[In the following excerpt, De Bellis explores The Science of English Verse for Lanier's literary criticism and his discussion of the relationship between music and poetry.]

In his last years Lanier matched the tuberculosis that scorched his lungs to a white-hot pen. Though he wrote in a continuous streak, he was often forced by necessity to depart from projects which might have continued the philosophical, psychological, and esthetic investigations of “The Marshes of Glynn.” In his last three years only a few poems and The Science of English Verse continued the lines of his major development. But everything he wrote still related itself directly to his dream of educating the emotions of his nation and of correcting the mistaken devaluation of feeling.

Lanier published “The Marshes of Glynn” in an omnibus volume of anonymous writers, A Masque of Poets. The book slipped into oblivion because of the mediocrity of most of the selections, but at least one reader thought Lanier's poem was by Tennyson. And W. D. Howells, ironically enough, stated that it almost bettered Swinburne.¹ Interestingly, though Lanier had read Swinburne and had frequently commented about him, he complained that he could never be recognized in “a Swinburnian time.” Though he may have responded to Swinburne's rhythms and tone color, he must have been displeased by the English poet's voluptuousness and simple glitter.² Lanier had made his private amalgam of Poe, Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, Emerson, and Whitman; and his poem was selected by Longfellow for his Poems of Places (1879), perhaps because it appealed to his own rich sense of rhythmic experimentation. For the past century, Lanier's fame has rested on his musicality of verse, but it is unfortunate that no commentator has recovered the thematic service Lanier's musicality had performed. It had provoked a deeper emotional response for his fairly elementary ideas about the morality of feeling.

I THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE

During 1878 Lanier organized his many ideas on the interaction of music and poetry into a series of lectures at the Peabody Institute later published as The Science of English Verse. Even while at Oglethorpe, Lanier had been interested in the impact of music on feeling, and his musical career showed a determination to synthesize the two arts in accordance with what he felt to be the spirit of the time, as well as his personal religious aspirations.

Though virtually all poets have manipulated the musicality of verse, Lanier always placed a high priority on sonic rather than semantic effects of language. His debates, speeches, letters, and essays show conscious manipulation of dialects, speech rhythms, and phrasings of words. But he was determined to connect music and poetry, though, as seen in the previous chapter, when he had the chance to write poetry for music he failed. He thought his ideas in The Science of English Verse were original contributions to understanding verse technique, and he was right, though his work was misconstrued because of the book's ambiguous writing. It must have occurred to him that the demonstration of identities between music and poetry could subtly propagandize for the mysterious effect of music on the moral nature of man.

In selecting the term “science,” Lanier was also ambiguous, though perhaps not intentionally misleading; for critics at once condemned him for trying to formulate with finality the ways poetry is constructed. He really only wanted to demonstrate some of the practices that have been followed and to suggest others. It has been thought that Lanier probably did not mean “verse” but “versification,” for he does not deal with a large number of elements of verse which have little to do with versification. To Lanier, verse is simply the relation of sounds, so all that distinguishes music from poetry is the tone color of vowels and consonants compared to the tone color of flutes or violins. Both music and speech share rhythm, tune, and tone color; and, for this reason, poetry can gain some of the freedom of music.

As music may shift accent for emphasis away from the rhythmic accent, poetry can create an opposition between rhythmic and logical accent by use of originality in the creation of rhythms. (Lanier means that the stresses in a word may counter the rhythm of a line by having the divisions of a word of two or more syllables from separate parts of different musical groups, like the foot.) The freest poetry would have the least rhythmic regularity, the fewest end-stops in a line, and few strong line endings. In his implication that the freest poetry would tend toward prose—or what we now know as “free verse”—Lanier was creating the esthetic basis for much later experimentation; and he was also defining the nature of practices like Whitman's. Yet Lanier argued that such freedom would not create “prose poetry” since the freest poetry would be led back to poetry by the regularity of its rhythm. Interestingly, these arguments had occurred to Lanier not from an analysis of his or his contemporaries' techniques but from his study of Shakespeare's poetic development toward freer forms.

But Lanier did considerably more than merely insist upon the relation of music and poetry. For one thing, he presented the first lucid description of the way in which poetry could be understood according to musical rhythms, offering conclusive examples and detailed analysis. The poet Karl Shapiro has defended the work as “the most famous and influential in the field of temporal prosody … in no sense dated … one of the best expositions of its theory in the literature of metrics.”³ Most critics agree. Lanier was the first American to break ground for a richer understanding of poetic rhythm, and he is still important, as Joseph Hendren has shown in his recent thoughtful study, “Time and Stress in English Verse with Special Reference to Lanier's Theory of Rhythm.”⁴

Hendren has found that Lanier's only fault is his inability to do away with the devices of traditional scansion and, therefore, rely completely on the musical implications of his novel approach. For Lanier intended to demonstrate how rhythm in poetry depends on the temporal relation of accents, and thus a different stress notation had to be used to make this apparent, a stress system using musical notation. This notation involves him in a demonstration of the difference in the “quantity” of syllables. Thus “it is” is an iambic unit like “was grouped,” but the second “iamb” obviously takes longer to say than the first. There is a quantitative difference; and, since this is true, it is misleading to say they have the same foot length. Lanier assumed it would be possible for the trained ear to grasp spontaneously the similarities and differences of duration, but laboratory studies by linguists have shown, though there may be general agreement about many specific cases, the identifications of duration are subjective and variable. Even so, musical notation will give, in some ways, a clearer indication of exactly what rhythm is being employed than the stressaccent system does.

