SOURCE: "Technique," in Thomas Holley Chivers: His Literary Career and His Poetry, University of Georgia Press, 1956, pp. 211-48.

[In the essay that follows, Watts provides examination of Chivers's poetic technique.]

THEORY OF POETRY

Perhaps the measure of [Thomas Holley] Chivers' success with the themes most typical of his poetry may be in part determined by an examination of his theory of poetry, and his understanding of the duties and desires of the poet. Not an analytical critic or a particularly acute surveyor of the contemporary literary scene, he wrote few objective reviews, most of his expression on literary theory occurring in the Prefaces to Nacoochee, Memoralia, and Atlanta. Very often such discussion becomes a defense of his own poetry.

Chivers did not greatly modify his poetic beliefs as expressed early in The Path of Sorrow; his later theories are, in large part, developments of his determination in 1832 to write from the world of his imagination, and his certainty that the true poet was divinely inspired. As he wrote and experimented further, he came to change the terms of these theories; but they remain, in principle.

One of his earliest decisions was no doubt brought about by his own distress and grief over his first marriage. He will sing, he says, only of grief; there is reason to believe that his early tragedy focused his desire to write poetry. He had been happy, and indeed in early youth had composed a number of incidental verses, but after a period of mourning, grief "tuned up [his] heart strings to music again." Chivers' belief that sorrow could draw the poetry from him was never changed; The Lost Pleiad (1845) is a volume which testifies to the seemingly endless variety he could achieve upon the single theme of death and sorrow, and while such melancholia was quite in keeping with Romantic tendencies, it is obvious that he felt more than a theoretical motivation.

But even the most depressed of poets needs must find relief from such woe, and Chivers' most important interpretation of his calling arose from the necessity to find another outlet, another world in which he could create all that this one, he believed, had failed to supply him with. The mystical world of the terrestrial Eden and the emotional evocations of Heaven which are such an important part of his poetry provided the necessary outlet. His understanding of that world came from within himself; so there was no need to square it with the reality he saw about him. He speaks often enough of the horrors of this world, of loss, death, and loneliness, but never does he evoke Hell; his glance moved only upward (if inward), a move which he once developed a metaphor to describe:

As the penitent Pilgrim, on his way to Mount Zion, reclines, at the noontide hour of the day, from the burning heat of the tropical sun, in the cool refreshing shadow of the Rock of Rimmon, so does my wearied soul hide itself away into an ecstasy underneath the odoriferous dovewings of the Divine Queen of Heaven.

It is not difficult to understand the motivation for such a hiding away; the world would not receive his poetry in the manner he believed it deserved; his happiness with his second wife hardly compensated for the death of four of his children; and as a Southern Transcendentalist, he found himself out of place in both North and South.

The result of his inward-turning is such a poem as "The Poet of Love," in which he attempts to explain his source of inspiration and to exhibit its effects at the same time:

The Poet of Love receives divine ovation;
Not only from Angels' hands while here on earth,
But all the Ages echo back with salutation
The trumpet of the Skies in praises of his worth;
And all the islands of the Sea
Of the vast immensity
Echo the music of the Morns
Blown through the Corybantine Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns,
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!

From the inflorescence of his own high soul
The incense of his Eden-song doth rise,
Whose golden river of pure redolence doth roll
Down the dark vistas of all time in melodies—
Echoing the Islands of the Sea
Of the vast immensity,
And the loud music of the Morns
Blown through the Conchimarian Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns,
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!

With the white lightnings of his still small voice,
Deep as the thunders of the azure Silence—
He makes dumb the oracular Cymbals with their noise,
Till BEAUTY flourish Amaranthine on the Islands
Of the loud tumultuous Sea
Of the vast immensity,
Echoing the music of the Morns

Blown through the Chrysomelian Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns
By the great Angel of Eternty,
Thundering, COME TO ME! COME TO ME!

The excesses of the poem are perhaps annoying; yet it is successful, I believe, in the effect Chivers desired to create, for not only does it explain an important theme, but also it attempts to recreate the emotional state of the poet as he experienced that theme.

Furthermore, it exhibits almost all of the theories Chivers developed in prose regarding his theory of poetry. Chivers drew a distinction between the poem as such and experience as such which modem critics have found valid, and he would answer the critic who objected to the excesses of such a poem as this by saying, "There is nothing in the world that is not equivalent in brightness to the poetical manifestations of it. People too often mistake the relations of things for the things themselves." That is, the experience he creates here was, to him, the experiencer, just as frantic and bright as the poem in which he tries to explain it. Many of Chivers' poems are of the same sort; seldom have we found him as interested in the "brightness" of "things," although their brightness is insisted upon, as in the actual experience of his appreciation of that brightness. A nice distinction, perhaps, but a necessary one, and one which helps to explain Chivers' statement that all true poetry is dramatic, for at first glance his poetry appears to be singularly undramatic. What he means is that the true poet describes not the scene before him, but his experience in reacting to it. Because of his participation in the scene it becomes dramatic, animated, although the drama is usually implicit.

"The Poet of Love," by its very title, suggests further explanations. God, he believed, was Love. The true poet partakes of that Love and attempts to express it. In what may it be found? In the poet himself. What inspires it? His answer helps explain his poetry:

… Poetry is the soul of his nature, whereby, from communing with the beauties of this earth, he is capable of giving birth to other beings brighter than himself; and of lifting up his spirit to the presence of those things which he shall enjoy in another state; and which he manifests to this [world] through the instrumentality of certain words and sentences melodiously concatenated; and such as correspond with the definite and wise configurations of the mouth in the communication of thought through language.

I very much doubt that any poet writing in the South in 1837, except perhaps Poe, had developed his own aesthetic so completely; Chivers' beliefs may not be suitable for the twentieth century, or, for that matter, popular in the early nineteenth, but they were definite and defined. We have grown away from any theory of poetry which depends upon inspiration of such a seemingly nebulous character; Chivers was close to it, and he depended upon it to write poetry. He said, in the Preface to Birth-Day Song of Liberty,

Inspired by that self-rewarding enthusiasm which always fills the heart with rapture—being the first-born Cherub of the soul's rapport with the infinite splendor of God—I composed the following Paean of Glory.…

Sometimes his sense of this identification may have been self-induced. That is not as important as the fact that it was induced. Poetry was not a matter of incidental composition to Chivers; it was tied very closely to his deep belief in an after life which would compensate for the toils and turmoil of this one. So when he soars upward in his description of Heaven, he is tasting joys which, to him, were just as much reality as the earthly vistas about him.

But those earthly vistas were, as he notes, important to evoke the needed inspiration. And since the following development of his theory comes close to that expressed by Poe in The Philosophy of Composition (1846), it is necessary to point out that Chivers had established, to his own satisfaction, the basis of his later expression in the Preface to Nacoochee (1837): by communing with "beauties" he will be empowered to produce further beauty which will in turn produce a "lifting up [of] his spirit." I do not suggest that Poe derived his belief that poetry's province was that of beauty which produced "pleasurable elevation, of the soul" from Chivers, but that such similarity as exists here is further evidence of a more inclusive similarity of judgment and taste. Poe's language apparently impressed him, however, for Chivers depended more and more upon the word beauty to express his desires after Poe's statement was published.

Poe believed poetry should concern itself with beauty, not with passion or with truth; Chivers disagreed, insisting that passion was an integral part of any poem and that Poe's poetry suffered from its absence. And Chivers' interpretation of beauty differed in an important point from Poe's; it was divine beauty that Chivers sought, in connection with his belief that poetry was a vehicle by which the soul might rise to God. Chivers attempted to set up an interesting distinction between earthly beauty and the divine, a distinction which probably resulted from his personal failure to find heavenly beauty in the physical world:

No Nation, with the exception of the Hebrews, ever enjoyed so serene a vision of the Divine Glory as did the Greeks. Their religion was Beauty. It was out of the manifold analysis of Nature that they created their world-renowned Synthesis of Beauty, called The Venus de Medicis [sic]. For, as there was nothing in Nature perfect enough to represent the Divine Beauty, they had to resort to Art, which is the Synthesis of the highest sensation united to the loftiest thought. Thus, by glorifying sensation, which is finite, into thought, which is infinite, thereby creating an Image, they gave birth to the Apollo.…

Now, the more palpably this thought is made manifest in the IMAGE, through Art, the more lucid will be the Revelation of the Divine Idea.

