Death of Lanier: The day being done

Sidney Lanier contracted the tuberculosis that would kill him while in a military prison during the Civil War. Even so, he spent the next several years enjoying his life: he became an educator and a musician, then he passed the bar and became a lawyer, married, and published poems and even a novel. He traveled to or lived in Maryland, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, hoping to find a cure for his illness. He never did, and Lanier died in North Carolina on September 7, 1881; he was 39 years old.

Lanier's grave in Baltimore, MD

In his last year, Lanier had taken a job at Johns Hopkins University (his friends and colleagues there hosted a memorial about a month after his death). Notes for his lectures were dictated in strained whispers to his wife. Allegedly, students worried that their lecturer would die mid-lecture. In this same period, he also completed his final poem, "Sunrise," which one critic called "his masterpiece, radiant with beauty, and strong with the spiritual strength which outbraves death." As his wife noted, the poem was written "while his sun of life seemed fairly at the setting, and the and which first pencilled its lines had not strength to carry nourishment to the lips."

"Sunrise" is a fairly lengthy poem written in a conversational yet bouncing meter akin to Walt Whitman. In it, Lanier celebrates his connection to natural world around him. He particularly calls out the trees and their leaves at night:

    Teach me the terms of silence, — preach me
    The passion of patience, — sift me, — impeach me, —
            And there, oh there
As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air,
            Pray me a myriad prayer.

The poem continues in a passionate, almost frenzied, series of observations, questions, and exasperated pleas for answers. The sun is slowly rising throughout, and Lanier combines his poetic sentiments with his sincere belief in the connection between verse and musicality. "I am lit with the Sun," he says, and those words now mark his grave in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery. The poem picks up pace, almost feeling like a symphony as it draws to its conclusion, with the all-powerful, almost godlike sun:

Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
        Of traffic shall hide thee,
Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
                        Hide thee,
Never the reek of the time's fen-politics
                        Hide thee,
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee,
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee,
        Labor, at leisure, in art,— till yonder beside thee
           My soul shall float, friend Sun,—
              The day being done.

Lanier: to welcome a bold new-comer

After the Civil War, Sidney Lanier moved to Montgomery, Alabama for a time, where he worked as a teacher and musician. He also contributed a few editorials. One was published on July 14, 1866. In it, Lanier asked for a new cultural revival in the post-war period: "Who will come forward and inaugurate a new era of bold, electrical, impressive writing?"

We look to see young men coming forward who shall inaugurate a better literature. If ever there was a time when a magnificent field opened to young aspirants for literary renown, that time is the present. Every door is wide open... All the graces of poesy and art and music stand waiting by, ready to welcome a bold new-comer.

As if inspired by his own declaration, Lanier quit his job in Montgomery and moved to New York, the completed manuscript to his first book in hand. Just over one month later, he was the published author of a novel, Tiger Lilies. The book drew little attention; his second book was even less successful. Instead, Lanier turned to poetry and, in that field, made his mark. One of his earliest poems after his novel was "Life and Song":

If life were caught by a clarionet,
    And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
Should thrill its joy and trill its fret,
    And utter its heart in every deed,

Then would this breathing clarionet
    Type what the poet fain would be;
For none o' the singers ever yet
    Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,

Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
    Or utterly bodied forth his life,
Or out of life and song has wrought
    The perfect one of man and wife;

Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
    Might each express the other's all,
Careless if life or art were long
    Since both were one, to stand or fall:

So that the wonder struck the crowd,
    Who shouted it about the land:
His song was only living aloud,
    His work, a singing with his hand!

Lanier: inclined to hate me, as in duty bound

Sidney Lanier was living in Alabama when, in 1867, he took a trip to New York City in the hopes of publishing his first book, a novel he called Tiger Lilies. A veteran of the Confederate army, Lanier was overwhelmed by the urban world of New York. On April 16, 1867, he wrote to his father:

The grand array of houses and ships and rivers and distant hills did not arrest my soul as did the long line of men and women, which at that height seemed to writhe and contort itself in its narrow bed of Broadway as in a premature grave... I have not seen here a single eye that knew itself to be in front of a heart — but one, and that was a blue one, and a child owned it.

