[In the following essay, Petry examines Lanier's theory of etherealization, or abandonment of the senses for the soul, as presented in his essay “Retrospects and Prospects.” The critic also considers the representation of death in his poetry.]

It was in the Spring of 1871 that the Southern poet, essayist, critic, and flutist Sidney Lanier published an essay entitled “Retrospects and Prospects” in successive issues of the Southern Magazine. In this little essay, which has been quite ignored by otherwise enthusiastic Lanierolators, Lanier expounds his not-too-original, rather unconvincingly argued, and occasionally frankly illogical theory of “etherealization,” that “great central idea of the ages”(286)¹ which, at least for Lanier, manages to conveniently explain the development of the natural world, mankind, culture, and human institutions. In a nutshell, “etherealization” [or “spiritualization”(289)] involves the abandonment of “sense” (which Lanier sees as including artificial physical confines, violence, “clutter,” and elitism) in favor of “soul” (which involves freedom, non-violence, few complexities, and a democratic, universal, and shall we say, “domestic” orientation). Lanier attempts to prove the validity of his theory of etherealization by exploring four major realms within which the etherealization process allegedly has taken, or is taking, place: (1)Nature, (2)Politics, (3)Religion, and (4)Art (subsumed within which are architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, and prose). Now, according to Lanier, one can tell that Nature has etherealized because

To-day we have from Nature rather dews than avalanches; to-day she gives us more of the fruitful mould and less of the barren rock; to-day sees petroleum-wells and healing-springs instead of volcanoes; to-day the woods emerge from the gloom of giant ferns, and revel in the lights and odors of tiny flowers; to-day we pluck fruit from off rocks that once starved a fir.

(285)

One may well be impatient with such an uncompromisingly “romantic” interpretation of Nature, especially in view of the fact that Lanier was, for his day, uncommonly well-educated, scientific-minded, and devoted to the theories of Charles Darwin. At any rate, this unrealistically “roseate” view pervades the entire essay, and, incidentally, much of his poetry. He illustrates the etherealization of painting, for example, by remarking how “we get from it now rather tender home-scenes than barbarous battle-scenes; rather little ones saying prayers at mothers' knees than bloody-heeled conquerors soiling the plain”(290). In a fashion typical of this essay, however, this anti-martial dimension of etherealization is illogically countered throughout the piece [e.g., Lanier praises the “mechanic arts” for having etherealized to such a degree that whereas “the ancients did hew and whack each other with hard tangible stone and steel … we propel our bullets with an elastic gas”(289)]; and, indeed, the essay is rife with similar indications of “shoddy” logic, oversimplification, and just plain shallow thinking. One may explain these difficulties in the very ways in which sympathetic Lanierolators attempt to explain the considerable shortcomings of his poetry: the compulsiveness of a man forced to write frantically during the periods of remission of a long-term battle with tuberculosis (he had been suffering for some five years before writing “Retrospects and Prospects,” and died a decade later); his characteristic failure to revise his writings; the haste to be expected from a poor man accustomed to writing “pot boiling” travel books and “juvenile” versions of Malory; the deep strain of romanticism which is such a powerful element in his poetry and letters; and his strong, rather shallow tendency to see the world in black and white terms, an element apparent in his favorite poetic motif, the use of contrasts (head/heart, up/down, etc.). But however one may attempt to explain the inadequacies of “Retrospects and Prospects,” it is clear that one of the most remarkable inadequacies of the essay is that Lanier fails to touch upon what is, in effect, a sort of “microcosm” of etherealization in action: death. When one considers how frequently the notion of death is encountered in much of his best poetry, and how perfectly human death embodies the passage from “sense” to “soul,” it is really quite incredible that it apparently did not occur to Lanier that death can be seen as the perfect example of etherealization. In this article, we shall see just how perfectly the notions expressed in “Retrospects and Prospects” correspond to the ideas of death expressed in Lanier's poetry, and we shall try to come to some understanding of this rather startling omission from his theory of etherealization.