Having established the fact that he was reaching toward a purpose which was as much ethical as aesthetic, Chivers goes on to define the difference between Art and Thought, which taken together produce Divine Beauty. Every poem contains two beauties, the outward, that of form, the vehicle, and the inward, that of passion, of Nature; when they are correctly combined a "pure" poem results, one which will "enchant the souls of men." Passion, to Chivers, represented both thought and action, both the consciousness that contact with God could be established and the act of identification itself. A transcendental belief, surely, the transcendental nature of which is even clearer when Chivers speaks of the poet as having "the perfectly couched eyes of an illuminated Seer," to whom "all things appear beautiful that are really so."

As seer, or prophet, it is the poet's job to become the mediator "of the revelation of the influx of the Divine Life of God into the soul" of man; he is the voice of God and the echo of Nature.

In statements such as these, Chivers tried to define why he wrote as he did; occasionally he went on to speak of how the true poem might achieve the desired ends. He agreed with Poe that no true poem was anything but a lyric. Although he did not set as definite a limit on the length of a poem as Poe did, he based his objections to epic poetry on much the same belief as that which Poe had, that the soul wearies after a time and cannot absorb the beauties before it. A poem must be complete in itself, and the only way a long poem might be written was through the method Chivers used in Atlanta, by creating a narrative or symbolic framework against which separate images may be placed. These images, Chivers believed, must constantly be varied; the "true mystery" of angelic pleasure is the continual reception of varying delights.

One device which is helpful in producing this necessary variation is the refrain, which is not simply an ornament to a poem, but part of that poem's "essence": he describes its importance in typically Chiversian terms.

It is a Poem precisely what Ovid says of the outward golden tire of the many-spoked wheels of the Chariot of Apollo, that makes a continual, ever-recurring Auroral chime at every revolution of the wheels, proportionate to their velocity, which is never lost, or dies away into an echo, but forever returns upon itself, like the menstrual changes of the Moon, but only to be made the same sweet Moon—the same sweet Auroral chime.

Again a reference to "The Poet of Love" will indicate Chivers' meaning; the refrain returns the poem and the reader's attention to the central theme once more, or, as in a poem like "Rosalie Lee," it provides a melodious and slightly varying structure about which the theme is developed. Chivers experimented with the refrain, varying its place in the stanza (beginning, middle, or end), shifting its content slightly each time (as Poe did in "The Raven"), or using it to establish the desired rhythm.

Rhythm was particularly important, and although Chivers' statement of its importance was undoubtedly derived from Poe, he was experimenting with it before Poe defined a poem as "the rhythmical creation of beauty." Interested in music, and familiar with the Negro songs of the South, which he praises highly, Chivers would naturally utilize strong rhythm to produce the essentially hypnotic effect of some of his evocations of Heaven.

And although he never fully stated his implicit belief that the poet's province entitled him to coin whatever words were necessary to express his emotions, it is clear that when he says that no poem can be wholly successful unless the poet has "the highest knowledge of the true Art of musical language," he means just that. Much of the unique effect some of his poems have is derived from his interest in sound as such, which often demanded that he invent onomatopoetic words.

Chivers insisted that the Age does not make the poet, but that the poet establishes the essential character of the Age. Insofar as he adhered to the standards and theories which have been elaborated here, Chivers spoke the truth about himself. Although certain elements of his belief can be traced to New England Transcendentalism, and the wording of others to Poe, the poetry which resulted from the application of his theories is virtually unique in any anthology of nineteenth century American verse. Concerned with establishing his identification with what Emerson called the over-soul and with what he called Heavenly Beauty or Divine Beauty, he was very much of the nineteenth century, however, in the essentially theological base he chose to give his poetry. Furthermore, that poetry of his which does not concern itself with Divine Beauty, as a considerable amount does not, is typical of the magazine expression of his Age. No better proof than his intermittent application of his poetic beliefs, as well as the nature of those beliefs themselves, could be offered in testimony to the fact that Chivers was both a product of the nineteenth century and his own master.

FORM AND STRUCTURE

The development of Chivers' technical ability throughout his publishing career is a gradual one, moving from the use of standard abab quatrains, which were so simple and so popular, to a manipulation of stanza form and meter to achieve unique poetic effects. Chivers was a conscious artist, deeply concerned over the appropriate form his expression might take.

His very first volume, The Path of Sorrow, indicates that the young medical student had been paying as much attention to form and structure as to the woes he wished to express. Although depending largely on single and double quatrains for the majority of his poems, he experimented, at this beginning point in his career, with such diverse forms as Spenserians and blank verse, even pausing to invent a nine line stanza, ababcdcdd, which he hoped might round out the formal double quatrain to something more organic. Throughout his career he experimented with the basic eight line stanza, varying the pattern to such extremes as aaaabbbb and abaabbaa, and while many of these efforts are not successful, the fact of his experimenting, occurring as it does so early and continuing so long, helps to present another perspective on his nature. He was not simply a theorizer, but an artisan, attempting to mold his forms to particular ends. His second and third volumes indicate an early and sustained interest in the use of the refrain, an interest quite in accordance with his poetic theory, and the third, Nacoochee, contains "Malavolti," a poem which, as Professor Damon points out, may well have been inspired by Coleridge, whose "Christabel" utilizes varying forms to suit the several moods; in "Malavolti" Chivers includes stanzas of abab rhymes, aaaabbbb rhymes, couplets, and an abbacca form.

The Lost Pleiad (1845) marks Chivers' first use of the sonnet, and his attempts to evolve a new pattern of rhyme for this form are as numerous as they are unsuccessful. All told, Chivers tried eighteen different variations, the majority involving changes in the Shakespearian sonnet, although he also tried to manipulate the octave and sestet of the Petrarchan form. However, he lacked the precise control necessary to achieve variation within the strict form of the sonnet, and most of his efforts indicate he understood the sonnet to be simply a fourteen line lyric. "The Grave," for example, rhymes, in iambic pentameter, ababacacacacac, and although it is an effective lyric, it hardly illustrates the subtleties of a sonnet.

His last three books, Eonchs of Ruby, Virginalia, and Atlanta, are more interesting in terms of diction and sound than of form, although his early interest in the refrain here becomes almost an obsession. Usually he used his refrain to carry certain repeating hypnotic or melodic effects through the poem; so its use must have sprung directly out of his interest in sound and rhythm rather than from any artificial influence or example.

Chivers' forms are seldom completely orthodox. If he utilizes a simple double quatrain, he is likely to make it unique by alternating trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. His stanzas vary from tercets to an eleven line stanza. Blank verse appealed to him in his early work, although he used it only twice after 1837. It will be worth while to examine the effect of some of his less orthodox attempts.

Chivers' new stanza, ababcdcdd, a variation from the Spenserian, is usually marred by the obviousness of the experimentation. "The Prophet's Dream," for example, concludes many of its stanzas with the final line beginning with an all-too-obvious And, the result of which is not all that Chivers was hoping for. He speaks of the coming of Christ:

His hand shall help creation's alien race;
His wings shall hover o'er the contrite child!
The mighty men of earth shall see his face,
But no man shall presume to say, He smil'd.
He shall be sanctified by heaven's dew,
And he shall be a stone—a steadfast rock!
And he that doth his path, in love, pursue,
Shall shine again, exempt from hell's foul shock;
And He shall be a pillar on Jehovah's rock.

Perhaps Chivers realized that he had not fully integrated the final line with the rest of the stanza, for in "Apollo," many years later, he used the same scheme but changed the repeating final rhyme into a varying refrain.

Like some deep, impetuous river from the fountains everlasting,
Down the serpentine soft valley of the vistas of all Time,
Over cataracts of adamant uplifted into mountains,
Soared his soul to God in thunder on the wings of thought sublime.
With the rising golden glory of the sun in ministrations,
Making oceans metropolitan of splendor for the dawn—
Piling pyramid on pyramid of music for the nations—
Sings the Angel who sits shining everlasting in the sun,
For the stars, which are the echoes of the shining of the sun.

The repeating final phrase of the seventh line does help to control the long varying lines. Chivers' efforts to thus end-stop the double quatrain are effective only when he so arranged his content that the added line does not appear tacked on.