And so Lanier lists several rhythms of English verse according to how the ear instinctively groups sounds. Primary rhythm is the ticking of a clock before any pattern is imposed on it (tick-tick). Secondary rhythm is a pattern of clock ticks (tick-tock). Then Lanier sets up a system of proportions. If the second sound or syllable is twice, three times, or four times the previous one, then duple, triple, or quadruple time is constructed—exactly as in music. Lanier notes that a major difference between the musical and prosodic bar is that the musical one always begins with a stress or beat; yet it would have been easy for him to free himself from the necessity to adhere to the old system of the metrical foot and to scan his poetry fully in musical terms, as Hendren has suggested.

Lanier's other kinds of rhythm are not very useful, and, regretfully, he did not explore alliteration or assonance beyond a few preliminary notes. Yet his demonstration of the ability to scan poetry differently gave a sharp incentive to other investigations and made the musical study of verse a permanent part of English prosody.

Paul Fussell, Jr., has directed attention to basic problems involved in Lanier's approach when he notes the basic weakness in the added complexity of musical notation, as well as the danger of implying that poetry follows musical principles explicitly.⁵ Allen Tate had earlier sounded the alarm by suggesting that a poet who would develop such a theory simply rationalizes his incapacity to take the subject matter of poetry seriously.⁶ (In Tate's later essays, he seems unsure that poetry has a definable “subject matter.”) Robert Penn Warren has accused Lanier of a complex camouflaging of his own withdrawal into feeling. Other critics have specifically attacked Lanier's inability to show in musical notation what is actually heard. But many scholars and poets have found that Lanier's theory redeems poetry from mechanical contrivances like the foot that are inaccurate and ambiguous; and we may cite the controversy among Lanier critics about the “meter” of “The Song of the Chattahoochee” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” They have also found that Lanier's theory helps represent more accurately the different musical effects of the same kinds of feet.

Hendren's purpose was to “rescue Lanier's significant work from discredit and neglect,” and he succeeds quite well. He begins by listing some basic errors, three of which are “that one can discover the rhythm of a verse by simply dividing it into feet,” and “that a foot is a definable entity, or that accent (stress) in itself sufficiently accounts for rhythm.” He emphasizes the importance of Lanier's description of the duration of sounds by showing that two dactylic lines may take different times to speak, one in duple time and another in triple. Thus, the same feet might have the difference of a waltz and a march, but conventional scansion would never indicate it. Additionally, the traditional foot is often helpless in dividing some lines—as many in “The Marshes of Glynn” might indicate. The foot itself, he concludes, “is not a section beginning with a stress, nor a section ending with a stress, nor an isochronous interval, nor a sense section, nor a syntactic grouping. Just what it is nobody can tell.”⁷ Lanier had begun to liberate prosody from fetters like the foot, but he had insisted on trying to construct a musical theory within the traditional use of the barred foot, a convention which his theory totally opposed.

Hendren reconstructs the direction of Lanier's thought and qualifies his overstatements. Lanier had said, “There is absolutely no difference between the sound-relations used in music and those used in verse,” and he was quickly dismissed by many critics for his absolutism. He meant only “sound-relations,” not actual performances or readings which, of course, draw in the element of subjectivity, according to Hendren. He also discusses Lanier's crucial core idea that “rhythm of any sort is impossible except through the coordination of time,” and he explains that this means that “rhythm is neither performable nor conceivable without measured time; that every line of verse is divided into a number of sensibly equal time periods marked by stress; that the time periods so marked are themselves subdivided into equal segments of time (beats) by their syllable configuration.” Here is the foundation of verse rhythm, and not only is Lanier right about it, but Hendren sees “the consensus of modern prosody” solidly behind him.

Lanier's major weaknesses in his theory now appear to be attributable to exaggeration. His title proclaimed what he knew could never be—a “science” of verse. His frequent and hasty comments about the place of quantity in English scansion that opposed his own practice surely show his manifesto fervor outrunning his good sense. Lanier did not want to describe merely the operations of music in poetry but how poetry began to etherealize by becoming like music. While his “wider applications” and perorations scattered through the book may have been simply oratorical embellishments, Lanier clearly wished to give music a more glorious place in man's life than others had. The examples he offered of the operation of music in ordinary life appealed to moral thinkers, and this effect was the major intention in Lanier's writing of this book: he intended to discover the ways in which emotion might be more completely manipulated. In a sense, the ultimate meaning of The Science of English Verse in the development of Lanier's imagination is similar to that of “The Marshes of Glynn.”