One may initially assert that Lanier omits the mention of individual corporal death from “Retrospects and Prospects” simply because he is treating etherealization as a collective historical process, rather than as something specifically involving individual lives. In the earlier portions of his essay, Lanier does indeed emphasize civilization and “Progress,” and seems frankly uncomfortable that the “old road we called the nineteenth century is ended; we stand at the mile-post with beating hearts and gaze up the unfamiliar avenue of a new era”(282). However, the strong initial emphasis upon etherealization as a collective, historical process is, curiously, not consistently maintained throughout the essay. In fact, Lanier is quite explicit that “a soul and a sense linked together in order to fight each other more conveniently, compose a man” and that “soul must win”(283). One would reasonably expect Lanier to follow these assertions through to the next logical one, viz, that a man etherealizes at his death, but Lanier never makes the connection. In order to find that connection, one must turn to his poetry. The following poem, quoted in its entirety, is called “The Stirrup-Cup”:

Death, thou'rt a cordial old and rare:
Look how compounded, with what care!
Time got his wrinkles reaping thee
Sweet herbs from all antiquity.
David to thy distillage went,
Keats, and Gotama excellent,
Omar Khayyam, and Chaucer bright,
And Shakspere for a king-delight.
Then, Time, let not a drop be spilt:
Hand me the cup whene'er thou wilt;
‘Tis thy rich stirrup-cup to me;
I'll drink it down right smilingly.

(45)

This poem is quite characteristic of Lanier. The highly conventional and rigid form; the apostrophes to personified abstractions (Death, Time); Lanier's self-conscious and rather immodest association of himself with the great poets of the past; the concluding note of cheerfulness; and the rather grotesque, cannibalistic image of the poets being dehumanized into “herbs” to be distilled and drunk, make “The Stirrup-Cup” a most Lanierian poem. Now, one may note that in this poem Lanier is treating death as an historical process, as one affecting individual lives, and as one eventually to affect himself in a very personal way: in effect, the poem handles death in the all-encompassing fashion which would be expected in so wide-ranging an essay as “Retrospects and Prospects,” but which was not attained, perhaps because of the unfortunate initial emphasis upon etherealization as an historical process. But for our purposes, what is most noteworthy about “The Stirrup-Cup” is that it treats death as etherealization inasmuch as “sense” (the physical bodies of David, Keats, et al.) quite literally becomes “soul”: the “cordial old and rare” is a “spirit” because it is a liquor. Were we dealing with the works of any other poet, one might justifiably accuse us of willful misreading for detecting a “cordial”/liquor/“spirit”/ghost pun; with Lanier, however, such an admittedly rather feeble pun is common.

It may be further remarked how in “The Stirrup-Cup” time is distilling the poets to make the cordial death, and, not surprising for a dying man, Lanier was apparently preoccupied with the idea of time. In the companion poem to “The Stirrup-Cup” entitled “Tampa Robins,” Lanier (quite characteristically) personifies the dying poet as a robin, and asserts, “While breasts are red and wings are bold / And green trees wave us globes of gold, / Time's scythe shall reap but bliss for me / —Sunlight, song, and the orange-tree”(28). Embedded within this optimistic assertion is the implication that time is something which co-exists with the course of an individual's life, and which ends it (the traditional scythe image), but which itself somehow ends once one passes out of life. This admittedly rather illogical belief is precisely what one finds in “Retrospects and Prospects,” wherein etherealization is termed “freeing things from the limitations of time and space” (298). What more perfectly embodies the idea of release from the confines of temporal and spatial co-ordinates than the physical death of an individual? And yet Lanier does not bring this in, attempting instead (with little success) to try to force his initial “historical” bias into an argument of how Nature, Politics, Religion, and Art are freeing themselves from time and space.

Not surprisingly, but rather unclearly, in his attempts to demonstrate how these four elements are freeing themselves from these two confines thanks to the process of etherealization, Lanier brings in the notion of “floating.” Painting, which Lanier feels has etherealized into photographs and engravings (290), is now in more “democratic” forms which “float forth … and glitter in a free heaven for all to see”(290). Likewise, “music has etherealized, and … has floated away freely into all homes over the whole land”(296). Similarly, every time Religion “has shaken itself free of an inquisition, of a persecution, of an intolerance … she has signalized the event by rising and floating …”(304). Now, although one may find it difficult to visualize photographs, engravings, music, and religion floating, it is a readily imaginable and powerful notion when applied to the human soul; and, indeed, floating forms the final and clearest image of “Sunrise,” Lanier's famous (and misnamed “death-bed”) poem, written when he was suffering from a fever of 104°:

… 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.

(9)

Once again, however, this notion of the floating soul, so readily applicable to the notion of etherealization, is never mentioned in “Retrospects and Prospects.”