The blank verse which Chivers used in the three long autobiographical poems of The Path of Sorrow is of a particularly unique kind. Chivers knew Byron, but that poet's adept manipulation of the line apparently did not have as much effect upon him as his own wish to achieve a coherence through some sort of a carry-over from line to line. Realizing perhaps that steady, regularly accented pentameter lines might not achieve the flow he desired, Chivers tried to create something more organic by dividing his lines after the fourth or fifth beat in the line, and placing the resulting extra syllables at the beginning of the next line. The effect does not always succeed, partly because he often utilized this method artificially and without reference to the content of the line:

My
Soul is drunk with thy omnipotence. There
Seems to be, within my very life, a
Longing after immortality, in love.
There is an ideal something in my soul,
Which swells my bosom lord nigh bursting! What
Is it?—from the very morning when I
Woke a child of sorrow, I have espoused
The cause of nature; and I love the world
Not that I feel adhesiveness for man
For sinful man! but, there is a glory
In its contemplation, which pervades my

Very being. There is a fixedness,
Undaring purpose in my heart, which time,
With all her multitude of ills, shall not
Eradicate. The basis of my heart
The center of my being—shall remain
As firm and steadfast as the wreckless rock
Of Heaven! it shall endure, though hell, with all
Her panoplied and plumed array, consign
Me to their grief.

Chivers' method creates a caesural pause before the fourth or fifth beat of the line. It seems probable that by this pattern he hoped to achieve something like Milton's blank verse paragraphs. The subtleties of Milton's technique escaped him, and his enjambment does not always create the organic effect he desired; while his attempt shows his lack of experience as a poet, it also shows his interest in technique itself. But in his poems written in this enjambed blank verse, he is trying to duplicate the emotional effects of an experience (not the experience itself), and the surge of each line into the next is occasionally successful in its context, even though the tendency toward regularity of enjambment is in itself static.

Not all of Chivers' blank verse attempts such carry-over. "The Soaring Swan," whose subject is a symbol of Chivers' own desires, keeps its accents:

Thou art soaring around the throne of light,
Bathed in the tingling radiance of the sun
Whose bright effulgence, gilding thine abyss
Of burnished glory, scales the heights of heaven!
For on the velvet vesture of the hills,
Throned in the fulgence of the hills,
In desert embrace—bosomed by the groves—
And where the liquid flowings of the waves
Woo the enamoured banks—thy home shall be.

But blank verse could not serve him long, for his spirit would rise as does his swan, and the broken lines of "The Death of Adaline" or the long paragraphs of "The Lament of Youth" soon give way to more complex patterns, forms in which Chivers might establish a rhythm and break it where he wished.

One of Chivers' answers to this problem, the necessity of finding a strict form which might be endlessly varied, led him to utilize more and more the refrain, before, within, or at the end of each stanza, with the hope of thereby achieving a varying continuity, change plus exact cadence. In the Preface to Virginalia, he compared the refrain to the recurring chime at each revolution of the wheels of "the Chariot of Apollo"; but, he notes, the wheels' sound (i.e., the refrain's effect) is "proportionate," in terms of the metaphor, to the "velocity" of the chariot's wheels, or, to the desired motion of the poem. Since this desired variation is close to Poe's theory as stated in The Philosophy of Composition, it is interesting that Chivers experimented with such refrains as early as 1834.

Chivers developed his use of the refrain gradually, from the simple one line final refrain in his 1834 volume to a complex seven line refrain containing elements of both theme and mood in 1856; generally, the advance in complexity was steady. The Path of Sorrow (1832) makes no use of the refrain at all, while Virginalia (1853) contains only a few poems which avoid it. Such a steady progress toward the organic type of refrain which he desired shows constant attention to the problem, and makes it doubtful that any particular outside influence determined his interest.

The orthodox use of refrain as a continuing set-piece appears throughout Chivers poetry; often it is there simply to provide atmosphere for the body of the poem. "To a China Tree," describing the idyllic surroundings of his early childhood, ends each stanza with "And shot with my cross-bow—my mulberry cross-bow—/ The robins that perched on the boughs near the gate." Not an effective refrain, surely, but the type is familiar. He achieved a variation on the same type in one of the "Songs" of Nacoochee:

Blessed of heaven! thy home shall be
In the bright green isle of my love for thee,

When thy form shall rest on my spirit bright
Like the silver moon on the starry night;
When thy voice shall float on my soul awake,
Like the gentle swan on the azure lake—
Blessed of heaven! thy home shall be
In the bright green isle of my love for thee.

Gradually Chivers' attempt to create an organic refrain evolved from simple parlor verse like the above. "Choral Song of the Temperance Legions" is an experiment that failed. Here he repeated, in each stanza, the first, seventh and eighth, and fourteenth lines of an odd fourteen line stanza, which attempts, as do a number of his poems, to present a shouted chant. The refrain lines presumably welded each bulky stanza to the next.

"The Angel's Whisper" is one of the more complex of his poems which attempt to integrate the refrain within the stanza. Following an ababbab scheme, Chivers used the fourth, fifth, and seventh lines as a constant refrain, and made the sixth line a repetition of the third. The result is a poem which depends for its effect almost entirely upon the varying content of the third line, which, by its repetition as the sixth line, a line contained within the refrain, determines the meaning of the refrain, allowing it to develop and change with each stanza.

Much of the same ballad-like quality is found in a series of poems which make use of the repeated rhyme in the refrain without attempting to insert it within the body of the stanza. "Lily Adair" and "Rosalie Lee" are familiar to Chivers readers, and their background extends as far back as 1836, to a poem entitled "Ellen Aeyre," where the basic stanza form and refrain may be found. Again the simple double quatrain, ababcdcd, is the basis, but a ddd refrain is added to utilize the final pair of rhymes, the final d of the refrain doubling the length of the line.

Like the Lamb's wife, seen in vision,
Coming down from heaven above,
Making earth like Fields Elysian,
Golden city of God's love—
Pure as jasper—clear as crystal—
Decked with twelve gates richly rare—
Statued with twelve angels vestal—
Was the form of Ellen Aeyre—
Of my saint-like Ellen Aeyre—
Gentle girl so debonair—
Whitest, brightest of all cities, saintly angel, Ellen Aeyre.

When Chivers came to write "Lily Adair" he had only to shorten the third line of the refrain:

Where the Oreads played in the Highlands,
And the Water-Nymphs bathed in the streams,
In the tall Jasper Reeds of the Islands—
She wandered in life's early dreams.
For the Wood-Nymphs then brought from the Wildwood
The turtle doves Venus kept there,

Which the Dryades tamed, in his childhood,

For Cupid, to Lily Adair—
To my Dove-like Lily Adair—
To my lamb-like Lily Adair—
To my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair.

The same format for the refrain is found again in "Rosalie Lee," with the same varied prepositions and descriptive phrases in the final three lines. Each refrain of these poems contains different descriptions of the heroine, each changing the reader's understanding of her a slight amount. The lulling, melodic effect of such refrains was part of what Chivers was seeking; it helped to weave an aura of vague ethereal beauty about his subject, which was the only way he could effectively describe female beauty.

Eonchs of Ruby and Virginalia in particular show how much Chivers depended upon this strict ababcdcd structure to provide a pattern from which he might deviate. "The Place Where I Was Born," for example, presents this form, but subtracts the last three lines and makes them the basis of a dcddd refrain. "The Moon of Mobile" follows the double quatrain with a refrain of efefff; again Chivers seeks the hypnotic effect. "Avalon," a poem typical of Chivers and one of his best, utilizes the repeating refrain for atmospheric effects:

Thy soul did soar up to the Gates of God,
Oh, Lark-like Child!
And poured Heaven's Bowers of Bliss, by Angels trod,
Poured Wood-notes wild!
In emulation of that Bird, which stood,
In solemn silence, listening to thy flood
Of golden Melody deluge the wood
Where thou art lying
Beside the beautiful undying
In the Valley of the Pausing of the Moon,
Oh! Avalon! my son! my son!

Such an atmospheric refrain was necessary, Chivers believed, not as an ornament, or as embroidery, but to complete the theme; statement was never as effective as suggestion.