One of Lanier's perorations shows this more clearly than this technical analysis of the book has perhaps done. He argues that science has proved that the primordial mode of disease, of the seasons, and of the distribution of nebulae—all things in “nature”—is rhythm. He points to Poe's view of the universe in Eureka as “nothing more than the rhythmic beating of the heart of God,” and he calls it one of the most striking similes in literature. Paraphrasing his earlier comment in Tiger-Lilies that music is harmony, harmony is love, and love is God, Lanier quotes: “‘The father of metre is rhythm, and the father of rhythm is God.’”⁸ As the action of opposing forces in nature and poetry creates rhythm, so natural oppositions in the moral world create “moral rhythm.” Lanier put these thoughts into a poem, “Opposition,” and this suggests that his perorations for his quite technical book were “prose poems.” And yet Lanier, when revising his ideas for poems, chose, surprisingly, to follow the form of Tennyson's “In Memoriam” quatrains—iambic tetrameter rhyming abab.

As Lanier gained increased confidence from his experiments in “Corn” and “The Symphony,” experiments which he thought placed him in the avant-garde, he felt that his poetry was beginning to shuck the bonds of convention. He perhaps made the mistake of many other poets in thinking that whatever is new is better and that “forms” necessarily suppress an ambitious poet's talents. Nevertheless, he succeeded in liberating himself from the mechanical schemes of meter and tone color that he had used in his poetry of the chivalric vein. He knew why he was liberating himself, so there was no danger of affectation or of the creation of “art-for-art's-sake” “esthetic poetry” which he despised. But Lanier's powerful hold on his view of the morality of feelings kept him from liberating his lexicon. He retained not only the archaisms with their implications of chivalric values but also some sentimental diction (“dear,” “sweet”) while he continued to manipulate imagery of nature.

It seems possible that Lanier's experiments with musical verse and his writing of The Science of English Verse were his ways of convincing himself that he was an original poet. For this reason his lexicon remained, apparently, more conventional even though his rhythms were so free that they moved toward free verse. He did not realize that such a verse called for a refinement in diction, tone, and imagery. Nor did he guess that his occasional grotesque images would become valuable to another kind of poet. In other words, Lanier was not a Symbolist poet; he simply moved along parallel lines with others who were in many ways precursors of it, like Swinburne, a translator of Baudelaire. Perhaps now the deeper tension in Lanier's mind has been exposed—reactionary imagery and diction opposed to a radical symbolism and musicality of verse. Growing more subjective, he intended to plan entire books of poetry around his “Marsh” poems. He had simply reached the limit of his vision and ability.

II SHAKESPEARE

Lanier addressed The Science of English Verse to his fellow poets, and it surely appealed to them far more than his lectures on Shakespeare, those on the English novel, or his editions of chivalric classics—all works that resulted from Lanier's growing academic pursuits. While some may imagine these publications were unfortunate scatterings of his draining energy and dwindling time, Lanier seems to have taken this direction to confirm his basic ethical and esthetic ideas and to acquire a perspective from which to examine his literary situation. We may speculate that Lanier might have become increasingly absorbed by his nonpoetical interests and gradually stopped writing poetry completely. Perhaps he theorized that the lectern offered a better place from which to influence directly the morality of his age. Possibly Lanier might have been led to stop writing poetry if he had understood the depth of resistance in society to his evangel of love, and if he had recognized how his absorption in the musicality of verse had brought him close to the “art-for-art's-sake” decadence he despised.

His first serious interest in literary criticism took him naturally enough to Shakespeare; and, reflecting the “Bardolatry” of his time, Lanier thought Shakespeare the perfect synthesis of artistic originality and moral growth. Always a person who identified with great artists, Lanier may have found his “ego ideal” in Shakespeare. No matter what the reason, he found in Shakespeare's plays “moral teaching … pure morality” and that each play was “in the strictest sense, a powerful sermon.”⁹ Thus, Two Gentlemen from Verona (an unlikely choice) was to Lanier a “sermon” about “that forgiveness which pardons the trespasser.” He found the greatest moral artist was also “a special adorer of music,” so his life was “morally musical.” Shakespeare's career moved from realism toward the “sweet music” of his last plays which centered on the theme of reconciliation and forgiveness. This theme, coincidentally, was also the major one of Lanier's last poems.

