While most of Lanier's poems are in a serious strain, several disclose no mean sense of humor. I refer to his dialect poems, such as `Jones's Private Argyment', `Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn', and `The Power of Prayer', especially the last, written in conjunction with his brother, Mr. Clifford Lanier.
There are passages in the poems no less pathetic than the poet's life. In discussing his love of nature we have seen that he was a pantheist in the best sense of the term. So delicate was his sensibility that we do not wonder when we hear him declaring,
"And I am one with all the kinsmen things
That e'er my Father fathered,"*
a saying as felicitous as the Roman's "I am a man, and, therefore, nothing human is stranger to me." The tenderness of the `Ballad of Trees and the Master' must touch all readers. Few passages are more pathetic, I think, than that, in `June Dreams in January', telling of the poet's struggle for bread and fame, while "his worshipful sweet wife sat still, afar, within the village whence she sent him forth, waiting all confident and proud and calm." And, if there occurs therein a plaintive tone, let us remember that it is the only time that he complained of his lot, and that here really he has more in mind his dearer self, his wife, and that calm succeeded to unrest just as it does in this passage:
"`Why can we poets dream us beauty, so,
But cannot dream us bread? Why, now, can I
Make, aye, create this fervid throbbing June
Out of the chill, chill matter of my soul,
Yet cannot make a poorest penny-loaf
Out of this same chill matter, no, not one
For Mary, though she starved upon my breast?'
And then he fell upon his couch, and sobbed,
And, late, just when his heart leaned o'er
The very edge of breaking, fain to fall,
God sent him sleep."**
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* `A Florida Sunday', ll. 102-103.
** `June Dreams in January', ll. 68-78.
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V. Lanier's Theory of Poetry
It is now time to say a word about Lanier's theory of art, especially the art of poetry. His views upon the formal side of poetry have already been noticed in the consideration of his `Science of English Verse', and hence receive no further comment here.
That Lanier keenly appreciated the responsibility resting upon the artist, appears from `Individuality', where he tells us,
"Awful is art because 'tis free,"*1*