The refrain might be made a part of the whole in other ways, too. Any repetition of thematic lines would draw the various stanzas together and create a unified effect. Perhaps I take liberties with strict meaning when I call the following repeating and organic lines a refrain, yet I think that Chivers would have cited this poem as one which achieved the continuity plus variation which he desired, and so I have included it here. "The Dying Beauty" repeats the introductory statement in the first line eight times, and it is followed on each occasion by an extended simile; the whole poem, by virtue of these varying images within the static structure, creates a veiled and romantic picture of the death of a woman:

She died in beauty, like the morn that rose
In golden glory on the brow of night,
And passed off gently like the evening's close,

When day's last steps upon the heavens are bright.
She died in beauty, like the trampled flower
That yields its fragrance to the passer's feet,
For all her life was as an April shower,
That kept the tear-drops of her parting sweet.
And like the rainbows of the sunny skies,
The dew-drop fillet of the brow of even—
That blends its colours as the evening dies—
Her beauty melted in the light of heaven.

She died in softness, like the last sad tone
That lingers gently on the midnight ear,
When beauty wanders from her bower alone,
And no one answers, but the voice is near.
She died in beauty, like the lonesome dove
That seeks her fledglings in the desert air,
And hastes away from out the flowery grove
To seek the little ones that nestled there.
And like the humming-bird that seeks the bower,
But wings her swiftly from the place away,
And bears the dew-drop from the fading flower—
Her spirit wandered to the isle of day.

Several of the similes are effective; others are not, but whatever general success the poem has stems from the rigidity tempered by variation which the repeated line provides. Conscious, perhaps, that he had achieved something of his aim, Chivers used this formula in two other poems. "To My Mother in Heaven," published in the following year, begins each stanza with "I see thee not!" and then enumerates, by stanza, the facets of his sense of loss. "Uranothen," published in Virginalia, is a revision of "The Heavenly Vision," which depends upon a repeating final line in each stanza, "She came from Heaven to tell me she was blest," to coordinate an essentially loose poem. In its revised form Chivers made the repetition less obvious, relegating it to the end position in the final line:

The hyaline wavelets of her voice of love
Rose on the boundless ether-sea's calm breast;
Amid the interstarry realms above,
To God in Heaven, telling me she was blest.

There are endless examples of Chivers' structural devices, but most of them stem from the two categories developed here. He was constantly interested in involved stanza forms; "Threnody," written at the death of his son Tommy, indicates that he could be absorbed in the intricacies of form even in the midst of grief. In an attempt to slow down the movement of the opening of each stanza, he repeats the end-rhyme of the first stanza line as the first word in stanza lines two and three. The result is trickier than it is successful.

How I miss him in the summer,
Summer of the Golden Grain—Summer.…

What Chivers could achieve by use of the basic abab quatrain in his attempt to create certain hypnotic, semirhythmic effects was paralleled by his use of this form to produce a species of declamatory poetry which cannot easily be duplicated in the nineteenth century until Whitman turned it into a philosophy and an ideal. Like Whitman, he begins his stylistic ventures by adhering to orthodox forms; like him, too, he threw them away when certain inspirations were before him. Unlike the Camden seer, he did not utilize his declamations to present any but the most orthodox sentiments.

The development of Chivers' style was of course gradual, and we have just seen to what ends he put his experiments in the use of the refrain. There are suggestions of his declamatory style in his first tragedy, Conrad and Eudora, in 1834, although they are overwhelmed almost always by metaphysical imagery or Shakespearian rhetoric. Perhaps the earliest inspiration for his use of the style was from Byron, for a poem like "Anastasius" follows his formula for the narrative verse tragedy while it shows signs of declamation, unsuccessful as they are, which are absent from the other poetry of Chivers' first three volumes. Whenever an artificially imposed dramatic situation is present in his early poetry, as it rarely is, most of the poems being lyrical, Chivers attempts a rhetoric totally unlike the intimate style of his love songs or personal elegies. There is, however, a parallel between his development of the evocative, hypnotic effect which is exemplified in his later use of the refrain and the declamatory poetry under study here. In both styles he is likely to give way to exclamation and shouting which often obscure form, although the strictness superimposed by the varying refrain demands and gets attention where the blank verse or paeon-filled declamatory verse flows on from line to line without more than superficial notice of structure.

A series of what may be called patriotic poems best illustrates the development of this experiment. Chivers' quickly-incited fervor over any contest between liberty and tyranny was in some ways bound up with his desire to evoke or create the beauty of a Terrestrial Eden, for the Eden Isle is not far distant from the New Jerusalem which he saw embodied in nineteenth-century America. And when Chivers chooses Heaven or its earthly counterpart as subject, he seldom tries to limit his effects. The emotion within him can best be expressed by exultation.

Yet it may not be said that Chivers lost sight of the less ethereal details of his world; we find the clearest beginning of his declamatory style in the "Choral Song of the Temperance Legions." The poem is a series of trimeter quatrains arranged in the form of a chant, wherein the Legions shout their strength and purity to be answered by various Echoes—of the Sun, Moon, Constellations, or Angels. Its failure and its experimental nature are testified to by the fact he could revise it to "The Cry of Hungary" by changing little more than its title and omitting the identification of the Echoes; their lines become a widely varying refrain. The evocation, this time of freedom, is equally vague. Such vagueness would not necessarily harm a declamatory poem, but as yet Chivers had not found the meter to create the necessary carry-over from line to line which would unify the poem despite its looseness.

It was in 1854 that Chivers found and elaborated the form necessary to make his declamation effective. "To Allegra Florence in Heaven" had been written in lines which, although tetrameter in appearance, were actually broken octameters. In "Where Liberty Was Born" Chivers developed this meter in his favorite abab quatrain and kept the second and fourth lines catalectic. Like his earlier experiments in declamatory verse, the poem is marred by its extremes of imagery and diction, but the longer line goes far toward the effect of oration which Chivers was seeking.

"The Roll of Fame" is his most successful attempt in this direction, and its long, pulsing lines almost discard the stanza form and meter to achieve a rolling cadence now reminiscent of Whitman's carefully unmetered lines:

In the Autumn of the world, when the honey of
the Summer still lay on the flowers of
the years,
I stood on the evergreen banks of the
beautiful River of Time,
And there I heard the loud thunders, rolled off
from the prows of the crystalline Spheres,
Break calmly against the white shore of my
panting soul in utterance sublime.

Then the tranced Silence, wakened from her
peaceful slumber
In the Oasian Ocean of Saharah, hearing her
mournful voice
Breaking against the Hills of Nubia, listening
without number,—
Fled to the Pacific Islands in those Seas
whose billows make no noise.

But still it was far sweeter the Muezzin's
mournful crying
Uttered at daybreak from the Dome of the
beautiful Omar,
Looking from the top of Zion up to the
Mountain that is undying—
Like the first great golden Iliad bursting
from the soul of Homer.

Then, like the unfolding of some antediluvian
iron Scroll,
With repercussive clang, like storm-winds
when they rend the bosom of the Deep,
The Vail of Isis was rent in Twain, revealing
unto my more than raptured soul
The dark Aenigma of the grave, written in
Dreams in the House of Sleep.

Then I heard iron words, spoken as if by
clanking chains
Rattling in bottomless vaults rusted by tears
wept by the utterless Tomb—
Followed by rumbling thunders-after which there
fell down hailing rains,
As if hail fell instead of rain—freezing my
lips to dumbness doubly dumb!

The control afforded by meter is here discarded in favor of a series of chanted lines which, although the rhyme is kept, flow on without pause. The whole poem, thirty-four stanzas long, lacks any really vital organization, but moves from stanza to stanza within a very general framework of an emotional vision, in which Chivers sees the Heavenly kingdom spread before him. The effect of these short stanzas with their rolling lines, unhampered by any strict progression, is of a series of impressionistic and sometimes symbolic images flashed before the reader. Like the majority of Whitman's long catalogues of images, they demand that the reader supply most of the pictorial detail, and depend for their effect upon the continuing cadence lines, lines which sometimes include as many as fourteen accents.

This is the furthest approach Chivers made toward the effects Whitman was to make notorious and then famous less than a year later. Published only four years before Chivers' death, a poem like "The Roll of Fame" indicates the extent of his interest in form as controlled only by cadence and sound. The 1850's saw the fullest development of Chivers' powers as a poet, and the poems of these years help to show the distance he has travelled since 1832. Never content with existing forms or methods, Chivers sought to expand the power and scope of poetry, and his attempt ought to entitle him to a position at least part way removed from the limited horizons of the mid-nineteenth century "public Renaissance" and nearer the broader and deeper limits of the true American Renaissance of Leaves of Grass.