But Shakespeare's own moral growth, not his plays, interested Lanier, especially in its revelation through his changing poetic practices. Shakespeare's disuse of rhyme and regular rhythm and his use of run-on lines, feminine endings, and weak endings were “clearly an advance towards freedom.” While Lanier's critical evaluation is correct, he makes a too-simple analogy from this fact when he asserts that Shakespeare's freedom enabled him to shift from “form toward chaos” and from love to egoism. But he finds that the great accomplishment of Shakespeare is his balancing of form against chaos in both art and morality, through a career that developed from the innocent relation of man to nature (A Midsummer Night's Dream), to the dark reality of man's relation to man (Hamlet), to the heavenly relation of man to God (The Tempest).¹⁰ The pattern shows, not surprisingly, a great similarity to that of Lanier's own life work.

Lanier makes a tighter identification with Shakespeare by seeing him as opposed by the same vicious critics he had earlier delineated as kin to Christ's crucifiers. Lanier imagines that each of them was a prophet of a new poetry who was ignored by his age but who will be vindicated by the judgment of time. Lanier regards Shakespeare as having passed through the strains of oppositions on the way to forgiveness as Christ had. A diagram of the final plays resembled, to Lanier, a cross. Shakespeare was God's representative on earth, entrusted with teaching men how to control, “with temperance and perfect art,” all oppositions.¹¹ Before the poet can teach, he must learn; but Lanier evidently did not see the relevance of his own writing of poetry to self-education, though he assumes that Shakespeare's life-work revealed such a self-education. Having made so many correspondences between himself and Shakespeare, it is likely that he would have seen that Shakespeare's loosening of forms resembled his own attempt to unite poetry to music.

III FORGIVENESS, THE LAST MAJOR THEME

As we have noted, Lanier asserted that Shakespeare's last phase used freer forms, and it centered upon the theme of forgiveness. The two were related in Lanier's mind. When the artist had achieved his “musical morality” through a struggle with artistic form which was, in fact, a moral struggle, he would then be able to confer this moral freedom on those who had never understood him, morally or artistically. In forgiving his detractors, he would relieve them of the guilt of having injured him, and he would also free himself from spite and anger. Put in other terms, the freedom to discover the limits of artistic possibilities required a strong capacity of self-identification. And this message, perhaps, was Lanier's final one about the education of the feelings of his age: by witnessing the artist's capacity for love and forgiveness, despite society's resistance, the men of the mistaken age could use him as a moral exemplar. Symbolic moral teaching is all that is left, and the symbolic teaching of art was less dramatic than that of an entire life. Despite Lanier's understanding, mildness and conciliation were not easily achieved by him. In “Remonstrance” of 1878 he ostensibly attacks science, but he shifts to an assault on the critics he berated in his lecture on Shakespeare. Those critics freed Barabbas but stabbed Christ. The poet begs: “I would thou left'st me free, to live with love.”

But in “How Love Looked for Hell,” written while he worked on “The Marshes of Glynn,” Lanier extended the plea for freedom to an ideal description of forgiveness, and the poem recalls in its allegorical simplicity the early joust poems. Prince Love's ministers, Mind and Sense, take him to see hell; but, since hell is a matter of viewpoint, Sense insists, “I saw true hell with mine own eye”; however, Love calmly says, “But I cannot find where thou hast found / Hell.”¹² At last, when Mind confesses that he had dreamed he had murdered love, Love replies with complete forgiveness, “In dreams of hate true loves begin.” But the allegorical form insures that there will be no challenge to this notion of etherealization. And this problem is exactly the one which Lanier's psychological honesty has been unable to resolve in “The Marshes of Glynn.”

IV BOYS' BOOKS AND ADULT ESSAYS

Another but secondary approach by Lanier to the education of feelings was his editing of chivalric classics for boys which kept the pot boiling from 1878 to 1881. However, Lanier did use this chance to educate those who were as yet unaffected by the materialism of the Gilded Age. Apart from the customary bowdlerizing of the texts, Lanier's scholarly introductions drew ethical implications from the stories. In 1878, he wrote his publisher that The Boy's Froissart would direct the reader to “those persistent remains of Chivalry” in modern culture, and he notes that Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif were “large and beautiful souls” to be imitated. As in his Shakespeare essays, Lanier appealed to hero worship; but he felt compelled to add that “Somehow it seems harder to be a good knight nowadays than it was then,” listing the everyday problems that might tempt a boy to vice including “the utmost delicacy of national honor”—just what Lanier had called the result of uneducated feeling in his 1860 letter to his father. But Lanier was not directing his remarks solely to boys, for in The Boy's Mabinogion (1881) he contrasted King Arthur's love of law with contemporary legislatures which “multiply laws and murder Law.” And The Boy's King Arthur (1880) and The Boy's Percy (1881) directed boys to be “fair in trade, loyal in love, generous to the poor … and honest in all things.” He expected much from boys.

