Poems by Sidney Lanier

First published: 1877/1884; includes Poems, 1877; Poems of Sidney Lanier, 1884

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The poetic fame of Sidney Lanier, after Edgar Allan Poe one of the most important nineteenth century poets of the southern United States, rests on a small body of poetry found in the posthumous volume Poems. This contains the verse Lanier included in his earlier Poems, along with a number of pieces that had received only magazine publication before the poet’s death in 1881, plus a group of unrevised early poems that his wife felt were worthy of publication.

Lanier was a poet of both theory and practice. His theory of technique was influenced by his great love for music. Precociously musical, he became a brilliant flutist who played with symphony orchestras in Dallas and Baltimore. His moralistic theory of poetic content was possibly influenced by his early training in a devoutly Christian family as well as by his own fundamentally religious nature. This shows itself in some of his nature poems as a passionate love for God’s plants and creatures that approaches the fervor of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Lanier’s theory of prosody is expounded principally in his work The Science of English Verse (1880), in which he develops in extensive detail and with copious illustration the thesis that the same laws govern both versification and music. Three brief quotations illustrate this thesis:

When we hear verse, we hear a set of relations between sounds; when we silently read verse, we see that which brings to us a set of relations between sounds; when we imagine verse, we imagine a set of relations between sounds.

When those exact co-ordinations which the ear perceives as rhythm, tune, and tone-color, are suggested to the ear by a series of musical sounds, the result is … Music.

When those exact co-ordinations which the ear perceives as rhythm, tune, and tone-color, are suggested to the ear by a series of spoken words, the result is . . . Verse.

There is absolutely no difference between the sound-relations used in music and those used in verse.

Lanier’s application of his prosodic theory may be studied in many of his poems, but it may be seen easily in such poems as “The Symphony,” “The Marshes of Glynn,” and “Song of the Chattahoochee.” In “The Symphony,” Lanier attempted the difficult task of composing a poem somewhat as a musician would. Such instruments as the violin, flute, clarinet, horn, and hautboy (oboe) are personified and used to develop the theme of love, the enemy of trade (materialism), which pervades the poem. Nowhere is Lanier’s belief in the essential identity of sound relations in music and in verse better illustrated than in the four lines that introduce the horn passage in the poem: “There thrust the bold straightforward horn/ To battle for that lady lorn./ With hearthsome voice of mellow scorn,/ Like any knight in knighthood’s morn.”

It has been objected that Lanier tried the impossible in “The Symphony” and that his achievement, though notable, is successful only in part. Perhaps his theory is better illustrated in “Sunrise” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” In “Sunrise,” the sibilance of the forest can be heard: “Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms,/ Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,/ Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves,/ Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves.” In “The Marshes of Glynn,” the sounds and even the silence of the great marshes near Brunswick, Georgia, may be heard and felt by the reader. A passage near the close of the poem describes in this fashion the coming of the high tide of evening:

The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run’Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the  marsh-grass stir;Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that  westward whirr;Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease  to run;And the sea and the marsh are one.

In these lines the sounds of the moving waters and grasses and of the whirring wings are followed by a silence that is palpable.

Because of Lanier’s repeated use of onomatopoeia in his verse he has often been compared with Poe, but Lanier’s theory of poetic content is quite different. Poe, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” concedes that “passion, or even truth, may . . . be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem”; however, he asserts, “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.” In another essay, “The Poetic Principle,” Poe attacks what he calls “the heresy of the didactic.” “Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral,” he declares, “and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged.” He goes on:

Would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

Lanier loved art as much as Poe did, but Lanier was on the side of the moralists. In his series of lectures posthumously published as The English Novel and the Principle of Its Development (1883), he leaves no doubt as to his position when he states:

We may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty—that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him; he is not yet the great artist.

