VI
Had Lanier lived a decade longer, had he had time and strength to devote himself completely to his poetry, had his impetuous soul had time to gain patience and poise, and divest itself of florid extravagance and vague dithyramb, he might have gained a much higher place as a poet. He was gaining in power: his last poem is his greatest. He was laying plans that would, we feel sure, have worked themselves out to high poetic achievement. For at least four books of poetry he had already selected titles: Hymns of the Mountains, Hymns of the Marshes, Songs of Aldheim, and Poems on Agriculture. What they were to be we can judge only from "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise."
In these two poems we have work that is timeless and essentially placeless. There is a breadth and sweep about it that one finds only in the greater poets:
And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,
Are beating
The dark overhead as my heart beats—and steady and free
Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussions of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
Oh, like the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
The jottings that he made in his notebooks and the fragments of poems that he noted down as the inspiration came to him remind us often of Whitman. They have sweep and range:
I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage and I said:
"I know that thou art the word of God, dear violet.
And, oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads!
Measure the space a violet stands above the ground,
'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that!"
I went to the church to find my Lord.
They said He is here. He lives here.
But I could not see him
For the creed-tables and bonnet flowers.
Lanier is essentially a poet of unfulfilled promise. He seems always about to do greater things than in reality he ever does. His lyrics like "Evening Song," and "The Trees and the Master" and "The Song of the Chattahoochee," have strains in them almost Shelley-like, but there is always the fatal defect somewhere. Nothing is perfect. It seems strange sometimes that one who could at moments go so far could not go the whole way and remain long. He must hold his place among the American poets by virtue of a few fragments. A few times was he rapt into the pure ether of poetry, but he was allowed to catch only fleeting glimpses.