SOUND AND RHYTHM

A considerable part of the effect of Chivers' most characteristic poems stems from their often unique diction. His habits of language indicate that descriptive or suggestive words that appealed to him found a repository either in his memory or in some sort of a card file. Images and phrases become familiar to the reader of Chivers, and sometimes their change and development may be followed throughout his volumes.

The Path of Sorrow (1832) marks the beginning of his experiments with various types of diction. The product of a young, inexperienced poet, that it should contain coinage of his own is surprising at first glance, but when we recall that he tried many varieties of meter and stanza form in the same volume, obsecration, unburlesqued, gnomen, or domil further the belief that The Path of Sorrow was a thoroughly unusual first book. Attempting to find a vehicle for the untutored poetry he had within him, Chivers misuses and coins words whenever it serves his purpose to do so. The prophet, Chivers says, moves

far
Beyond sycophants of terrene strife,—
While scintillations from his mighty star,
Shall pilot him to that eternal life,
Where oblectations shine, devoid of grief.

Such diction is self-conscious and not entirely typical of the style he later developed. It does show, however, something more than early self-consciousness. Its essentially pedantic nature indicates that he was trying to mold what he thought of as esoteric diction to fit his own needs. An orrery of tears, an ultramontaine sphere, the domil sun are neither provocative nor suggestive unless they appear natural in their respective stanzas, and the poems of The Path of Sorrow are notable for their combination of standard poetic diction with such unique phrases as these. Delighted with unusual diction, Chivers had not yet found that it was possible to create poetry dependent almost entirely upon sound. The volume contains few color adjectives, and the greater part of the adjective usage is quite conventional in nature.

The urge to experiment in diction is not so much present in Conrad and Eudora, for the short lyrics in the book are, as has been suggested before, standard love songs whose content offered little or no incentive. The title drama indicates he knew his Shakespeare, although he cannot succeed in coordinating seventeenth-century soliloquy with nineteenth-century diction. And while a run-mad heart seems his own, Eudora says, echoing the Bible with some incoherence, "He, once the 'apple of mine eye,' cast off! / If it offend thee, pluck it out!" The violent rhetoric of the play is not good oration, but occasionally he succeeds:

This fountain, which is stirred to bitter wrath,
Which that insatiate wretch so rudely stung,
And wounded with the arrows of his lust!—
Shall turn an August to his life, and thirst
For every drop that palpitates his heart!

Chivers revised and improved the play later as Leoni; or, the Orphan of Venice. Here the rhetoric is improved, and lines which were loose and vague in Conrad and Eudora appear in a more effective, concise style. The Shakespearian diction is still present, but Chivers has managed to develop his own images:

… never shall my soul find rest,
Until the purple mirror of his blood
Reflect the deep damnation of his deeds.…

The fault of nineteenth-century colloquialism is still present, however, and exclamations of "By Jove!" appear violently out of place.

But the rhetoric which occupied Chivers in his plays does not often appear in his lyric poetry, except in the patriotic chants discussed earlier. He was busy developing what may be called his later style, which takes many of the unusual words of his earlier poetry and places them in a context which fits their nature. Compounds are very frequent, and smile-beams, sapphire-paven, or zephyr-dimpled lake become typical of the atmosphere he is trying to create. Nacoochee (1837) shows that it did not take Chivers long to realize the inadequacy of his earlier diction, or, rather, that that diction would not fulfill the purposes which were now uppermost in his mind. To paraphrase his own language, he would speak in shelltones, moving in pearl-tinct azure (the sky) over the crystalline deep sea to the island-clouds of Heaven. The title poem of the volume and "The Soaring Swan" contain the clearest examples of this later preoccupation; the other poems follow the essentially orthodox style of the lyrics in Conrad and Eudora. Some time in the years just preceding Nacoochee, he saw the collected poetry of Coleridge as it appeared in the Galignani edition republished in Philadelphia. The sight of "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner" must have excited Chivers as much as Keats or Shelley did, for here was confirmation that he was right in believing that the boundaries of poetic diction might be extended. But surely he saw too the hypnotic effect Coleridge's romantic images created in "Kubla Khan"; and "Alph, the sacred river" as well as "Mount Abora" may well have drawn his attention to the fact that a wholly unreal image could be created by the judicious use of exotic diction. It did not matter whether or not Mount Abora could be traced on a map; taken in its context it suggested just the remote romanticism that Chivers came to delight in.

Although Chivers learned more than exotic place names from Coleridge, his imagination was capable of producing such exoticisms as Chalceldony, Boscobella, Oossanalla, and Meru, and their use follows the date at which it is presumed he first saw Coleridge. "The Soaring Swan" (1837) suggests that he was either immediately inspired by Coleridge or had been experimenting on his own:

For there shall flow
From out the circlings of thy floating form,
Bathed in the flickering dalliance of the gems
Of thy sun-cinctured dimples, like the pearl
Of ocean set in beryl by the deep—
A shell-toned music.…

Such a picture is not realistic, nor is it detailed in the sense of being exact; it might better be called provocative, in that it attempts to set the reader's imagination to work with the poet's, suggesting colors and hues which may be filled in as the reader chooses.

Eonchs of Ruby and Virginalia mark Chivers' primary effort in the use of imagery that depends wholly upon suggestive diction, and the second volume indicates his increasing interest in the effect and theory of pure sound. Stanzas of "Rosalie Lee" have already been quoted to indicate Chivers' delight in certain passages from Keats, notable for this same suggestiveness. Eonchs of Ruby contains diction which still startles:

In the mild month of October,
As we did go
Through the fields of Cooly Rauber,
No one can know,
But the great Archangel Auber,
What songs did flow.…

That Chivers is interested in the suggestive connotation of a phrase like Cooly Rauber rather than its denotation is indicated by the fact that the cooly rauber is a vegetable, a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. The same poem describes the "thousand oceans spooming" (1. 82). Or he could describe a natural scene in these terms:

The cloud-sustaining, many-folded Hills—
The soft, retiring mystery of the Vallies—
The open frankness of the verdant Fields—
The winding labyrinths of the emerald
Alleys—
The bending Heavens, with all the Stars in
cyclic sallies—

Lily Adair resides

Where the Oreads played in the Highlands,
And the Water-Nymphs bathed in the
streams,
In the tall Jasper Reeds of the Islands—

Examples like these can be culled from a large number of the poems in these volumes, and they indicate a general trend. Chivers was less concerned with the denotation of his words than with the possible connotations dictated by the context of the poem; frequently he goes beyond the dictionary, to a land where the moon becomes a melologue (a word coined by Thomas Moore) and makes the icy azure / Argently clear. That is, Chivers could coin or distort language until it supplied him with the suggestiveness, the fantasy, he often desired. His imagination was not pictorial, nor was it, actually, dependent upon color so much as upon the connotations of the colors of precious stones; gem-mad, if you will, in the stanza from "Rosalie Lee" which he based on a scene from "The Eve of St. Agnes," he is interested in apples seen as "Ruby-rimmed Beryline buckets," and cucumbers as "emerald," "like Chrysopraz." His descriptions of Heaven depend largely upon the twenty-first chapter of the Revelation of St. John, where the City of God is described in terms of precious stones.

Exotic place names, figures from Greek mythology, Biblical names, precious stones—all contribute toward the diction of Chivers' later style. Most frequently he utilizes the more unusual words as end-rhymes, realizing the emphasis thus obtained. There was an interesting connection in Chivers' mind between color and sound. He added a note to the phrase "Soft as the liquid tones of Heaven," saying that he was "Alluding to the harmony between a soft sound and a blue color." Twentieth-century psychologists, and even home decorators would agree, perhaps, and it seems probable, that Chivers' growing interest in color and its suggestive powers led him to experiment with the nature of pure sound in poetry. The mind that can record color in terms of sound clearly was sensitive to mutations in sound itself. Interest in suggestions of sound through alliteration and assonance led Chivers to write poems in which sound dominates, the thematic sense of the poem being of little importance. Coleridge certainly helped to lead him to such experimentation, and some of his lines are worthy of the English poet. Earlier he had written that the vultures "cleave their curve in the charnal air," a line which immediately suggests Gerard Manley Hopkins, and that his love's eyes were "Like the Lioness', lazy, their hazel hue." He once tried to put this interest into concrete terms: the Angelus is described as

A wave-like, azure sound,
Upon the pavement of new-fallen snow,
Pure as an Angel's garment on
the ground—
Trembling the atmosphere with its soft flow—
Comes swiftly, with its Heaven-dilating swell,
From the Noon-ringing of yon far-off Bell.

