the Chattahoochee saying that all depends upon the call of the lordly “main.” Here all of the lines point in the direction of the verb “calls” and fall from “downward” and “and”:
But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall
Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call—
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.(103)
All the rhythms are alternately bound and released, caught, and sprung free. Parallelisms, short internal rhymes, and a certain ebbing and flowing from the initial line repetitions are caught in successive and alternate rhyme endings. The poem is, of course, a slight one, lacking many of the graver overtones so often found in Lanier's work. But it is a little art-work, not simple, delighted in for its tiny and perfectly wrought mosaic rhyme scheme.
Music is the subject of “To Nannette Falk-Auerbach,” one of the great nineteenth century Beethoven interpreters, as it is in the humorous but rather fine little verses “To Our Mocking Bird Died of a Cat” with its original figure of speech:
Trillets of human,—shrewdest whistle-wit,—
Contralto cadences of grave desire …
Bright drops of tune, from oceans infinite
Of melody, sipped off the thin-edged wave
And trickling down the beak. …
Ah me, though never an ear for song, thou hast
A tireless tooth for songsters: thus of late
Thou camest, Death, thou Cat! and leapst my gate,
And … snatched away, how fast, how fast,
My bird—wit, songs, and all—thy richest freight
Since that fell time when in some wink of fate
Thy yellow claws unsheathed and stretched, and cast
Sharp hold on Keats, and dragged him slow away,
And harried him with hope and horrid play—
Ay, him, the world's best wood-bird, wise with song—
Till thou hadst wrought thine own last mortal wrong. …
Nay, Bird; my grief gainsays the Lord's best right.
The Lord was fain, at some late festal time,
That Keats should set all Heaven's woods in rhyme,
And thou in bird-notes. Lo, this tearful night,
Methinks I see thee, fresh from death's despite …
Methinks I hear thy silver whistlings bright
Mix with the mighty discourse of the wise,
Till broad Beethoven, deaf no more, and Keats,
Midst of much talk, uplift their smiling eyes,
And mark the music of thy wood-conceits,
And halfway pause on some large courteous word,
And call thee “Brother,” O thou heavenly Bird!(104)
Though his 1876 volume of verse was published while the poet lay seriously ill, he was writing from Tampa in 1877, “I ‘bubble song’ continually these days, and it is as hard to keep me from the pen as a toper from his tipple,”105 (which has a sound to it surprisingly like Emily Dickinson). And all of 1878 he was writing poems like the above, and reading for the first time Walt Whitman and Emerson.
Lanier's relationship to Whitman already has been the subject of much discussion. Most critics have recognized the strong interest of both poets in moving toward something new in the way of poetic forms, and though Lanier wrote Whitman that he disagreed with him on all matters referring to form and “taste” in poetry, he recognized the “modern song at once so large and so naive … propounded in such strong and beautiful rhythms.”106 Anderson commented astutely on this relationship between the two men: “Perhaps the greatest likeness is between Whitman's practice and Lanier's theory.”107 Though The Science of English Verse made no direct reference to Leaves of Grass, Anderson called attention to the fact that Lanier must have had it sometimes in mind.108
“The Marshes of Glynn” is undoubtedly one of the best poems Lanier ever wrote. It is full of his complex rhythmic patterns, overlaid with alliteration, and a muted syzygy. It was never widely published because it was not finished until July, 1878, long after the collected poems had been published. All of the qualities that represent the inwoven style which is peculiarly Lanier's own can be found in this poem. Here are all the devices for moving the line and concluding the stanza that have been observed in incipient stages. Here is all the minutely wrought detail that blurs the larger outline with its vividness. Every corner, every facet of one man's impression of the marsh is explored, and the large symbol of the marsh sweeps into the poet's heart so that he no longer fears the unending, unknown, and water-flooded areas. Here Lanier has made of the marsh a wonderful mystic symbol:
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn. …
The sense of light and shadow that plays initially on the leaves of the live oaks plays fitfully throughout the poem, now blazing here in clarity, now shadowing and suggesting. It is noticeably true that these marsh poems have a rhythmic perfection—dactyls tying line to line—with innumerable substitutions of feet and subtleties of phrases, of melodic interplay, but they also have a freeness in the stanza that may have been in part inspired by the evolution of cantata odes and poems like “Psalm of the West.” Perhaps the chief influence upon this great poem of Lanier's—and it is considered his best poem by many critics—was the Maryland Musical Festival of 1878 which Lanier undoubtedly took part in, and which he reviewed. One of the most striking phases of the review is his interest in Beethoven's worship of nature, as revealed in the Seventh Symphony, Mendelssohn's “Calm of the Sea,” and the beauties of Wagner's “Siegfried Idyl,” of which he wrote:
This is the explanation of much of the difficulty which most persons feel in perceiving the drift of Wagner's pieces. Probably it will be long before the ears of average audiences will be practised to such keenness that they can detect the multitudinous melodies which arise, sing together, vanish, and re-appear, all through the Idyl. … To follow these through their sinuous windings and interweavings is possible only to a practised ear and concentrated attention. …109
Certainly there was much in the Festival that excited the poet, and “The Marshes of Glynn” came from his pen only two months later. It differs in many respects from any previous poem; Lanier's consciousness of God is everywhere apparent in it; and the longer lines sweep with artistic surety. The poet's personal impression of nature is bound up with religion. Stanza two begins with a reference to the lights and darks of the woods while the sun is still high:
Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,—
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—
Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
Pure with a sense of passing of saints through the wood,
Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good. …(110)
Here the flickering light, reference to the cathedral-like woods and arches, and the “wavering arras of leaves” parting hermit chambers constitute only a part of the stanza's beauty: the careful handling of time within the phrases, with their varied rhythms, is another. Rich imagery and verbal music combine here, while foot forms give way to a flowing, changing accentual pattern.
