It requires but little intimacy with the true artist to see that,
whether his medium of expression be words or music or the brush, much of
his finest achievement can never be given to his fellows bearing the
stamp of perfect craftsmanship. As when the painter, with hand
momentarily inspired by the fervor of the eye, fixes in a sketch some
miracle of color or line, which vanishes with each succeeding stroke of
the brush laboring to embody it in a finished picture—so the poet may
transcribe one note of his own tense heart strings; may find fluttering
words that zigzag aerially beside the elusive new-born thought; may
strike out in the rough some heaven-scaling conception—to discover too
often that these priceless fragments cannot be fused again, cannot be
joined with commoner metals into a conventional quatrain or sonnet.
At such moments, by some subtle necromancy of quivering genius, the poet
in his exaltation weaves sinuous words into a magic net with which he
snares at one cast the elfin woods fancies, the shy butterfly ideas that
flit across secluded glades of the imagination, invisible even to him at
other times; and there these delicate creatures lie, flashing forth from
the meshes glimpses of an unearthly brilliance—for all time, if he be
wise enough not to attempt to open the net and spread out their wings
for the world to see them better. Or it may be that his mood is
interrupted by the necessity for giving to the world that which it will
receive in exchange for a living, and his next vision is of a far
distant corner of the Enchanted Land. Yet these records are what they
are; they bear star dust upon their wings; they give, perhaps, his most
intimate revelation, his highest utterance.
So the following outlines and fragments left by Sidney Lanier are
presented, in the belief that they contain the essence of poetry. His
mind budded into poems as naturally and inevitably as a tree puts forth
green leaves—and it was always spring-time there. These poem-sketches
were jotted in pencil on the backs of envelopes, on the margins of
musical programmes, on little torn scraps of paper, amid all sorts of
surroundings, whenever the dream came to him. Some are mere flashes of
simile in unrhymed couplets; others are definite rounded outlines,
instinct with the beauty of idea, but not yet hewn to the line of
perfect form; one, at least, is the beginning of quite a long narrative
in verse. There are indications of more than one projected volume of
poems, as mentioned in foot-notes. All have been selected from his
papers as containing something worthy of preservation; and, while the
thought sometimes parallels that in his published work, all are
essentially new.