Although Lanier wrote occasional poems such as his verse narrative “The Revenge of Hamish,” in which the moral element is not a major one, most of his poetry is charged with moral purpose or shines with “the beauty of holiness.” “The Symphony” bitterly indicts the cruel, greedy practices of trade and sings the gospel of brotherly love. In “The Marshes of Glynn,” he writes, “As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,/ Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.” Even a dialect poem such as “Thar’s More in the Man than Thar Is in the Land” contains a moral lesson, as the title itself suggests. Occasionally his moral earnestness dims Lanier’s artistic sight, however, as in “Song of the Chattahoochee,” in which the river is made to say, “I am fain for to water the plain./ Downward the voices of Duty call—.” This is a flagrant example of what John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy. People may act with moral purpose; when the Chattahoochee River flows downward, however, it is not because it knows that “The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,/ And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,” but because, as Lanier himself very well knew, the law of gravity is a part of the earthly scheme of things.

Though Lanier is not primarily a regional poet, many of his lines sing eloquently of his southern origin. He is in love with the beautiful marshes of Glynn, with their “moss-bearded live-oaks.” He mourns that “Bright drops of tune, from oceans infinite/ Of Melody” were ended when a pet mockingbird “died of a cat, May, 1878.” He grieves in “Corn” that the rich soil of his native state is being washed away because of the greed of cotton farmers who lay the surface bare and then leave their erosion-ruined areas and head for Texas to repeat their folly. In “A Florida Sunday,” he holds “in my being” rich-scented orange trees, pea-green parakeets, “pranked woodpeckers that ne’er gossip out,” palmettos, pines, and mangroves. In such poems, Lanier is as clearly a southern poet as Robert Frost is a New England one when he describes his New Hampshire countryside.

A fault that many readers have found with Lanier is that, as a poet, he too often lets his heart overflow and his whole being “quiver with the passionate thrill.” At times a noble emotion may descend into sentimentality and at others the poet’s feeling may blur the expression of “the great thought.” The lush music of Lanier’s lines may also create the lulling mental effect that one finds in Algernon Charles Swinburne. Part of Lanier’s trouble seems to be that he is striving too hard to attain the right combination of “rhythm, tune, and tone-color.” He sometimes forces his comparisons so that they become too-obvious poetic conceits, as in “Marsh Song—at Sunset,” with its metaphors drawn from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623). Some of his sentences, such as the thirty-six-line one that opens “The Marshes of Glynn,” lack clarity because of their great length and intricate structure.

In spite of the undisciplined emotionalism, hazy thought, and strained effects of his lesser poems, Lanier seems well assured of a permanent place in American literature. The melody of his best lines; the love of God, human beings, and nature found in poems such as “The Marshes of Glynn” and “The Symphony”; the simple beauty of “A Ballad of Trees and the Master”; the stoic acceptance of “The Stirrup-Cup,” in which the consumptive poet says uncomplainingly to Death, “Hand me the cup whene’er thou wilt”—for these Lanier will continue to be loved.

Bibliography

De Bellis, Jack. Sidney Lanier. New York: Twayne, 1972. Provides an excellent critical overview of Lanier’s life and works. Includes careful readings of the major poems, a discussion of Lanier’s fiction, and a biographical chronology.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sidney Lanier: Poet of the Marshes. Atlanta: Georgia Humanities Council, 1988. Brief but fine introduction to Lanier’s major works includes careful readings of selected poems. Focuses on the poetry’s relationship to nature and music.

Gabin, Jane S. A Living Minstrelsy: The Poetry and Music of Sidney Lanier. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985. Provides an informative account of Lanier’s life and artistic career. Includes sensitive readings of the poems and is particularly enlightening on the subject of the relationship of the poetry to music.

Kerkering, Jack. “’Of Me and of Mine’: The Music of Racial Identity in Whitman and Lanier, Dvořák and Du Bois.” American Literature 73, no. 1 (March, 2001): 147-184. Analyzes the issue of racial identity in the poetry of Lanier and Walt Whitman, the music of Antonín Dvořák, and The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W. E. B. Du Bois. Compares visions of American unity in Lanier’s “Centennial Cantata” (1875) with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855).

Parks, Edd Winfield. Sidney Lanier: The Man, the Poet, the Critic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968. Examines Lanier’s complete artistic life, tracing his development as a poet and a thinker. Discusses his own writings as well as his commentaries on and concerns with the works of others. Considers why Lanier never became a major poet.

Starke, Aubrey Harrison. Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. Presents a full, critical exploration of Lanier’s poetry and creative nature.