An azure sound suggests the nature of Chivers' ear, but here he depends, successfully, at least partially upon the picture suggested. "The Poet of Love," on the other hand, dispenses with such pictorial detail and relies upon the sweep of his language;

With the white lightnings of his still small voice,
Deep as the thunders of the azure Silence—
He makes dumb the oracular Cymbals with their
noise,
Till BEAUTY flourish Amaranthine on the
Islands
Of all the loud tumultuous Sea
Of the vast immensity,
Echoing the music of the Morns,
Blown through the Chrysomelian Horns
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns
By the great Angel of Eternity,
Thundering, Come to me! come to me!

"Apollo" achieves much the same effect:

Like the lightning piled on lightning, ever rising,
never reaching,
In one monument of glory towards the
golden gates of God—
Voicing out themselves in thunder upon thunder
in their preaching,
Piled this Cyeclop [sic] up his Epic where
the Angels never trod.
Like the fountains everlasting that forever more
are flowing
From the throne within the centre of the
City built on high,
With their genial irrigation life forever
more bestowing—
Flows his lucid, liquid river through the
gardens of the sky,
For the stars forever blooming in the
gardens of the sky.

The images of such poetry are not to be taken out of context, nor are they to be asked to produce their effects unless surrounded by others of the same nature. In these poems Chivers depends upon the multiplicity of his imagery, which in its suggestiveness often goes beyond intellectual comprehension, to produce an effect that is wholly of the senses. The reader is asked to forego his stable position and transport himself to Chivers' world, a world where "Chrysomelian Horns" and the "gardens of the sky" are wholly in place. The subject matter of poetry of this sort matters less than the emotional hypnosis the vast images and the exotic diction produce. It is not quite Xanadu, but it is not far from it.

Coleridge's world is most clearly evoked in a strange poem of Chivers' entitled "The Little Boy Blue," a title as deceptive as any ever offered. The poem tells the story of the poet's wanderings across the earth, led on always by the song of the little boy blue. It becomes clear only after some little time that this figure symbolizes Chivers' poetic inspiration, and the places they visit are suggestive of the wild heights of Chivers' imagination. It matters not at all what the exact sense of the stanza may be; the thirty-seven quatrains that make up the poem establish a cadence which, while it is completely different from the whirling lines of the poems quoted above, carries the reader through the exotic lands of Chivers' inner world.

The little boy blue
Was the boy that was born
In the forest of Dru,
On the mountains of Morn.

Where the tongue of the sea
Piles the dirges on Lorn
There he warbled for me
Mellow lays on his horn.

Where the dregs of his moan
Shingle-sanded the shore,
There he built all alone
Lays that live evermore.

By the cool crystal rills,
That meandered Lahawn,
All along the green hills,
There he wandered at dawn—
From the forests of Dru,
On the Mountains of Morn,
Blowing songs ever new
Through the throat of his horn.

From the island of Arran,
To the Vale of Lahore,
Where the fields are all barren—
There he walked evermore.

On the green banks of On,
By the City of No,
There he taught the wild swan
Her white bugle to blow.

First, he sang of the land,
Then he sang of the sea,
Then he wrote on the sand
What I write now for thee.

And it does not seem imperative that the reader recognize symbolic meaning in such stanzas; their primary effect, obviously, is to establish the atmosphere of another world.

Although "The Little Boy Blue" depends for many of its effects upon strange end-rhymes, the true nature of Chivers' interest in sound itself becomes clearer from an examination of his "Chinese Serenade." The poem is divided into six irregular stanzas, the first three introduced by lines which attempt to approximate the sound of a Chinese stringed instrument:

Tien-Tsze
Tu Du
Skies Blue—
All clear—
Fourth year,
Third Moon,
High Noon
At night.…

Strange music indeed for the stable pages of a reputable literary magazine! The subtly cadenced music of the Chinese appealed to Chivers, and his attempt to reproduce it is successful as far as it goes. The main body of the first three stanzas does not continue the music, however, as it tells the story of the love and the "King of SonTay." The final stanzas of the poem are an attempt to convey the sound of a gong:

Bo-au-awng, ba-ang, bing!
Bee-ee-eeing, ba-ang, bong!
So-au-awng, sa-ang, sing!
See-ee-eeing, sa-ang, song!
Bing, bang, bong!

Here he has gone beyond poetry to a type of phonetic reproduction which is less effective than the tonal music of the first lines. Chivers' ear was not always acute, but melody and certain rhythms attracted him, and his attempts to create poetry which might approximate what he heard are a fascinating undercurrent in American literature. The songs of birds attracted him, and he tried several times to spell them out. In one of his letters to the Georgia Citizen, he speaks of his "recently written Theory of a true Poetical Language," and it may be presumed that this essay, were it extant, would lead up to a full understanding of his hopes to create a diction depending more upon connotation that denotation, and of his onomatopoetic attempts.

The presence of a strong rhythm in much of Chivers' experimental poetry is best accounted for by remembering his boyhood among his father's slaves. He writes that "there is absolutely more real and soul thrilling music made audible, (but still unwritten,) by the impassioned utterance of the negroes in the South … than can be found … in these whole Northern regions…" Earlier he had noted that he had a large collection of such songs, and had praised them for their "simplicity" and natural perfection of rhythm. Cultural historians and jazz enthusiasts of the twentieth century have agreed, and Chivers' own day of course saw the beginning of the famed Christy minstrels. Whether the "Corn Shucking Song" Chivers published in 1855 in his own work and the result of many hours listening to work songs, or whether it is a literal transcription is difficult to tell. An earlier Negro melody, "De Ole Gray Hoss," contains the lines, "Oh! whar did you kum fum/Kum fum, kum fum—," the substance and rhythm of which can be found in many of that race's songs today, and the rhythm of the following seems legitimately derived from Negro melody:

Shuck de Cawn, Niggers! oh! shuck de Cawn,
Darkies!
De Mawnin' Staws a-risin' to bring de
brake o' day;
Shout aloud, Darkies! oh! shout aloud, Niggers!
De Oberseer's watin' to cawl us awl away.
Wawk yore tawk, Jawbone! oh! wawk yore tawk
wakin'!
For old Massa's dreamin' about de brake o'
day;
Bress yore soles, Darkies! de Oberseer's akin!
To gib us awl de cowhide, before we go
away!
Git away de Cawn, Boys! git away de Cawn!
Oh! git away de Cawn, Boys! git away de
Cawn!
Linkydum-a-hydum, a linkydum-a-ho!
Holler, Boys! holler! de Cawn is gettin'
low.

Chivers evidently delighted in such exaggerated colloquialisms, for "De Ole Gray Hoss," mentioned above, is a comic lyric, and "The Death of the Devil," a low comedy farce built around one man's efforts to hoodwink another, makes use of exactly such stage-darky diction as we have above, unfortunately lacking the rhythms that make the "Corn-Shucking Song" successful.

Rhythm and onomatopoetic diction came together again in Chivers' attempt to reproduce the effect of a railroad train leaving the station. This is tour de force work, but nonetheless interesting as it exhibits his deep interest in an experiment with hypnotic effects. The images that are scattered throughout the poem resemble some of those he used to produce the sweeping effects of "The Poet of Love" or "Apollo" in that they are entirely suggestive, and totally unrelated to the realistic scene portrayed.

All aboard! Yes—Tingle, tingle,
Goes the bell as we all mingle—
No one sitting solely single—
As the steam begins to fizzle
With a kind of sighing sizzle—
Ending in a piercing whistle—
As the fireman builds his fire,
And the steam gets higher, higher—
Thus fulfilling his desire—
Which forever he keeps feeding
With the pine-knots he is needing,
As he on his way goes speeding—
Till the Iron Horse goes rushing,
With his fiery face all flushing—
Every thing before him crushing—
While the smoke goes upward curling,
Spark-bespangled in unfurling
And the iron wheels go whirling,
Like two mighty millstones grinding,
When no miller is them minding—
All the eye with grit-dust blinding—
And the cars begin to rattle,
And the springs go tittle-tattle—
Driving off the grazing cattle—
As if Death were Hell pursuing
To his uttermost undoing,
Down the iron road to ruin—
With a clitta, clatta, clatter,
Like the Devil beating batter
Up in Hell, in iron platter.…

These poems emphasize the continual necessity Chivers felt to expand the limits of poetic theory and practice as he knew it. They are not uniformly successful, but they are strong indication of his distinction from the common. He had imagination, an ear which could catch tonal differences and melodic rhythms, and often the talent to turn what he heard and felt into effective poetry. His diction varies from the dream world of "The Little Boy Blue" to such realism as we have just seen, a scope indicative of his interest in deriving meaning from the manipulation of sound itself.