Continuing in his direct attempts to educate the public, Lanier gave a series of lectures early in 1881 about the English novel in which he argues that depth characterization is a modern innovation and in which he also summarizes and develops many ideas of his later years. He argues that the Greeks did not depict personality, or what Carlyle called “the mystery in us that calls itself I.” Since Lanier thought everything evolved from simple to complex, from chaos to form, from definite to indefinite, he easily reconciled the theory of evolution with his idea of etherealization; but, unlike later literary Naturalists, he exempted human development from such determinism. Freedom was necessary to Lanier's moral view, and it was intimately related to his view of the ultimate synthesis of all forms that have etherealized. The growth of personality toward the Unknown, toward one's fellow man, and toward nature becomes unified by “the conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order.”¹³ The very form of the novel, Lanier explained, reveals a synthesis of science and poetry, as well as a spiritualization of language, for prose is a freer form than poetry because it contains more forms. The need for a freer form enabled the novel to develop from drama in order to explain “the more complex relations between modern personalities.”

As Lanier had insisted that every play was a powerful sermon, so the novel is the most moral of all forms of literature; and George Eliot, because she uses a newer form and responds to modern ideas, is a more moral teacher than Shakespeare. Unlike Shakespeare, she had discovered, besides the “enormous motive of forgiveness,” the mysterious forces in human personality that determine people to love each another. Because the omniscient point of view resembles, to Lanier, the omniscience of God, he calls the novel “the very highest and holiest plane of creative effort.” In fact, his claims for the novel are so strong, we wonder if he might have turned to this genre again as a way to free his poetry from the technical problems he had encountered and to allow deeper explorations of human motives. His characterizations of Smallin and Cranston in Tiger-Lilies reveal some interest in psychological fiction.

Lanier was certainly making the most of his educational roles and used his new positions as ways to encourage the education of the feelings of his era, and he not only employed them, however indirectly, as guides to his own artistic development, but also used the opportunities to reject some of his earlier views. Only six years after writing “The Symphony” he could write that “Charity has become organic and a part of the system of things.”¹⁴ As we so often sense in Lanier's essays, his self-assurance was partly adopted to convince himself.

V POETIC FEVER

Lanier had complained that his professional music career and his lectureships at the Peabody Institute and Johns Hopkins University made him “crush back” poems he longed to write. In 1880 he wrote: “To be an artist, and preach the gospel of poetry: that is the breath of my life.” There was barely enough breath left for him to voice his last poems; for, since November, 1876, when a mysterious five-hundred-dollar gift had allowed him to rest in Florida, he knew he did not have long to live. Among the poems of this period is “The Crystal” (spring, 1880) in which Lanier forgives the faults of the “sweet seers and stellar visionaries” who were the greatest poets and thinkers. The poem expanded upon a letter written in November, 1876, to Bayard Taylor. He told Taylor that the greatest poets needed the greatest allowances: “What enormous artistic crimes do we have continually to pardon in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare! How often is the first utterly dull and long-winded, the second absurdly credulous and superstitious, the third over-done and fantastical!”¹⁵

This rather cavalier way of treating his betters occurred when Lanier was at one of the peaks of his artistic egoism. In a letter explaining this poem, Lanier stated that his use of the term “forgiveness” derived from the Lord's Prayer which demands forgiveness of those sinning against us. “It becomes thus not only our right but our duty to ‘forgive’ them.”¹⁶ In his zeal to forgive, Lanier had once more fallen into the Christ-like pose which robbed his work of its most interesting human insights. It is possible to argue as well that the self-satisfaction and condescension of such an attitude as that shown in “The Crystal” seriously weakened his art by allowing a relaxation into abstractions of piety when a more concrete exploration of the human condition was needed.

In “The Crystal” Lanier expands this list of writers in need of “the greatest allowances,” many of whom he had listed as those ruined by capricious criticism: Buddha, Dante, Socrates, Milton, Aeschylus, Lucretius, Thomas à Kempis, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Caedmon, Keats, Emerson, Langland, Emanuel Swedenborg, Jacob Behmen, Tennyson, and Shakespeare require forgiveness because they never created a perfect work of art. The only perfection ever created was Christ, and he alone needs no forgiveness. Lanier's criticism, therefore, is moral, not artistic, just as his criticism of Shakespeare had been; but he seems unwilling to make sharp distinctions between art as art and art as biographical data. Naturally, Christ alone is blameless:

But Thee, but Thee, O Sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ.(17)

In “The Cloud” (June, 1880) Lanier returned to the posture of social critic that he had defined years before and which he linked in his imagination to Christ, the castigator of the moneylenders. Lanier arraigns the cloud for the crimes of murder and arson and asks why it does not plunge its lightning bolts in “Some maggot politician throng / Swarming to parcel out / The body of a land, and rout / The maw-conventicle, and ungorge Wrong.”¹⁸ But Lanier forgives the cloud since it acts according to a nature designed by God. The very freedom which had so appealed to Lanier earlier now seems to be fraught with anxiety, for the artist may be free to write what he pleases, but his responsibility is great in proportion to his freedom:

Awful is Art, because 'tis free.
The artist trembles o'er his plan,
          Where men his Self must see.

