Doubting Thomas and loving John,
Behind the others walking on:—
“Tell me now, John, dare you be
One of the minority?
To be lonely in your thought,
Never visited nor sought,
Shunned with secret shrug, to go
Thro’ the world, esteemed its foe;
To be singled out and hissed,
Pointed at as one unblessed,
Warned against in whispers faint,
Lest the children catch a taint;
To bear off your titles well,—
Heretic and infidel?
If you dare, come now with me,
Fearless, confident, and free.”
“Thomas, do you dare to be
Of the great majority?
To be only, as the rest,
With Heaven’s creature comforts blessed;
To accept, in humble part,
Truth that shines on every heart;
Never to be set on high,
Where the envious curses fly;
Never name or fame to find,
Still outstripped in soul and mind;
To be hid, unless to God,
As one grass-blade in the sod,
Underfoot with millions trod?
If you dare, come with us, be
Lost in love’s great unity.”
_Sidney Lanier_
Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His was
a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful performer on
various instruments), and it is not surprising that his verse
emphasizes—even overstresses—the influence of music on poetry. He
attended Oglethorpe College, graduating at the age of eighteen
(1860), and, a year later, volunteered as a private in the
Confederate army. After several months’ imprisonment (he had been
captured while acting as signal officer on a blockade-runner),
Lanier was released in February, 1865, returning from Point Lookout
to Georgia on foot, accompanied only by his flute, from which he
refused to be separated. His physical health, never the most robust,
had been frightfully impaired by his incarceration, and he was
already suffering from tuberculosis, the rest of his life being
spent in an unequal struggle against it.
He was now only twenty-three years old and the problem of choosing a
vocation was complicated by his marriage in 1867. He spent five
years in the study and practice of law, during which time he wrote
comparatively little verse. But the law could not hold him; he felt
premonitions of death and realized he must devote his talents to art
before it was too late. He was fortunate enough to obtain a position
as flautist with the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 1873 in
Baltimore, where he had free access to the music and literature he
craved. Here he wrote all of his best poetry. In 1879, he was made
lecturer on English in Johns Hopkins University, and it was for his
courses there that he wrote his chief prose work, a brilliant if not
conclusive study, _The Science of English Verse_. Besides his
poetry, he wrote several books for boys, the two most popular being
_The Boy’s Froissart_ (1878) and _The Boy’s King Arthur_ (1880).
Lanier’s poetry, charming though most of it is, suffers from his all
too frequent theorizing, his too conscious effort to bring verse
over into the province of pure music. He thought almost entirely,
even in his most intellectual conceptions, in terms of musical form.
His main theory that English verse has for its essential basis not
_accent_ but a strict musical _quantity_ is a wholly erroneous
conclusion, possible only to one who could write “whatever turn I
have for art is purely musical—poetry being with me a mere tangent
into which I shoot.” Lanier is at his best in his ballads, although
a few of his lyrics have a similar spontaneity. In spite of the fact
that he had rather novel schemes of rhythm and stanza-structure,
much of his work is marred by strained effects, elaborate conceits
and a kind of verse that approaches mere pattern-making. But such a
vigorous ballad as “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” lyrics like
“Night and Day” and “The Stirrup Cup,” and parts of the symphonic
“Hymns of the Marshes” are sure of a place in American literature.
Never a great figure, he was one of the most interesting and
spiritual of our minor poets.
Lanier died, a victim of his disease, in the mountains of North
Carolina, September 7, 1881.