POETIC DEVICES

Chivers' creative process was a religious one; his moments of inspiration are akin to the mystic's consciousness of his at-oneness with God. Chivers made the relation between the artistic and the religious experience concrete and factual by proclaiming that his poetry was an evocation of divinity, of the divine presence. Unlike most mystics, he felt no sense of awe upon establishing this identification. Supremely confident of his own abilities, he comments on the fact of the nature of poetry rather than on the technique used to create the poetry.

Expressing himself in exultant terms in his prefaces and prose statements, Chivers seldom speaks of his conscious effort to achieve something new in form and technique. Indeed, the majority of these statements have proved to be his efforts to explain the true quality of his subject matter, rather than explications of his method.

In line with this silence about his technical experiments is the absence of any general statement on imagery, beyond his assertion that "the more palpably [Divine Beauty] is made manifest in the IMAGE, through Art, the more lucid will be the Revelation of the Divine Idea." In introducing this comment, Chivers insisted that the image is derived "by glorying sensation, which is finite, into thought, which is infinite.…" Such a statement could come only from a poet who reacted to experience, to stimuli of any sort, by his senses alone. A ratiocinative poet, for example, would place his emphasis upon the Art, which Chivers does include in his theorem, rather than upon the sensation. When Chivers said Poe failed in certain poetic areas because he lacked passion, what he meant was that the Art, the craftsmanship of the poet, had become too obvious, that the fire of inspiration had been extinguished before the calculation of means to achieve the desired effect. Such an objection sums up the failure of certain of Poe's poems quite exactly; it also clarifies Chivers' own theory and practice. For while he objected that Poe stressed the necessary Art to the exclusion of the necessary Passion, Chivers himself delighted in the Passion to a point where some of his poems lose form and shape before its onslaught.

But it is not to be imagined that Chivers held entirely to the notion that Passion, or exalted emotion, was a poem's only necessary ingredient. His experiments in diction and form have already testified to his interest in technical matters, and his use of imagery furthers the belief that while he could speak of poetry only in terms of its ultimate purpose and divine nature, he was deeply if silently concerned with the problems of the working artist. Just as we have seen that his efforts to extend the boundaries of poetic form and language resulted from certain basic beliefs which he held, so will we see that his use of imagery derives from his insistence that an image is basically sensation "glorified" or raised into thought.

The explication of such a statement is relatively simple once Chivers' prose is understood: sensation, the reaction of the poet as he stands in the face of the given experience, when placed in the context of the poem's theme becomes more than simply emotional response; it becomes the true interpretation of the experience, for the poet sees with the eyes of the seer. His reaction, then, expressed in terms of imagery, gives the facts or details of the experience the inspired quality which makes them the "Revelation of the Divine Idea."

With such a belief behind it, Chivers' poetry takes on new meaning, particularly when his subject matter is concerned with divinity or the divine, that which is in some way at a remove from this earth. His more conventional pieces, those devoted to standard romantic themes of earthly love, parting, or sorrow, for example, seldom make use of imagery. But the poems which transcend the earthly toward the divine contain images which are distinctly unusual in the work of an American poet of the 1840's and 1850's.

While this theory lies behind virtually all of Chivers' more unusual imagery, his use of the simile seems to derive directly from an outside influence rather than from his poetic theory. In many of the poems following the middle years of the 1830's, presumably after he had seen Shelley's collected works for the first time, Chivers depends wholly upon the parallel construction made possible by repetition of the simile. Shelley's influence seems clear, for his work abounds in such usage; this has already been noted in reference to Chivers' "To Allegra Florence in Heaven."

Yet in another way Chivers' use of the simile derives from the emotional and sometimes erratic quality of his mind. Where a poet like Edward Taylor, rational in at least certain elements of his Puritan thinking, seldom leaves an image until he has exhausted all its involutions and possibilities, Chivers, moved by emotion and not by intellectual or rationalistic stimuli, seldom investigates an image beyond its surface connections with the subject at hand. One aspect of a comparison catches his attention, and he builds a simile about it; another, perhaps illustrating a second comparison, may be added to the first—and so on. Rather than utilizing a single fully developed metaphor or image, Chivers' poetry is characterized by a loose, inclusive structure, typical in many ways of Shelley. Bome upward by emotion, his mind and imagination play over a series of comparisons, delighting in each for a moment before going on to the next. The effect of such composition is sometimes erratic, while at other times the spread of his series of pictures gives just the quality of totality which he desired. "The Dying Beauty," a poem written soon after he had first studied Shelley, is typical:

She died in meekness, like the noiseless lamb
When slain upon the altar by the knife,
And lay reclining on her couch so calm,
That all who saw her said she still had life.
She died in softness, like the Dorian flute,
When heard melodious on the hills at night,
When every voice but that loved one is mute,
And all the holy heavens above are bright.
And like the turtle that has lost her love,
She hastened quickly from the world to rest;
And passed off gently to the realms above,
To reign forever in her FATHER'S breast.

The majority of Chivers' similes utilize the word like, and frequently it is given a primary position in the line. Others use a moderately extended simile bounded formally by as and so; apparently the strict format of such a construction helped Chivers to achieve a tighter structure. "Caelicola," an elegy on Poe, begins,

Like that sweet bird of night,
Startling the ebon silence from repose,
Until the stars appear to burn more bright
From its excessive gush of song which flows
Like some impetuous river to the sea—
So thou did'st flood the world with melody.

For as the evening star
Pants with its "silver lightnings" for the high
And holy Heavens—the azure calm afar—
Climbing with labor now the bending sky
To lead Night's Navy through the upper sea—
So thou did'st pant for immortality.

Such usage is not always effective, for the structure of the stanza dominates its content instead of containing it.

Chivers' mind, with a wide enough grasp to delight in virtually unrelated similes, occasionally achieved a yoking of disparate elements reminiscent of John Donne. When lust attacks virtue, Chivers says in Conrad and Eudora, "Then fix a pivot in thy heart for doubt to turn on!" Violent and forceful images of this sort do not occur often in his work, but their presence, as in the following example, is another instance of that facility of imagination which characterizes Chivers' poetry:

Thou wert as mild as an incarnate Moon,
Making his soul the satellite of mine—
Round which thou didst revolve in joy, as soon
As my fond soul could shed its light on thine.

The Path of Sorrow (1832) and Conrad and Eudora (1834) do not develop in this imaginative usage very far. Generally, the poems in the first volume utilize direct statement of emotion or reaction rather than the indirection of the simile or metaphor. "Songs of the Heart" of Conrad and Eudora contains fewer of such personal revelations, but the format normally involves an artificial situation or theme, and such notable imagery as is found there seems orthodox romanticism. Occasionally Chivers developed an atmospheric effect through the use of an imaginative image: his sister's dying eyes mirrored sights to him which were "the whisperings of bliss, / Uttered by silence.…" The significance of silence seems to be the beginning of his almost mystic insight into sensory reaction:

my chamber has become an alcove
For the watchers of the sky! and in my
Bed, at midnight of my sleep, I people
Worlds, and dream unnumbered things; till
silence
Wakes from lethargy, and shocks my burning
Brain.…

In these two random examples, Chivers has had comparative success with a device which he was to use more and more frequently. By personalizing or animating the abstract, he attaches a physical dimension to his otherwise prosaic statement.

This same device is elaborated in Nacoochee (1837), and we find "An angel fondling with the locks of even …" or with "the locks of love!" His Heaven is made physical, if not visual, and thus susceptible to sensory reaction. He came to use this device most frequently when he attempted to envision vast or distant or indistinct forces. The earth, in her last convulsion at Judgment Day, is seen as an animated being:

the far-stretching solitudes were torn
By the tempestuous whirlwinds, as they came
From out the nostril of the dying sea!
And when the pantings of his collapsed sides
Gave out the last Lunarian sigh to heaven,
That sent prolific torpor through his limbs;
And when the voiceless confines of his waves
Lay back within the pulseless arms of his
Peninsulas, with one far-spreading seethe
Of songless palsy—down his bosom sank!