As a Southerner, Lanier also felt quite out of place. His letter also described a dinner he had with relatives. "About the time that the champagne came on I happened to mention that I had been in prison during the war," he wrote. The young girl there, Katie, was horrified and asked if the "rebels" treated him poorly. When Lanier replied that he had been one of those rebels, she was even more horrified.

This phrase ["Rebel"] in Katie's nursery had taken the time-honored place of bugaboos, and hobgoblins, and men under the bed. She could not realize that I, a smooth-faced, slender, ordinary mortal, in all respects like a common man, should be a live reb. She was inclined to hate me, as in duty bound.

After a few months, Lanier's novel was published, a fictionalization of his experiences in the Civil War. It was considered a failure and he never wrote prose fiction again. Instead, he turned to poetry.

Lanier: dear Land of all my love

"By the grace of God," wrote Sidney Lanier to his friend and colleague Bayard Taylor on April 4, 1876, "my centennial Ode is finished." Taylor had been asked to present an original poem for the country's 100th birthday celebration in Philadelphia and, in order to better represent both North and South, had invited Lanier to write a cantata for the event as well. "I now only know how divine has been the agony of the last three weeks," Lanier wrote to Taylor, "during which I have been rapt away to heights where all my own purposes as to a revisal of artistic forms lay clear before me, and where the sole travail was of choice out of multitude."

Like much of his writing, Lanier considered the words like a piece of music. This poem was written with the idea of a symphony in his mind, though the music was written by someone else (Dudley Buck of New York). Its full title was "The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, 1776—1876: A Cantata":

From this hundred-terraced height,
Sight more large with nobler light
Ranges down yon towering years.
Humbler smiles and lordlier tears
Shine and fall, shine and fall,
While old voices rise and call
Yonder where the to-and-fro
Weltering of my Long-Ago
Moves about the moveless base
Far below my resting-place.

Mayflower, Mayflower, slowly hither flying,
Trembling westward o'er yon balking sea,
Hearts within Farewell dear England sighing,
Winds without But dear in vain replying,
Gray-lipp'd waves about thee shouted, crying
         "No! It shall not be!"

Jamestown, out of thee—
Plymouth, thee—thee, Albany—
Winter cries, Ye freeze: away!
Fever cries, Ye burn: away!
Hunger cries, Ye starve: away!
Vengeance cries, Your graves shall stay!

Then old Shapes and Masks of Things,
Framed like Faiths or clothed like Kings
Ghosts of Goods once fleshed and fair,
Grown foul Bads in alien air—
War, and his most noisy lords,
Tongued with lithe and poisoned swords—
Error, Terror, Rage and Crime,
All in a windy night of time
Cried to me from land and sea,
         No! Thou shalt not be!

Lanier continues by describing the nation's perseverance through its short history. But, the narrative voice asks, how long will we last?

"Long as thine Art shall love true love,
Long as thy Science truth shall know,
Long as thine Eagle harms no Dove,
Long as thy Law by law shall grow,
Long as thy God is God above,
Thy brother every man below,
So long, dear Land of all my love,
Thy name shall shine, thy fame shall glow!'

The cantata was also published in Lippincott's Magazine, earning Lanier an impressive $300. Though he had published several works before this, the cantata launched the most successful period of his short career.

Birth of Lanier: Go, trembling song

The short life of Sidney Lanier began with his birth in Macon, Georgia on February 3, 1842. He became interested in music early in his boyhood, and that interest was sustained for the rest of his life. As he said, "since then the very deepest of my life has been filled with music." In fact, he later claimed that he could play several instruments before he learned how to write legibly. But he did learn to write, and infused his interest in music into his poetry (he also wrote only one novel).