Now, one may be rather surprised to find a highly conventional Southern poet exhibiting this pagan idea of the sun as a sort of god-head, but Lanier was, for his day, a man of unorthodox religious beliefs who had very little patience with organized religion (see, for example, the poem entitled “Remonstrance”). Perhaps one may partly attribute his unorthodoxy to the aforementioned scientific orientation which was so strong an element in Lanier's intellectual life, an orientation which, furthermore, may help explain his treatment of death in “The Marshes of Glynn.” There is some indication that biologists in Lanier's day had taught, under the influence of Darwinian thought, that animal life had achieved its current physical state by traveling from the sea, to marsh areas, and finally to land,² and, significantly, the poem “The Marshes of Glynn” incorporates a tripartite movement and structure which is the opposite of this. As the persona moves from the woods with the “Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven / With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven / Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,—”(14), to the marsh region with its far less intricate expanses of “marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade, / Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade”(16), and finally, to the uniform blankness of “the terminal blue of the main”(16)—not “interminable” (endless) but “terminal” (signifying death)—one finds not simply a sort of “reverse evolution,” but, more importantly, a movement from more complex forms (“braided,” “woven,” “intricate”) to a vast simple one (the ocean); and the movement from complex to simple forms is a cardinal aspect of the etherealization process. For example, in criticizing the “cluttered” and complex poetry of Milton and praising the simpler verse of Tennyson, Lanier writes:

Observe … how many purely material accessories of Milton's poetry are well gotten rid of and purified away in Tennyson's. The elisions, the apostrophic shortenings, the involutions, the anaconda conceits which in mere kindness wind about us and crush us to death: these are all gone. Full words, direct arrangements of clauses, terse phrases, Saxon roots, light airy metaphors, three-word conceits: these display themselves in Tennyson. Dainty flowers have sprouted where the gigantic ferns died … [The] iron manacles on the wrists of poetry have been stricken off by a magic touch, the walls of the prison have opened, and the bound apostle may now preach in the market-place.

(297)

However much one may disagree with Lanier's estimation of the poetry of Milton, it is nevertheless clear that the movement towards death embodied in “The Marshes of Glynn” is indistinguishable from the process of simplification which Lanier held to be characteristic of etherealization; and yet, as we have noted, Lanier does not indicate this in “Retrospects and Prospects.”

But we are not yet through with “The Marshes of Glynn.” One may note that his poem ends with the image of the “terminal blue” ocean flowing into the marsh regions:

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.

(17-18)

There are two aspects of this passage which merit special attention. First, the emphasis is on the creation of a mood of serenity and peace. Nowhere in his poetry does Lanier depict death as violent or even unpleasant, and this is very much in keeping with the assertion running throughout “Retrospects and Prospects” that the process of etherealization, inasmuch as it entails a movement from “sense” to “soul,” gradually de-emphasizes the rather violent physical aspects of the world and mankind, and emphasizes the serene and the domestic. For example, what Lanier finds so “ethereal” about a group of sculptures by John Rogers is that “They engage themselves with the domesticities of our life; and by as much as home-life is tenderer than camp-life, by as much as an idyll is more heavenly than an epic, by so much are these groups more ethereal than the groups of ancient sculpture” (289). Now, although one must grant that Lanier's poetry is not “domestic,” it is nevertheless true that he does posit death as a state of serenity towards which one progresses as one moves away from the physical and mental anguish of daily existence. For example, the persona of “The Marshes of Glynn” has, in true Emersonian fashion, visited Nature in order to refresh his troubled soul and mind:

… 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
When length was fatigue, and when breadth was
          but bitterness sore,
And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable
          pain
Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain,—

(15)

The final, deeply religious section of the poem is similarly peaceful, the curiosity as to “what swimmeth below when the tide comes in” betokening less terror of death than a quiet, scientific interest in it:

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 marvellous
          marshes of Glynn.

(18)

In addition to this emphasis upon serenity and peace—or what Lanier terms “calm control” in praising the poetry of Tennyson (297)—the passage depicting the flowing of the ocean into the marshes is important because it suggests that death involves a loss of individual identity. This notion of the loss and/or blending of identity may be attributed in part to the influence of Emerson [see, for example, “A Florida Sunday”: “… All's in each, yet every one of all / Maintains his Self complete and several” (145)], and it is a strong element in Lanier's poetry. In “Song of the Chattahoochee,” for example, the apparently blissful, dutiful Chattahoochee River has no qualms about losing its identity by being mixed with the ocean: “Downward the voices of Duty call— / Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main” (25). This willingness to merge one's identity with other identities and/or with a “larger” entity (such as the ocean) is, needless to say, a source of much of the optimism found in the poem “The Stirrup-Cup”: that the persona, by dying, would blend his identity as a poet with a universal, collective identity of deceased poets of other times and other places was no doubt a source of much comfort for Lanier.