He attempts the same visual effect in "The Death of Time":

A mournful anthem comes from out the moon!
For she has found her grave-clothes in the
clouds!
And frightened at the widowhood of earth,
She wanders blindfolded from her wonted path,
And, wailing for her ocean-lord, she puts
On sackcloth for the dying sun, and sets
Behind Eternity to rise no more!

Such an image is both pictorial and suggestive; the reader cannot visualize its full extent, but because of the animation of forces and bodies not normally capable of feeling or emotion, Chivers has made an otherwise unimaginable circumstance vivid.

Imagery of this sort depends for its effect upon and helps explain extensions beyond the normal boundaries of experience. When Chivers says "Before [God] laid the world's foundation stone / High on the nothing of primeval night," he intends that the reader understand by visualizing the action. God fixing the cornerstone of the world led to more unusual work. By the same token that Chivers is able to accept and utilize the metaphor of an artisan construcing the world is he able to provide an almost surrealistic effect when he imagines his own death:

The great golden hand on the Adamant Dial
Of the Clock of Eternity pauses in Heaven!
From Death's bony hand I now empty the
Phial—
And the Morning is just like the Even!

It is a sensory reaction that Chivers demands of the reader. By an extension of the physical reality of this world to a plane which is usually dealt with only in abstract terms, he presents an image which can be visualized by the imagination. I say "by the imagination," because Chivers seldom uses intimate detail of the physical world in his imagery. The scene set by "Death, from out Hell's bars, / Looked lean for want of life!" is one which can be seen, but seen only by the inward, imaginative eye. The following description of a dead woman's hair moving slightly in the wind sets a scene clearly enough, but it is one which draws the imagination into the reader's reaction; where much romantic imagery provides a familiar or quickly visualized setting, the following scene exists in a separate world, a world which, I believe, existed within Chivers' own consciousness:

the whispers of the odorous Breeze,
Lifting her raven locks with spirit-hands,
And weaving, with their glossy curls, the woof
Wherein to hide the fragrance he had stolen—

Or, more exactly, when he speaks of his own emotions Chivers turns to an imaginative world which is not far distant from that which provided such imagery as we have been examining. Here the metaphor is standard in its limits, until the final lines:

The last dark wave that lashed affection's shore,
Is pausing now upon my weary soul!
Thy syren mistress of its tides shall be
A lamp hung out beyond eternity!

Chivers' imagination and mind were extensive enough to grasp such an image, and through the use of them in his poetry he hoped to achieve the revelation of the nature of his reaction to certain situations. When the situation was one which included Heaven, then his inward reactions became the true image of that Heaven, or when it was of lesser import, as the one above, he could suggest the extreme nature of his reaction by images which immediately force the reader to abandon his grasp upon the physical world and to enter into Chivers' consciousness, which, partially at least, becomes just as visible and real as the world the reader has left.

The images we have examined so far have all dealt in visual and sometimes imaginative terms; they are the sensory reactions Chivers has spoken of which both explain the poet's response and demand intuitive comprehension by the reader. But Chivers depended less upon his visual sense for his most striking images, than upon a combination of his auditory and olfactory senses. At times such imagery approached sense confusion, but almost always such multiplicity of sensory response is intentional. It might better be called ambiguity than confusion of sensory response. When Emily Dickinson described a humming bird as "A resonance of emerald," she was uniting the reaction of her eye with that of her ear; such unification is of course intentional and it suggests the totality or the multiplicity of her understanding of the bird. Chivers also makes use (perhaps to a greater degree even than Emily Dickinson) of this totality of the senses.

When Chivers speaks of the "Incense-smoke of pain" arising from the crucified Christ, he combines odor with emotion, as it were, in almost symbolic terms, demanding that the reader experience as well as understand the scene. A more complicated image attempts to describe the murmur of a sea shell when held close to the ear: "Here, in its labyrinthine curve, it leaves / The footprints of its song in many dyes; / And here, incessantly, it ever weaves / The rainbow-tissue of its melodies." Song, personified, is equated with color in such an image, and the effect is one of purposeful ambiguity or sense confusion.

It would seem that Chivers' ear supplied him with virtually all the ambiguities of sense imagery which he uses. This fact perhaps explains as well as depends upon his understanding of Heaven as a state of music. The inward world out of which almost all his more vivid imagery comes was one in which abstractions could have their own particular sound (and sometimes odor), and where vast forces are understood best in terms of their sound. Only once did Chivers attempt to describe his reaction definitively: entitled "The Voice of Thought," the following poem presents an explanation of what occurred during his moments of inspiration.

Faint as the far-down tone
Beneath the sounding sea,
Muffled, by its own moan,
To silent melody;
So faint we cannot tell
But that the sound we hear
Is some sweet rose's smell
That falls upon our ear;
(As if the Butterfly,
Shaking the Lily-bell,
While drinking joyfully,
Should toll its own death-knell!)
Sweeter than Hope's sweet lute
Singing of joys to be
When Pain's harsh voice is mute,
Is the Soul's sweet song to me.

The poem's title helps us understand Chivers' method of sensory perception; thought, an abstraction, is given a voice, and that voice is best understood by Chivers when likened to the odor of a rose. The voice, he says ambiguously, is silent, yet that silence stirs a certain sensory reaction within him.

By such reaction as this, Chivers could achieve a variety of effects. The vastness of space and Heaven, which he so often spoke of in his poetry, gathers sound unto itself, much in the manner of the belief of Pythagoras in the music of spheres:

the rolling spheres
Diffuse their circular orbit-tones on high—
Spreading till they embrace th' Eternal Years
With their dilating, wave-like melody—
Winnowing the calm, clear, interstellar air—

Or he can turn the device about and give physical qualities to sound itself:

Tempestuous whirlwinds of deep melody
Dash from his orb-prow on his spheric
road—
Rolling in mountain-billows on Heaven's sea
Against the white shore of the feet of God.

The image becomes vast and all-inclusive as the singer's melody becomes a vessel moving through an ocean; the poem from which the image comes is an attempt to recreate an astronomer's sense of exultation as he discovers a new planet, and in its context the image serves to increase and broaden the reader's response to the poem.

But such sensory effects as Chivers desires were not always of such huge size. By taking the physical quality of one physical situation and giving it to another, he produced a visual image which is at once real and imaginative:

Silver twilight softly snowing
On the earth and on the sea,

All the darkness overflowing—
Rode the moon.…

This entire image depends for its effect upon the use of the word snowing in connection with twilight; indeed, many of Chivers' most interesting images stem from his ability to snatch a word from a familiar context and put it in another, where it both describes the image and suggests the one from which it was taken.

But sound imagery, which is the particular fascination of so many of his poems, can be carried further, sometimes too far. A harpist is described:

While from his fingers' ends the dews of sound
Dript, changing into Jewels as they fall,
Bright as stalactites of crystal.…

The imagery which has been described here is not unusual in Chivers' poetry; it is not chosen with any purpose other than to present his most typical and yet most unorthodox images. There are, of course, numbers of poems which are wholly standard in imagery: here the wind is personified.

Thou wringest, with thy invisible hand, the foam
Out of the emerald drapery of the sea,
Beneath whose foldings lies the Sea-Nymph's home—
Lifted, to make it visible, by thee.…

But even as standard a romantic image as this indicates Chivers' primary interest and effect; it is an imaginative, visual, yet suggestive world out of which he would write. His attempt to recreate the totality of his sense response to particular situations through ambiguity is only a symptom of the completeness with which his emotions responded to certain stimuli.

The manner in which Chivers often strings a series of similes together to illustrate his reaction to an experience indicates further his attempt to make the Divine Idea, to use his words, clear to the reader. By comparing his subject with a variety of partially similar subjects or experiences, he hopes to illustrate the basic quality of that subject. These similes, as well as certain of his almost metaphysical conceits, frequently deal in terms of the poet's senses, for, as has been noted, Chivers would change sensation into thought or understanding, and one of the surest ways of achieving such a change is to force the reader to respond with his own senses in a variety of ways until the subject of the poem becomes an actual experience for him just as it was for the poet.