If the language and rhythms of this poem are an indication, Lanier thought the most unadorned expression of these abstractions would be most effective. Yet the experiments of “The Symphony,” “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” and “The Marshes of Glynn” had shown the risks that an artist takes in trying to find his original voice. “Crystal” and “The Cloud” may suggest that Lanier had begun not only to accustom himself to a sense of the crushing responsibilities of art but also to accept the inability of man being man to over succeed as an artist.

Despite his doubts, Lanier wrote two impressive poems two months before he died, “A Ballad of Trees and the Master” and “Sunrise,” which exhibit contrasting styles in the education of feeling, and two ways of living with some sense of defeat at having failed to educate nineteenth-century America, though he did his “devoirs” in obedience to the dream.

“A Ballad of Trees and the Master” is a simple, lyrically tender, and compassionate poem describing Christ's Agony in the Garden. The one person who did not need forgiveness and the model for Lanier's education of feelings, the “Poet of Poets,” Christ takes the same path as the narrator of “The Marshes of Glynn”:

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.(19)

The many repetitions of words, the rhyme links from stanza to stanza, the understated assonance, and the three-word rhymes in both stanzas carefully re-create a somber sorrow. Meanwhile, the dectyls and trochees are held in check, so that the movement does not become so quick that it distorts the tone. The poem looks back to some of Lanier's concise social protest poetry, but it is resolved, as those earlier poems are not, by the cross of salvation. And yet Lanier sees Christ in markedly human terms, enabling him to shape the personal crisis of the event. From Tiger-Lilies to “The Marshes of Glynn,” he had shown how nature can answer man's most disturbing questions, so long as man believes that nature ultimately loves man. Yet the narrator of “The Marshes of Glynn” remained in a quandary despite his apparent willingness to believe.

Christ receives, however, the love of the garden and returns renewed to the world only to have it misunderstand and destroy him, as it was fated to do because of the deep “error” implanted in man's nature through Adam's fall. Lanier imagines that such an acceptance of the oppositions of life, such a “musical morality” (to borrow his term in analyzing Shakespeare), can only be produced by the operation of an external force, typically revealing spiritual forces. Yet the garden is odd: the olives accept Christ by negating their alternative (“were not blind to him”); and the thorn leaves have a “mind” to him. The men who will shortly put Christ through the agony of the Cross are blind to him, and they will wound his head with a crown of thorns. Though nature may be misused by man, even to being turned into a wasteland, for the moment it “has a mind” to the man who symbolizes the possibilities of spiritual regeneration. The idiom “to mind” (to “understand,” “obey,” or “sympathize”) creates a current of understatement and suggests that the thorns, though put to a dark use, are not themselves a mysterious or hostile aspect of nature. Ironically, Christ has returned to nature at this time to prepare for death, and the chivalric language which accompanies him reminds us that he is the “great man” at last come back to the world to show it how to educate its feelings. Lanier's dark suggestion, however, is that, if such a man were to return, he would be misunderstood and killed.

“A Ballad of Trees and the Master” is such a perfect blend of Lanier's chivalric and protest themes, as well as a summation of his identification of himself with Christ and the “great man” and their probable fate, that there is little wonder he could have written it in fifteen minutes with a temperature of a hundred and four degrees. “Sunrise” was written shortly after “A Ballad of Trees and the Master”; and it offered an alternative to the artistic procedures of “A Ballad of Trees and the Master” by returning to the freer forms of the marsh poem, though it is nearly identical in theme: the preparation for death through the ministry of nature.

But Lanier's method and, surprisingly, his tone in “Sunrise,” are altogether different, for the forms of dark nature are revealed without terror and with a ritualistic praise and an ecstasy of faith totally unexpected in Lanier's late poetry. “Sunrise” may have been intended, however, to continue after the “waters of sleep” had subdued the narrator of “The Marshes of Glynn”:

          In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain
                    Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.
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 of wild sea-liberties, drifting,
          Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,
                    Came to the gates of sleep.(20)

(1-7)

This time, the sweeping anapestic verse helps to reflect the growing energy of the narrator, who is almost physically pulled back to life against his will. Or was the “sleep” actually the whole Transcendental experience of “The Marshes of Glynn”?

The link of the narrator and nature is made tenuous by the convoluted sweep of the lines and by the understated verbals and verbs “up-breathed,” “drifting,” and “sifting.” Otherwise, Lanier uses virtually the same devices of rhythm and tone color we have examined at some length in “The Marshes of Glynn.” For a moment the narrator lapses back into sleep and then his eyes open, foreshadowing sunrise.

In the second stanza the narrator shows himself a lover of nature:

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.

(16-18)

Not merely the major symbols but much of the imagery and language of “The Marshes of Glynn” is used from this point on. In “gospelling glooms” Lanier recovers two images; but, in making a metaphorical phrase of them, he gives a somewhat puritanical overtone to the oaks, making them unlikely as a “beloved.”