Another influence that acted upon this poem was Lanier's discovery for the first time of Whitman (1878) and his profound appreciation of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's feeling for nature could hardly have escaped Lanier. The lengthened lines that stretch across the Whitman page suggest the wide “Marshes of Glynn.” Lanier, for the first time, seems to have found here a sufficiently broad and powerful subject with which to deal.
Part of the beauty of “The Marshes of Glynn” comes not only from the treatment of the woods, the marshes, and the sea as facets of nature the poet no longer fears, but also from the reverence felt for nature which the poet seems to be exhibiting fully for the first time. Here are scarcely any lines of even length. How Lanier's varied rhythmic patterns run across the page, urged on by “and” and the development of the idea of a cessation of works as evening sets in and the sun sinks, can be seen in this stanza:
But now when the moon is no more, and riot is rest,
And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,
And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem
Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,—
Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore. …
Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face
The vast sweet visage of space.
To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,
Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,
For a mete and a mark
To the forest-dark:—
So:
Affable live-oak, leaning low,—
Thus—with your favor—soft, with a reverent hand,
(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,
Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea. …(111)
The final impression the poet leaves in this tone poem of nature is that of the sea spilling over into the marsh, flooding it in silver veins which reflect the last rosy glow of the sun. And then the whirring wings of some homeward bound bird sound in the looming dark and silence. And it is night. Finally the quite wonderful lines which query the shapes that appear in dreams, and those other final dreams:
And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea
Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:
Look how the grace of the sea doth go
About and about through the intricate channels that flow
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,
That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow
In the rose-and-silver evening glow.
Farewell, my lord Sun!
The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run
Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
And the sea and the marsh are one.
How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night.
And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
Roll in on the souls of men,
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.
The rhythmic principle again is quantitative, for nearly every line represents quick and fairly subtle rhythmic changes from dactyls, and yet the logic of the inner voice speaking is not at all disturbed by the underlying rhythms and the sense is not obscured. The old question—what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil—was perplexing the poet. The superiority of “The Marshes of Glynn” lies not alone in its rhythmic fecundity, nor in its memorable imagery, but also in the suiting of the rhythms and the tonal colors of the words to the mood of the poem. Despite the deceptive quietness of the wood, there is a passionate quality in the lines in which the first person “I” appears, in the “oh's,” and in the final questioning. On the whole, the poem is a quiet, almost reflective piece of writing, lacking the pacing of many of Lanier's verses. But the lines which deal with the movement of water—the sea—move quickly. Note how the poet smoothly calls attention to the sea; then how the “intricate” channels hold it back; then how it quickly flows “here and there—everywhere” till it again spreads out smoothly and has flooded the lands. And when the poet turns to a philosophical idea, how the dignified lines roll across the page, not only in length, but also in sound pattern: “And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep. …” Then note the careful spacing of vowel sounds as an alternate “Roll in on the souls of men” and the final line—“On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.”
In 1878 when this poem was written, Lanier had learned to handle completely the music of his lines, the complexity of his ideas, the alliteration of his syllables, and the organic shaping of a poem through some great mystical or spiritual experience. In short, he had found his subject matter, and his moral sense enlarged itself into a powerful faith in God, and his love for nature served as a wonderful symbol of that faith.
One of his last poems, “A Ballad of Trees and the Master,” written for music in the simple lyrical song style he also mastered, has been set to music and recorded. It is one of the most beautiful songs he wrote:
Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him,
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods He came.
