Poem Outlines.
By Sidney Lanier.
Charles Scribner’s Sons,
Publishers, New York.
D’Israeli’s “Calamities and Quarrels of Authors” may be ransacked in vain for an example of misfortune, suffering and heroic combat with adversity, more pathetic and more admirable than that of Sidney Lanier.
The literary history of our own country presents many an instance of the neglected genius, struggling with poverty, but none of them appeals to us quite so powerfully as does that of the Georgia poet who wrote the “Hymn to Sunrise”—wrote it when his hand was too weak to lift food to his mouth and when his fever temperature was 104.
Born in Macon, Ga., in 1842, he had hardly graduated, with the first honor, at Oglethorpe College, before the Civil War drew him, a youth of eighteen, into the Macon Volunteers, the first Georgia troops that went to the front.
At the end of the war,—in which he had been in several battles and had spent months in prison—he returned on foot to Georgia.
After a long and desperate illness, he went to Alabama, where he clerked in a store in Montgomery, and then became a school teacher.
He married in 1868 and soon afterwards had the first hemorrhage from the lungs.
Returning to Macon, he studied law and began its practice, with his father.
The lung trouble was a fixture, however, and he went to New York for treatment. The remainder of his life presents the distressing spectacle of pursuer and pursued—the Disease in chase of the victim. We find him now in Texas, then in Florida, now in Pennsylvania, then in North Carolina,—with his remorseless enemy on his trail, always.
In the occasional improvements in his health, in the temporary respites from the implacable foe, was done the literary work which gives Sidney Lanier his place in the hall of fame. A born musician, he played organ, piano, flute, violin, banjo and guitar, but his preference was the violin and his specialty the flute.
It was his exquisite music on the flute which secured and held for him the leadership of the Peabody Symphony Concerts, in Baltimore. To this city he went to live in 1873, and Baltimore was his home during the few years that were left to him.
There is no record of a braver struggle with poverty and disease than that made by the Georgia poet during these last tragical years.
Fugitive writings for the magazines, lecture courses to private classes, books in prose and books in verse, first-flute in an orchestra, public lectures at the Peabody Institute, and then the final scene in North Carolina where the long, hideous battle comes to its pitiful close. (Aug. 1881.)
It is not probable that Sidney Lanier ever got much money out of his books.
“Tiger Lilies,” his novel, made no hit; “The Science of English Verse” could not possibly appeal to many; and even his volumes of verse had no considerable recognition during the poet’s life-time. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Lanier will ever be one of the favorites of all classes, like Burns and Byron, Longfellow and Bret Harte.
It appears to be the literal fact that the Georgia poet was always hard up. Poverty and Consumption were always dogging his steps. To keep himself and family from want, he had to be first-flute in the Concert, had to deliver those lectures. No matter how weak he was, no matter how ill and depressed, he had to go,—and he did go and go and go, until he was so far spent that it may be said that his last lectures were the death-rattle of a dying man. It is said that his hearers, to whom his condition was but too evident, listened to these final discourses “in a kind of fascinated terror.”
Read this extract from one of his letters to his wife:
“So many great ideas for Art are born to me each day, I am swept away into the land of All-Delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind; and I find within myself such entire, yet humble, confidence of possessing every single element of power to carry them all out, save the little paltry sum of money that would suffice to keep us clothed and fed in the meantime.
“I do not understand this.”
(The black type is ours.)
It reminds one of that letter of Edgar Poe, written to Childers of Georgia, requesting a small loan and saying simply, abjectly, “I am so miserably poor and friendless.”
His poverty cowed Poe, and caused him to do unmanly things. Poverty did not cow Sidney Lanier, and never in his life did he do an unmanly thing. Much of the time he was not able to have his family with him. Therefore, the battle that was fought by this unfearing soul was a sick man, a lonely man, a care-worn man, a sensitive man, a very poor man against odds that he knew he could not long resist.
In 1905, Charles Scribner’s Sons brought out a complete collection of the “Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited by his wife.” Of those poems we have not space to write.
The present volume is unique and to those who value the brief suggestion which fires a train of thought, it is valuable,—exceedingly so.
Not all of these “Outlines” are properly so called. Many of them are as complete in themselves as are the Cameos of Walter Savage Landor.
Like other Georgia bards—A. R. Watson, Dr. Frank Tickner, Joel Chandler Harris, Frank L. Stanton and Don Marquis,—Sidney Lanier could put so much thought and beauty into four lines as to give one a sense of perfection.
For example,
“And then A gentle violin mated with the flute, And both flew off into a wood of harmony, Two doves of tone.”
That is not the “Outline” of a poem; it is a poem, perfect in its way and complete in itself. There was nothing more to be said.
Again,
“Tolerance, like a Harbor, lay Smooth and shining and secure, Where ships carrying every flag Of faith were anchored in peace.”
This also,
“Who doubts but Eve had a rose in her hair Ere fig leaves fettered her limbs? So Life wore poetry’s perfect rose Before ’twas clothed with economic prose.”
And,
“How did’st thou win her, Death? Thou art the only rival that ever made her cold to me.”
And,
“Wan Silence lying, lip on ground. An outcast Angel from the heaven of sound, Prone and desolate By the shut Gate.”
One more selection, and we leave off:
“Look out Death, I am coming, Art thou not glad? What talks we’ll have, What mem’ries of old battles. Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.”
This is no “Outline”; it is a complete poem, a terribly complete poem. Like the flash in a night of storm, it lights up a world of raging elements and universal gloom.