In the third stanza, the narrator embraces the trees with tears that rise “not from reason.” The leaves, “embroid'ring the dark of the question of man,” seem to give some “pattern and plan” to nature; but the dark doubt of the end of “The Marshes of Glynn” reappears: “(But would I could know, but would I could know).” But the narrator considers himself fortunate that the leaves “have wrought me / Designs on the night of our knowledge.” He is not content, but he is thankful for some knowledge of his mysterious life. These lines seem to be intimately related to the problem which ends “The Marshes of Glynn,” man's inability to discover the secrets of nature. But they are certainly not an answer. He begs nature to teach him the “terms of silence” and “the passion of patience,” apparently so he can resolve his bewilderment at the ambiguous signs nature affords man. The same fears that had bothered the narrator of “The Marshes of Glynn” during his passage through the woods have also affected this narrator, but Lanier has more specifically identified these fears as crises of religious faith. Lanier supplies in “Sunrise” no transition from woods to the marsh, and he draws an image from “The Symphony” to call the marsh an “old chemist, rapt in alchymy” who has solved the secrets of matter and so distills silence. Its “precious qualities of silence” symbolize for the narrator a profound peace that cannot be his.

The next stanza of this new section brings a full tide in the marshes, but there are no puzzling forms in the water since it is dawn, not twilight. The narrator notes that the marsh outdoes the riches of heaven: the sky has but one galaxy, but the marsh has ten. This section's tone of quiet meditation has been given greater tranquility by the greater number of couplets, often heroic couplets, than in “The Marshes of Glynn.” Suddenly the poem becomes agitated. The anxiety is not directed at the fear of some mysterious force in nature, however, but on behalf of the rising sun:

                    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.

(86-97)

As Charmenz Lenhart has rightly said, “It may seriously be doubted whether any better description of dawn with so carefully sustained a crescendo has been achieved in the English language.”²¹ In the thirty-seven lines leading to the sun's appearance, Lanier has packed all the musical effects at his command; and he maintains the narrator's anxiety as the location of the excitement. Thus the enormous flood of the sun's energy is given terrific personal substance. By invoking the images of dreams to describe the tense silence before dawn, Lanier has recalled the dream of the narrator that opened the poem, with its memory of the woods, marsh, and sleep. If it has been correctly inferred that this was a dream embodying “The Marshes of Glynn,” then the recollection of it at this moment dispels entirely the doubts which that dream had enclosed, as well as perhaps the worry of the ultimate questions in the woods later in that section of “Sunrise.” Those worries, it now appears, may have been the aftereffects of his dreaming.

Yet motion and sound are made in the next stanza as the “wild duck sails round the bend of the river,” apparently carrying the narrator's eyes eastward. Another of Lanier's spiritual birds, this one is more carefully worked into the rich tissues of detail than in any other poem. The poet becomes Whitmanesque and cosmic at this point as he momentarily springs from his own situation of almost unendurable tension to an unexpected image of a sailor seemingly hoisting the sun like a flag:

          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.

(116-123)

The many caesuras and the unusual stress distribution produce a retarding and a quickening of the lines to create tremendous tension. Lanier's long vowels also help to slow the line, while the anapests hurry it along. This effect is especially functional in “'Tis alive,” with the caesura serving to break up the foot and thereby extend the verb's vowel beyond its usual duration. The next line puts two nonstressed syllables in succession, and a strong caesura follows to create a strange effect of hush, breaking up our sense that the foot is an anapest (“Was awáre of it: náy …”). This exciting segment of the poem—perhaps the most exciting in all his poems—strains our normal expectations of patterned rhythms so much that the “feel” of the lines is free verse.

In absolute freedom, the sun rises—a symbol of the narrator's spiritual ascent. We recognize now that the “sunrise” the narrator has beheld is the rising of his own soul after death, and no better way exists to subdue a crisis of faith than to demonstrate the reality of the soul. This place would have been the perfect one for the poem to end, but Lanier pursues the sun as it rises with an unfortunately grotesque image in which the sun is a “star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee” returning to a “hive” of the sky, the “gold undazzling” zenith. Heroic couplets restore the peaceful scene to its former tranquility in the next stanza in which the marsh worships the sun by reflecting it. The following stanza draws the major symbols together with the poet's soul in a way that resembles Whitman's “symphonic” form:

          With several voice, with ascription one,
          The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul
Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll,
Cry good and past-good and most heavenly morrow, lord Sun.

(149-152)

In the last section of “Sunrise” Lanier reaches back to “Corn” for the highest praise of the sun: “Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art yon sea's all news, / With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues.” But “Corn” appears, in contrast, amateurish; for the sun is the source for all nature's energy, not merely an exemplar of it; it gives the marshes their form and color, and it makes clear what is mysterious in all forms of nature. The narrator can therefore return to the dailiness of life with a regenerated heart: “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.”

