The tolling of the bell of time which resounds throughout Lanier’s poems does not deafen him to the harmonies or the discords of the moment. With all his consciousness of literary tradition he was far more alive to the present than many of his Southern contemporaries, who were not so genuinely literary as imitatively bookish. “Corn” tells the tale of the improvident cotton-grower who becomes “A gamester’s catspaw and a banker’s slave.” “The Symphony” is an arraignment of the industrial system.
If business is battle, name it so:
War-crimes less will shame it so,
And widows less will blame it so.
“Acknowledgment” (first sonnet) and “Remonstrance” were written of the troublous period which was wracked between doubts that merely disturbed and dogmas which were still advocated with all the subtleties of persecution that—in an enlightened age—will substitute ostracism for the stake and social boycott for excommunication.
In the modest volume of his collected work—for his writing was mainly done in his last eight years, and he was not a garrulous poet—there is a marked variety. “The Revenge of Hamish” is a clear reflection of his zest for heroic story. It is one of the notably successful attempts of his day to emulate the old ballad, and it is the better for restoring the spirit of balladry without imitating the manner. “How Love Looked for Hell,” without being imitative of anyone, is distinctly pre-Raphaelite in tone. Rossetti might have written it. In “The Stirrup-Cup” there is an Elizabethan note, and “Night and Day” and the “Marsh Song—at Sunset” are literary lyrics for the readers of “Othello” and “The Tempest.” These and their like give token of Lanier’s versatility, just as the “Song of the Chattahoochee” displays his command of certain obvious devices in diction and rhythm; but the poems most distinctive of Lanier and most generally quoted are the longer meditations already mentioned, and, in particular, “The Symphony” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” Of these the earlier is much quoted by social reformers for the vigor of its protests at the exploitation of labor; by musicians, because of the sustained metaphor—though it might better have been named “The Orchestra”; and by those who love a certain fulsomeness of sensuous appeal in verse. This last trait gains friends also for “The Marshes of Glynn,” though its supreme passage, the last forty lines, is free from the decorative elaborations which in the earlier portion distract the reader from the content they adorn.
In the development of artistic power the formative period is the most open to influence and the most likely to be formal and self-conscious. Early and full maturity bring the nicest balance between the thing said and the manner of saying it; and a later period often is marked by overcompression or over-elaboration, a neglect of form in favor of content. Lanier, who died on the approach to middle life, had just published “The Science of English Verse” and was studiously aware of poetic processes, from the ingenious conceits of the “Paradise of Dainty Devices” to the metrical experiments of Swinburne and his contemporaries. In the compound of factors which were blending into the matured Lanier there was still a good measure of Elizabethan ingenuity. He felt a pleasant thrill in riding a metaphor down the page. He played repeatedly, for example, with the concept of the passage of time. In the second sonnet of “Acknowledgment” this age is a comma, and all time a complex sentence (four lines); in “Clover” the course-of-things is a browsing ox (twenty-five lines); in “The Symphony” the leaves are dials on which time tells his hours (three lines); in the first of the “Sonnets on Columbus” prickly seconds and dull-blade minutes mark three hours of suspense (three lines); and in “The Stirrup-Cup” death is a cordial compounded by time from the reapings of poets long dead (twelve lines). These all are picturesquely suggestive, but they are rather imposed on the idea than derived from it. Other poets, to be sure, have erred in the same way and then perhaps redeemed themselves. Lanier, however, said nothing so fundamentally true and compact as Pope’s “Years following years steal something every day,” or Shakespeare’s “And that old common arbitrator, Time,” or his “whirligig of time.” There is a similar reaching for effect in the rhythmical quality of many well-known passages. The twelve-line description of the velvet flute-note in “The Symphony” is more deft and intricate than convincing. The figures stumble on each other’s heels, and the alliterations, assonances, and three- and five-fold rimes are intrusively gratuitous. In like manner the opening lines of “The Marshes of Glynn” illustrate the over-luxuriance of Lanier. He delighted in tropical exuberance; he rioted in his letters with less restraint than in his verse, and in one written to his wife in 1874 he confessed parenthetically: “In plain terms—sweet Heaven, how I do abhor these same plain terms—I have been playing ‘Stradella.’” When he wrote this Lanier was thirty-two. Before his death he had approached the point of liking the plain term better and employing it oftener.
“The Marshes of Glynn” is a personal utterance of Lanier in its form, in its sensuous opulence, in its social sympathies, and in its religion; but in these latter respects it is emphatically the utterance also of the period that produced Lanier. It was written in 1878, the year of Bryant’s death; it was written in the structural sequence of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; and in its applications it indicates the changes that had taken place in religious thought since Bryant’s youth. In the earlier poem the various language that Nature speaks is expounded in general terms, before “Thoughts of the last bitter hour” lead to the monody on death and the resolve so to live that death shall have no fears. The latter poem differentiates the tones of Nature, lingering first in the cloistral depths of the woods during the heat of a June day. In the cool and quiet the poet’s
... heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,