Out of the woods my Master went,
And he was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last;
'Twas on a tree they slew Him—last
When out of the woods He came.(113)
Lanier's preoccupation with trees and the days in the wilderness resulted in this significant religious poem. He suggested harp-accompaniment for this late poem. The simplicity and dignity of this song mark it for posterity.
“Sunrise,” the last expression of the consumptive poet who loved life with such passion that its delineation led to charges of obscurity, is in reality another marsh hymn, with the same spiritual significance, but lacking in the philosophic quiet that the first is built upon. “Sunrise” seems almost imbued with the poet's life blood. It exhibits in the fullest degree his passion for nature and all of his poetic devices at once. It approaches a climax amid a luxuriant flowering of image and sound, and a strain and upward reaching that come from the very depths of his fevered soul. His worship of the sun in terms of nearly pagan joy, in Christian symbols, in terms of its meaning for man and for one particular dying man, almost overwhelms the music of the verse by the heavy freight of ornate and elaborate imagery that frets it. There is nothing easy or simple in Lanier's “Sunrise” and those who come to it lightly feel some despair that anything which sounds so melodious should appear at first too obscure for perception. Reading Lanier's late poetry is not easy, and even a good reader must repeat and repeat the pattern of the lines to realize how profoundly thought out the rhythms and many of Lanier's thoughts are. “Sunrise,” for instance, demands a creative effort from the reader fully proportionate to the poem itself. In the creation of a word picture attempting to capture the actual feeling of dawn itself rising out of the sea, the various steps leading up to that sunrise all have their different rhythmic modes and patterns like movements in music. The poem itself is written in a series of hushed stanzas, while the ear strains for the sounds of dawn with the whispering leaves, and the old “alchemist” marsh “distilling silence.” Occasionally the poet's easy circling and bounding rhythms dissuade the reader that anything of moment is being said, and yet here the poet is describing a state of tension which music alone had never achieved by a climbing, straining, piling up of sound that waits and waits for a single tone to dash the whole structure. In the verse, the poet has reached that quiet, breathless moment in nature which heralds the dawn. Here the stars gleam in the dome of night while beauty and silence strain forward:
Oh, what if a sound should be made!
Oh, what if a bound should be laid
To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring,—
To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string!
I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam
Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream,—
Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night,
Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light,
Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem
But a bubble that broke in a dream,
If a bound of degree to this grace be laid,
Or a sound or a motion made.(114)
Then the wonderful description of that first movement, so vibrant in feeling that it suggests only the parallel of Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” where the same speaking quality of the verse, the same address to nature occurs. Lanier's capture here of the immediacy of the action is musical, and reads like an improvisation of Grieg's “Morning.” The images, however, are very clearly conceived, like the movement of expectation in the marsh-grass; the duck, sailing silently around the river bend. It may seriously be doubted whether any better description of dawn with so carefully sustained a crescendo has been achieved in the English language. How it fits the descriptive quality of music in describing our alive senses in listening for sound:
But no: it is made: list! somewhere,—mystery, where?
In the leaves? in the air?
In my heart? is a motion made:
'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade.
In the leaves, 'tis palpable: low multitudinous stirring
Upwinds through the woods; the little ones, softly conferring,
Have settled, my lord's to be looked for; so; they are still;
But the air and my heart and the earth are a-thrill,—
And look where the wild duck sails round the bend of the river,—
And look where a passionate shiver
Expectant is bending the blades
Of the marsh-grass in serial shimmers and shades,—
And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,
Are beating
The dark overhead as my heart beats,—and steady and free
Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea …
And a sailor unseen is hoisting a-peak,
For list, down the inshore curve of the creek
How merrily flutters the sail,—
And lo, in the east! Will the East unveil?
The East is unveiled, the East hath confessed
A flush: 'tis dead; 'tis alive: 'tis dead, ere the West
Was aware of it; nay, 'tis abiding, 'tis unwithdrawn:
Have a care, sweet Heaven! 'Tis Dawn. …(115)
Unfortunately for Lanier, too many times the first strophe of this poem has been quoted to illustrate his metrical practice, and readers have found it, out of context, quite devoid of sense. The impressionistic descriptions of the rising sun itself are twofold: first the golden rays of the sun are described with Dionysiac jubilation and then a different, slower pacing as the great orb itself rises from the sea:
Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is uprolled:
To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold
Is builded, in shape as a bee-hive, from out of the sea:
The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee,
The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee,
—Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee
That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea. …(116)
The dactyls of which Lanier was so fond quickly change, when the sun itself is hailed, to the spondees so native to a rather primitive rhythmic beat:
The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee
… is the great sun Bee. …
Punctuated rhythm like this can appear any place in a stanza in the last verses of Lanier, indicating the greatest freedom within a line. Then again the slow paced dactylic line:
Not slower than Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure
Of motion,—not faster than dateless Olympian leisure
Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure,—
The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks, unjarring, unreeling,
Forever revealing, revealing, revealing,
Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise,—'tis done!