We feel that Lanier has at last written in “Sunrise” a mystical poem, the kind of poetry his musicality of verse was best suited for and which his essentially religious concepts of the synthesis of the arts could make most provocative. The impressionistic technique following the lead, sometimes too automatically, of “The Marshes of Glynn,” is welded to a triangular form in which the poem reaches its apex as the sun does, and it falls smoothly away into a retrenched belief in life. But the poem is given internal solidity through its inclusion of the traditions of chivalry, on the one hand, which always settled oppositions through religious paradoxes, and protest, on the other, which brought Lanier to recognize the sometimes irreconcilable injustices of life, some of which he came to regard as not circumstantial but as existential.

The sun is a symbol of pure feeling, and it is offered to the world as a potential symbol for all men. The final exemplar, it is the last demonstration of the reason for responding first to feeling rather than to thought. Only through an onomatopoetic representation of the effect of the sun on a poet's soul can the poet convince his audience that his age has not truly been alive. The river with its song of duty and the woods, marsh, sea, and sunrise are evoked by Lanier's rich musicality in such a way that we must feel our way toward the essence of the natural objects he represents. Thus, his music liberates us from the images which we may discover to be turgid, confused, obscure, trite, or sentimental. By freeing us from semantic responses insofar as he is able, Lanier invites a direct participation in the musical language.

Notes

1. Aubrey Starke, Sidney Lanier, pp. 316, 498, note 29.

2. The impact of Swinburne may be quickly summarized. In 1866 Lanier transcribed one of his poems in a letter, suggesting one of his own was the less obscure. (Centennial Edition, VII, 251.) In 1868 he revealed that he thought Swinburne had a foul imagination though an excellent technique (VII, 395). In “Retrospects and Prospects” of 1868, Lanier said: “Swinburne has overheard some sea-conversation which he has translated into good English” (V, 286). By 1870 Lanier had found Swinburne had given in to public acclaim and deserted serious poetry (VIII, 79). After that Swinburne became the symbol of “culture poets” (IX, 298). In the same year Swinburne apparently weighed Lanier's poetry and disliked it (ibid., note). Yet Lanier bought his Atalanta in Calydon (which was far inferior to Leaves of Grass in Lanier's private estimation). (X, 18.) He requested Swinburne's Studies in Shakespeare (X, 169) in 1880. A late poem outline is judicious and pungent: “He invited me to eat, the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt” (I, 260).

3. Karl Shapiro, A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (Baltimore, 1948), p. 16.

4. Joseph W. Hendren, “Time and Stress in English Verse, with Special Reference to Lanier's Theory of Rhythm,” Rice Institute Pamphlet, XLVI (July, 1959), v-vii, 1-72.

5. Paul Fussell, Jr., [Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York, 1965)] p. 21.

6. Allen Tate, “A Southern Romantic,” 67.

7. Joseph W. Hendren, p. 2.

8. Centennial Edition, II, 194-95.

9. Ibid., III, 186.

10. Ibid., 360.

11. Ibid., 410.

12. Ibid., I, 125-27.

13. Ibid., IV, 145.

14. Ibid., 107. In “The New South” Lanier could even assert that with slavery abolished Negroes were accepted for their true selves (V, 344, 345n.).

15. Ibid., IX, 413.

16. Ibid., X, 224.

17. Ibid., I, 138.

18. Ibid., 140.

19. Ibid., 144.

20. Ibid., 144-49.

21. Charmenz Lenhart, pp. 278-79.

Works Cited

1. Published Works

Anderson, Charles. R., ed. Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945. Ten Volumes. Associate editors and contents of each volume are as follows: I. Poems, Charles Anderson sole editor; II. The Science of English Verse and Essays on Music, Paull F. Baum; III. Shakespeare and his Forerunners, Kemp Malone; IV. The English Novel and Essays on Literature, Clarence Gohdes and Kemp Malone; V. Tiger-Lilies and Southern Prose, Garland Greever; VI. Florida and Miscellaneous Prose, Philip Graham; VII-X. Letters, Charles Anderson and Aubrey Starke.

Hendren, Joseph. W. Time and Stress in English Verse, with Special Reference to Lanier's Theory of Rhythm. Rice Institute Pamphlets, XLVI (July, 1959), v-vii and 1-72. As Chapter 7 showed, this essay rescues Lanier's scansion theory and places his most important ideas in an informed, intelligent context.

Starke, Aubrey. Sidney Lanier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933. Definitive biography of Lanier but marred by poor readings of the poetry.

Tate, Allen. “A Southern Romantic,” New Republic, LXXVI (August 30, 1933), 67-70. Blistering attack on Starke's conclusions which found Lanier a precursor of the Fugitive Agrarian writers like Tate who developed the Southern Renaissance. Useful as an evaluation of Lanier's poetry against the best poetry.