This concept of “Universalizing,” or of losing and/or blending one's identity with those of others, is closely aligned with the element of universalization which Lanier posits as a strong characteristic of the process of etherealization. In writing of the etherealization of his favorite art (music), Lanier asserts that “More than any art, music is in omnium manibus; and steadily improves in purity, in refined spiritual strength, in universality” (296). As a poet who was, surprisingly, far more national that sectional in his orientation and sympathies (see, for example, the “Centennial Meditation of Columbia” and “The Psalm of the West”), Lanier clearly appreciated anything which was conducive to, or reflected, the universal; and both death as a great leveler and etherealization as a great democratizer can be regarded as universal in applicability and universalizing in purpose.

Enough has been said to indicate that, at least given Lanier's poetic treatment of it, the death of an individual could be seen as a perfect example of etherealization in a microcosmic form. Yet why is it that the same man who asserts in “Retrospects and Prospects” that “man and nature steadily etherealize” (284) does not introduce the matter of individual death into an essay which obviously was intended to be a far-ranging consideration of etherealization? One approach to this curious situation is to consider the readership of “Retrospects and Prospects,” for if the readers were of the sort to find “morbidity” untasteful, one could understand Lanier's reluctance to introduce into his essay so perfect an example of etherealization as human death. However, there is no indication that the short-lived but apparently rather intellectual Southern Magazine had a particularly “squeamish” readership. Another approach, and probably an easier one, is to try to attribute the omission to the aforementioned shortcomings of Lanier: shallow thinking, a failure to revise his work intelligently, and so forth; and no doubt there would be some justification for this approach. But a third and, I believe, the most reasonable approach is to consider the dates involved. “Retrospects and Prospects” was published in the Spring of 1871. The poems we have considered were written as follows: “The Marshes of Glynn”—Summer, 1878; “The Stirrup-Cup”—January, 1877; “Tampa Robins”—January or February, 1877; “Song of the Chattahoochee”—November, 1877; “A Florida Sunday”—Winter/Spring, 1877; “Sunrise”—December, 1880. There is every indication in Lanier's biographies that although his health had broken when he was confined in a prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland (1864-65), and although his lungs had hemorrhaged in January, 1868, until late in the 1870s Lanier had an unrealistic faith that somehow he would not die of tuberculosis, and, indeed, the record of much of his later life consists of a series of trips to Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York in quest of cures. This unrealistic faith—unrealistic not simply because of the quality of medicine in the nineteenth century, but also because Lanier came from a long line of consumptives, including his mother—does much to explain how the topic of death is carefully avoided³ in the 1871 essay on etherealization, but frequently encountered in poems written late in the 1870s, when the severity of his illness apparently had demolished the faith in recovery which had been so strong in the early years of his consumption. In this regard, one could suspect that, had “Retrospects and Prospects” been written in, say, 1879 instead of 1871, the essay would have been quite different—would, indeed, have had a more personal rather than historical bias, and would have included far more emphasis upon that microcosm of etherealization, death. This is not to say that a later version of “Retrospects and Prospects” would necessarily be “morbid,” for, as the poems themselves make abundantly clear, even if the faith that he would not die of tuberculosis had fallen to pieces, there remained in Lanier a core of serenity which saw death as a universal and spiritual experience to be faced not with terror, but rather with calm acceptance.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, the page numbers of citations from “Retrospects and Prospects” [The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles Anderson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945), V] and from Lanier's poetry [Poems of Sidney Lanier, ed. by His Wife, New Ed. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1901)] will be indicated by parentheses in the body of the paper.

2. Philip Graham, “Sidney Lanier and the Pattern of Contrast,” American Quarterly, II, No. 4 (Winter, 1959), p. 507, n.

3. The only mention of death in “Retrospects and Prospects” is in the reference to the etherealization of architecture: the wealthy now construct mausoleums instead of pyramids, so that our thoughts are directed “rather to the soul that is risen out of the grave than to the inert bones that decay within it” (288). Lanier then promptly changes the subject to sculpture.