Good-morrow, lord Sun!
The sun is finally greeted as a symbol of power, of strength, first as a creative force, and then as a symbol of security for the dying man:
O Artisan born in the purple,—Workman Heat,—
Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet
And be mixed in the death-cold oneness,—innermost Guest
At the marriage of elements …
Thou, in the fine forge-thunder, thou, in the beat
Of the heart of a man, thou Motive,—Laborer Heat: …
Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright
Than the eye of a man may avail of:—manifold One,
I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun:
Old Want is awake and agog, every wrinkle a-frown;
The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town:
But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done;
I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun:
How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run,
I am lit with the Sun.
Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
Of traffic shall hide thee,
Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
Hide thee,
Never the reek of the time's fen-politics
Hide thee,
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
Labor, at leisure, in art,—till yonder beside thee
My soul shall float, friend Sun,
The day being done.(117)
Lanier revised “Sunrise” extensively and it has been highly praised by a variety of critics, many of whom saw relatively little in his earlier verse. It was called exceptionally original and his poems were called “so entirely unlike the poems of the day, that one has no standard to judge them by.”118 The English journals in particular hailed Lanier's verse, and, said the Spectator,
There is more of genius in this volume than in all Poe's poems, or all Longfellow's, or all Lowell's. … Lanier is an original poet,—more original, we think, than the United States has ever yet produced, more original than any poet whom England has produced during the last thirty years.119
And the London Times called him “the greatest master of melody of any of the American poets.”120 After arriving in Samoa, Stevenson was asked what he would do for intellectual companionship, and pulling the poems of Lanier from his pocket, he replied: “I am always well-companioned so long as I have this.”121 And Hamlin Garland, strangely enough, was fascinated by Lanier's verse. He wrote:
His verse puzzled me at first by its complexity, but it grew in music with each rereading.
Eager for more knowledge of this singer, I read every accessible article by him or about him, … every obtainable comment, until at last I felt it my duty to let the world know (so far as I was able) the message this poet, this thinker, had given me. …
… In opening his volume of verse, I chanced upon “Sunrise” and was instantly and profoundly stirred by its freedom of form, its wealth of thought, its intricacy of metaphor and its glorious music, and yet the subtleties of the metaphors, the changes in the rhythm, like the infinite shimmering lights of a near-seen landscape, distracted me. To this day “Sunrise” lives with me more closely than any other nature poem.
This striving after something dimly seen and dimly felt I soon discovered arose from an overwhelming musical tendency, which made of Lanier first of all a singer, establishing the lyric quality of his writing as absolutely as it did that of Blake or Shelley. … He was too intellectual, too masterful, too original, too sane to be affected by Poe. … He was lyric not as Poe was lyric; rather he was symphonic. …
“Whatever else his poetry may not be, it is perfect song,” I said to my pupils. “It has a flexible, variant, vibrant quality which is well-nigh unapproached by any American poet.”
Curious as it may seem to other lovers of Lanier, I found much in common between “The Marshes of Glynn” and Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
Whitman is wilder, sterner and more iconoclastic than Lanier, yet both were poets of cosmic sympathy. With singularly individual outlook on nature, each believed in uttering himself in characteristic fashion, each instinctively avoided conventional forms. I found no difficulty in loving and admiring them, both.122
Coulson and Webb made a considerable study of Lanier's contemporary status as a poet and found a surprising difference in the reactions of critics and poets, as well as general readers, to Lanier's verse.123 A partial explanation for this phenomenon must lie in the fact that not all of Lanier's work appears in anthologies, and that what does appear is often something he surpassed quickly. His early experiments, taken singly, while interesting in proving how rapidly he mastered a medium, are too slight to gain for him lasting fame as a great poet. If Lanier's reputation is to be succored in any way, a genuine effort must be made to see that his later poems have wide currency. In the Centennial Edition of Lanier's works Anderson wrote:
… [his poems] achieve the impression of freedom by carefully chosen and consciously controlled devices, sparingly employed but of considerable variety: occasional extremes of line-length, the frequent use of run-on lines, skillful foot-substitutions, and the reproduction in words of all the sound effects known to the ear of the professional musician. Others had made such experiments before him, of course; Lanier's contribution lies in the elaborateness with which he tried to combine music and poetry, and this is the explanation of why his poems are both liked and disliked. …124
Thus, it can be seen that the influence of music upon the poetry of Sidney Lanier can scarcely be overestimated. It is responsible for the kinds of poetry that he wrote; it had much to do with his concept of the line and the pacing of that line. Sometimes he threw off a spate of syllables like a group of notes in music with swiftness and excitement; at other times the accents are widely separated and the line lengthened by sonorous consonants so that it quietly eddies across the page. His stanzas after 1874 were elongated by the greater musical force which coursed through them, and the shifts between these strophes became subtler so that the poems gained in unity. He came to feel late in life less dependence upon end rhyme, and more dependence upon epanaphora, and all of the lines in a poem were directed toward a climax achieved not so much in the meaning as in the verbal coloring and rhythmic resolution. His rhythms, which were often very regular, in general, and in the best verse, came to have a complete freedom from repeated foot forms so that scarcely a line of “Sunrise” had the same feet in it. This freedom from foot forms makes for music in verse because, like music, when the only criteria are equal temporal values, melody is freed. But Lanier used foot forms with conscious success, interpolating exact patterns at sudden intervals to bring a kind of order to an idea and differentiate or emphasize a point. Sometimes dactyls or anapests appear, with their repetitious rhythms, and are swung faster and faster through a line as he handles his syllables like notes in music, until finally the tension breaks and the rhythms flood out from the feet in widely undulant waves. His stanzas seem to have little relationship with rhymes, but they do have some primitive relationship to the phrasal units with which Lanier preferred working. The speaking quality of many of his lines he learned from handling the choral medium.
But Lanier's was also a symphonic conception, though all of the voices were subservient to the melody or subject that he had chosen. This homophonic, or “symphonic,” quality can be seen at work in “The Marshes of Glynn” and “Sunrise,” both superior to “The Symphony.” Here are three voices sounding in “Sunrise” all of which await the sun's arrival: the marsh, the sea, and the wood:
The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;
Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep,
Interwoven with wafture or wild sea-liberties, drifting,
Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,
Came to the gates of sleep.
Not only are three voices announced but the pattern of this verse follows the sense of the lines, so that the thought of sleep impels “drifting, sifting, sifting” as repetitive soft sounds of leaves in nature and leads to dreams—the next section. The poet finally awakens:
I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide
In your gospelling glooms,—to be
As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea.
The poet then addresses himself first to the leaves of the live-oak which he treats as symbols of conscience and passions:
And there, oh there
As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
Pray me a myriad prayer.
Then he turns to the marsh which is an
Old chemist, rapt in alchemy,
Distilling silence. …
And finally the sea, which sweeps into the marsh, glimmering beneath the stars:
The tide's at full: the marsh with flooded streams
Glimmers, a limpid labyrinth of dreams.
Each winding creek in grave entrancement lies
A rhapsody of morning-stars. …
Then the period of strain and quiet listening sets in which is so rarely described in the present in poetry:
Oh, what if a sound should be made!
Oh, what if a bound should be laid. …
And suddenly the slightest movement among leaves, and then the soft movement of winds up through the woods, the air, “my heart,” and the earth—the marsh grass bends in the breeze, and a sail catches the wind, while dawn comes. And then the sun rises slowly above the horizon:
Now a dream of a flame through that dream of a flush is uprolled. …
And the sea and the marsh and the woods and “my soul” are the various voices that greet their “lord Sun.” The poet closes with a tribute to the might and power of the sun.
Lanier's last two poems are in the nature of “tone” poems, showing many of the qualities that must cause him to be placed among that group of artists appearing at the end of the century who came to be called impressionists. One of these qualities is love for color and, specifically, for the play of light and shadow. Another is the extremely subjective and personal reading of the poet's experience into nature, which gives to his descriptions something of an air of obscurity; in fact, so personal is the reaction that the wealth of finical detail—like pointillism in painting—obscures the general outline and meaning of the poem until one steps back and observes the larger sweep of the poet's canvas that gives an over-all “impression” of nature divorced from “real” nature.
Impressionism, in its reaction against the realism that followed the romantic movement, was more individual in its expression than almost any other “movement.” In poetry it found its expression in the symboliste work of the French: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Valery, etc., whose theories had been profoundly influenced, initially, by Edgar Allan Poe. In music, so disparate a group as Wagner, an early musical “symboliste,” Resphighi, Franck, Berlioz, Debussy, Grieg and a host of minor “nationalistic” composers have all been called “impressionists.” Closely related to descriptive or programme music, impressionism excels in the capture of the fleeting moment in nature. Grieg was dealing in impressionism in “Morning” from Peer Gynt. Debussy's personal impression of “Clouds” is one of the more famous musical impressions. In some ways the impressionism of painters such as Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, to name only a few, was a higher kind of realism than had before existed in painting. It is true that the outline itself was frequently blurred by the painter's intellectual judgment of nature, but nature had never before been so conceived and painted. For this reason those paintings, intellectually, possess great popularity and significance. In all of the arts, impressionism was the effort to suggest a thing by its human appeal, by relating it to some human faculty to a far greater extent than had ever before been attempted.
Since impressionism received fullest development in painting, some comment on that movement might help here; Lang said of impressionism:
… it is rather the sum total of man's experiences and observations, his artistic temperament … the painters fled into the open … declaring color the carrier of life; and since they endeavored to apprehend life in its minute momentary aspects, they reduced color to its finest particles. The final aim was an art bent on seizing the impressions of volatile, scurrying moments. …
Contour and silhouette have lost most of their qualities, the forms are dissolved into color patches. If we still want to find rhythm in these pictures we must seek it in the innumerable color particles, in the most subjective oscillation of the subtle color patterns. This rhythm, flickering restlessly, can no longer be abstracted from content and form; it rests on the relationship of theme, form, and color, receiving its validity exclusively from the creator.125
How much of this can be applied to Lanier's verse must rest with the eye of the beholder, but certainly there is much to be said for his impressionistic style in the last works, for the elaborate daubs of color and detail (pointillism). Since impressionism has never adequately been explored in American poetry, it is understandable that Lanier's attempts should exist now in a sort of demimonde. For the “art for art's sake” school has hardly yet received adequate treatment either on the continent or in England. This parallel to impressionism explains Lanier's surprising success with such apparently unlyrical subjects as “Corn” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” Lang said of this faculty: “The sensuous, corporeal, and actual stimuli of color and light become the main subjects, while the importance of the concrete subjects is minimized.”126
It is important to remember that impressionism existed independently in verse, as it did in music and painting, before it became a movement. All of the impressionistic poets “struggle against rhyme, verse, and strophe,” and demand “free rhythm,” according to Lang. In music, the only binding quality is that of mood and the treatment of the “fleeting” moment. Impressionistic music is colorful, blurred, mystic, dreamy. Debussy typifies musical impressionism. Certainly there is this personal subjective approach to nature in Lanier, and the initial difficulty the reader feels when first he hears (sees) trees so described as in the “Marshes of Glynn” can be rightly understood as impressionism:
Glooms of the live-oak, beautiful-braided and woven
With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs—
Emerald twilights,—
Virginal shy lights,
Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,
When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades
Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,
Of the heavenly woods and glades,
That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within
The wide sea-marshes of Glynn;—
Agreed that this is a kind of nature realism, it is only such realism as stems from the personal impression of a sensitive musician or poet, just as the impression of dawn and the rising sun move along, in point of time, with the actual rising of some sun. In this strange temporal quality Lanier seems again to be doing in poetry what music can do—recreating and sustaining the interest in the poem in that very moment, as a musician would in music. This is a difficult task and an almost original one that Lanier has attempted, for while music can depend upon a lulling of tone, a crescendo of interest by rhythm, melody, and intensity—and intensity was a quality that Lanier borrowed freely from music—poetry is faced with either using repetitive patterns or else with striking off new ideas which will sustain the flow of music to the climax. The richness of Lanier's poetic fancies made possible poetry such as he wrote, where every movement forward is impelled along that same line by the addition of some fancy in the same vein.
It is the immediacy and vibrancy more than anything else in this last verse of Lanier's that suggest a musical analogy, for only music, not art, shared with poetry the ability to be created and enjoyed in the moment. Music is wonderfully suited to sound the hush and the first stirrings of nature; it is something new when a poem achieves that same sort of effect. These little “tone poems” of Lanier's seem to owe to music their conception and their form. The lines in themselves, unlike the Whitman line, lack the symphonic quality; they are melodious. Lanier's verses would make good programs or program notes for a symphony on such a theme. There is the provision for the same sort of intensity and climax music handles so well. Descriptive poetry and descriptive music were the best products of Lanier's imagination. Lanier belongs to the lesser, finer workers in tone and colors that made up a certain coterie in the arts as the century waned.
It must therefore be admitted in any study of Lanier's verse that the influence of music was most profound. It shaped his stanzas; it was responsible for the forms and kinds of verse he wrote; it resulted in attempts at musical parallels: of symphonies in verse, of choral elements in verse, and of a kind of musical impressionism transferred to verbal terms. Though he wrote sonnets, the development of his musical gift led him into always greater structural irregularities, until in his “programme music,” “The Marshes of Glynn” and “Sunrise,” he seems to have followed only the forms of music. Add to these his numerous songs and the excellence of his musical images, and one can say of Lanier's verse, quite apart from the metrical dexterity and melodic beauty it often revealed, that if music had not been known to him his verses as we know them simply would not exist. He was a natural song poet, like Poe; he became fascinated by the symphonic forms of his day, like Whitman; but it is quite apparent now that the best poems he wrote were musical “impressions.” It is probably true that Sidney Lanier will someday be recognized as America's first great impressionistic poet and only a very musical poet would attempt to write in terms of such sounds and colors.
Notes
-
See Lanier's letter to Clifford Lanier, January 4, 1874 in the Sidney Lanier Letters, eds. Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey Starke, Centennial Edition, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), VIII, 425f.; IX, 8. Subsequent references to this edition will appear only with the volume title and number.
-
Ibid., 28ff.
-
Gay Wilson Allen wrote: “It is doubtful whether any other prosodist has presented the quantity argument with such clarity and force as we find in The Science of English Verse.” See Gay W. Allen, American Prosody (New York: American Book Company, 1935), 277-306, for his comments. Cf. also The Science of English Verse, II, xxx-xxxviii.
-
Quoted in Dorothy Blount Lamar, Sidney Lanier, Musician, Poet, Soldier (Macon, Georgia: J. W. Burke & Company, 1927; [1940], 12.
-
See Aubrey Starke, “Sidney Lanier as a Musician,” Musical Quarterly, XX (October, 1934), 384.
-
See William R. Thayer, “Letters of Sidney Lanier to Mr. Gibson Peacock,” Atlantic Monthly, LXXIV (July, 1894), 16.
-
See “From Bacon to Beethoven,” Essays on Music”, II, 289.
-
See Starke, loc. cit., 386.
-
He said of himself at this time: “The difficulty with me is not to write poetry,” but, conversely, “Whatever turn I have for Art is purely musical; poetry being with me, a mere tangent into which I sometimes shoot.” See Letters, VIII, 347.
-
See Tiger Lilies and Southern Prose, V, xxf.
-
“A Poet's Musical Impressions,” The Letters of Sidney Lanier, ed. Henry W. Lanier, Scribner's Magazine, XXV (May, 1899), 623.
-
Ibid., 624.
-
Quoted by Norman C. Schlichter, “Sidney Lanier—Musician and Poet,” Quarterly Review, (October, 1899), 327-328.
-
See Starke, 389.
-
See “A Poet's Musical Impressions,” 626.
-
He traveled to Wheeling, West Virginia, and Macon, Georgia, to give concerts. See Starke, 390.
-
“A Poet's Musical Impressions,” 625.
-
See Letters, VIII, 329f.
-
See Starke, 394.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., 395.
-
Ibid., 396.
-
He wrote redactions of Percy, Froissart, the Mabinogian, and Malory.
-
Starke, 395.
-
Quoted in Edwin Mims, Sidney Lanier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1905), 38-39.
-
The Science of English Verse, 22.
-
[Edgar Allan] Poe, Complete Tales and Poems, 916.
-
Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1948), 8-12.
-
It is the exaggerations of ordinary quantitative properties in poems like the “Congo” which make them seem so rhythmical.
-
The Science of English Verse, 11, n. 2.
-
Ibid., 33.
-
Ibid., 31.
-
Ibid., 47f.
-
Ibid., 60ff.
-
Ibid., 77.
-
Ibid., 108.
-
This results in a kind of syncopation. Thus he indicated that “typic” rhythms could only be decided by looking at the “sum of appearances” in the verse. See ibid.
-
See ibid., 113-122.
-
Ibid., 166.
-
Ibid., 168-174. The relative nearness of the two patterns is illustrated more freely than I have ever seen before.
-
Lanier said initially here that his work was but an “outline,” an “elementary work” written in the hope of promoting research in these fields. See ibid., 196.
-
Ibid., 211.
-
Bayard Q. Morgan has an interesting study in his unpublished manuscript: “Question Melodies in English.”
-
Pope said his own theory of the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon verse “sprang from a study of Sidney Lanier's pioneering work.” See J. C. Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), Preface.
-
“… the consensus appears to be that Lanier was in general nearer right than wrong …” The Science of English Verse, xxxvii.
-
Allen wrote further: “… a great part of his treatise is scientifically correct, and all of it is challenging and suggestive.” See Allen, 271-285 passim.
-
See Evelyn H. Scholl, “English Metre Once More,” PMLA, LXIII (March, 1948), 293-326.
-
Schramm's experiments proved Lanier's theories about rhyme to be valid. Rhyme is a phase of speech tunes, for experiments prove that the voice will leap as much as a full octave to return to a rhyme pitch. See Wilbur S. Schramm, “A Characteristic of Rime,” PMLA, L (December, 1935), 1223-1227.
-
See Calvin S. Brown, Chapters II-IV, 7-31.
-
Lanier wrote Bayard Taylor in 1875: “I could never describe to you what a mere drought and famine my life has been, as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one absorbs when one is in an atmosphere of art, or when one is in conversational relation … with persons who have … done large things.” See Sidney Lanier Letters, IX, 230.
-
Thayer, “Letters of Sidney Lanier to Gibson Peacock,” 25.
-
“Corn” was received by a small but very appreciative audience. As a result of this poem and “The Symphony,” Lanier became friends with Peacock, Bayard Taylor, and Charlotte Cushman.
-
Poems, I, 224.
-
Ibid., 5.
-
Ibid., 16.
-
Ibid., 19.
-
See Anderson's comment in ibid., xxviii.
-
Ibid., 19.
-
Ibid., 29.
-
Ibid., 30f.
-
Ibid., 34f.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., 36f.
-
Ibid., 39.
-
Ibid., 42f.
-
Letters, IX, 182.
-
Lanier said of “The Symphony”: “I have dared almost to write quite, at my ease in the matters of rhythm, rhyme, and substance, in this poem. You will be glad to know that it has had a grand success.” Ibid., 203.
-
[Richard] Webb and [Edwin R.] Coulson [Sidney Lanier, Poet and Prosodist], 66f.
-
Anderson said that there was “no attempt made to parallel the structural design of a symphonic composition. Instead, this is a sort of counterpart to programme music …” Poems, I, xliii.
-
Ibid., 48-50 passim.
-
Ibid., 48.
-
Ibid., 52.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., 53.
-
Ibid., 56.
-
Ibid., 55f.
-
Actually his experiments here and with his later “Centennial Ode” matured his conception of musical verse and made possible his later attempts at impressionism.
-
Lanier wrote: “… the gigantic illustrations of Richard Wagner … have … widened the province of orchestral effects to such a magnificant horizon that every modern musical composer, whether consciously Wagnerite or not, is necessarily surrounded with a new atmosphere which compels him to write for the whole orchestra, and not for the human voice as a solo instrument …” “The Centennial Cantata,” II, 263.
-
It was Bayard Taylor's recommendation that the commission for the cantata ode go to Lanier, whom he knew, at that time, only as a “promising” writer.
-
Thayer, loc. cit., 25.
-
See Poems, I, xlvii.
-
Letters, IX, 295.
-
Ibid., 296f.
-
Ibid., 297f.
-
Ibid., 298f.
-
This line, which seems more ambiguous than most, Lanier explained to the composer, Dudley Buck, as indicating the “weltering flow” of the remote past breaking like a sea against the firm existence of our Republic. See Letters, IX, 301.
-
Poems, I, 60-62.
-
Letters, IX, 349.
-
Poems, I, xlvi.
-
Letters, IX, 353.
-
Ibid., 354.
-
Quoted by Lincoln Lorenz, The Life of Sidney Lanier (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1935), 162.
-
The music Lanier wrote to “Psalm of the West” was entitled “Choral Symphony” after the pattern of Beethoven and Wagner. Unfortunately the music manuscript has never been found.
-
Lanier wrote: “By the grace of God my Centennial Ode is finished. I now only know how divine has been the agony of the last three weeks during which I have been rapt away to heights where all my own purposes as to a revisal of artistic forms lay clear before me, and where the soul travail was of choice out of multitude.” Letters, IX, 350.
-
It runs forty-one pages, and it is important to remember that the writing of this poem taught Lanier more about the choral idiom and the symphonic orchestra than any writing to date.
-
See Poems, I, xlix.
-
Ibid., 88.
-
Ibid., 1.
-
Ibid., 88-90 passim.
-
Ibid., 103.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., 104.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., 117-118 passim.
-
Letters, IX, 428.
-
See Aubrey Starke, “Lanier's Appreciation of Whitman,” American Scholar, II (October, 1933), 399.
-
Poems, I, lxi.
-
Ibid. Anderson felt that the recognition on Lanier's part of “rhythmic but unmetric” verse to be written without line divisions was due to Whitman's influence.
-
“The Maryland Musical Festival,” II, 326f.
-
Poems, I, 119.
-
Ibid., 119ff.
-
Ibid., 121.
-
Ibid., 144.
-
Ibid., 147.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., 148.
-
Ibid., 148f.
-
The London Quarterly, quoted in Ibid., lxxxvii.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Quoted in Oliver Huckel, “The Genius of the Modern in Lanier,” Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine, XIV (June, 1926), 164.
-
Hamlin Garland, “Roadside Meetings of a Literary Nomad,” Bookman, III (December, 1929), 404.
-
Coulson wrote: “Lanier's acceptance today by poets and students of poetry and versification has enabled the poet's fame to beat down the barriers which persisted after a long period of civil strife … Lanier's position as one of America's first ranking poets is secure.” See Webb and Coulson, 102f.
-
Poems, I, lxxixf.
-
Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1941), 1014f.
-
Ibid., 1016.
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