At age 14, Lanier took his first job working in a post office and, that year, went to Oglethorpe College (around the same time, he sat for the photograph here). It was there that his interest in music was compounded with a deep interest in literature. After graduating at 18, he was hired as a teacher himself, but the job was cut short by the Civil War, during which Lanier joined the Confederate Army. In camp with the Second Georgia Battalion (alongside his brother Clifford), Lanier always kept his flute and a steady supply of books. He was eventually captured and, after his release, returned to his home in Georgia in ill health. From then on, he held a series of jobs, all while writing poetry, until his death at age 39.

His poem, "A Song of the Future":

               Sail fast, sail fast,
     Ark of my hopes, Ark of my dreams;
     Sweep lordly o'er the drowned Past,
     Fly glittering through the sun's strange beams;
               Sail fast, sail fast.
Breaths of new buds from off some drying lea
With news about the Future scent the sea:
My brain is beating like the heart of Haste:
I'll loose me a bird upon this Present waste;
               Go, trembling song,
     And stay not long; oh, stay not long:
     Thou 'rt only a gray and sober dove,
     But thine eye is faith and thy wing is love.

Howl, battle-cry, cheer, and congratulation

Sidney Lanier was 25 years old and living in Alabama when he wrote Tiger Lilies, his only novel. He was living in Macon, Georgia, when he reported to a friend on December 16, 1867:

'Tiger Lilies' is just out, and has succeeded finely in Macon. I have seen some highly complimentary criticisms in a few New York papers on the book, and what was written in illustration of a very elaborate and deliberate theory of mine about plots of novels has been mistaken for the 'carelessness of a dreamy' writer; I would I knew some channel through which to put forth this same theory.

Though better known as a poet, Lanier had yet to publish a book of poetry by this time. In his preface, the author likens a new book to a baby. Unlike a newborn child, however, the book must enter the world fully mature, ready to "grasp swordhilt with chubby fingers" to defend its very existence. "A man has seventy years in which to explain his life," he wrote, "but a book must accomplish its birth and its excuse for birth in the same instant."

According to one contemporary reviewer, Tiger Lilies was "a spirited story of Southern life, beginning just before the war, and closing after the war." Its settings are in the mountains of Tennessee and the battlegrounds of Virginia (where the author himself had served as a Confederate soldier). But Lanier intended it to be a simple book: it is not about crime or murder, he wrote in his preface. "That it has dared to waive this interest," he explains, "must be attributed... wholly to a love, strong as it is humble, for what is beautiful in God's Nature and in Man's Art." Luckily, his method seemed appreciated. Only three months later, he told his friend a second edition was already planned.

Though much of the novel is enmeshed in the Civil War, modern critics are frustrated that Lanier makes little attempt to show the reality of war. In fact, Lanier's book was not as humble as his preface implied: the book was heavily loaded with symbolism (in one scene, a Confederate soldier shouts out a hurrah, before being shot in the mouth), making the comment about being a "dreamy writer" somewhat understandable. Perhaps his most visceral description on the battle field is the scene in which the "Rebel Yell" is presented:

From the right of the ragged line now comes up a single long cry, as from the leader of a pack of hounds who has found the game. This cry has in it the uncontrollable eagerness of the sleuth-hound, together with a dry harsh quality that conveys an uncompromising hostility. It is the irresistible outflow of some fierce soul immeasurably enraged, and it is tinged with a jubilant tone, as if in anticipation of a speedy triumph and a satisfying revenge. It is a howl, a hoarse battle-cry, a cheer, and a congratulation, all in one.

They take it up in the centre, they echo it on the left, it swells, it runs along the line as fire leaps along the rigging of a ship. It is as if some one pulled out in succession all the stops of the infernal battle-organ, but only struck one note which they all speak in different voices.

Lanier: melodious unities

The public library in Macon, Georgia unveiled a bust to their native poet/musician Sidney Lanier on October 17, 1890. The bust was a copy of and complement to another which was installed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Lanier had spent his last working years. The original bust was created by Ephraim Keyser, who did not accept payment for the work.

Lanier had died nine years earlier at the age of 39. In his short career, had inspired many including various other writers. Lanier saw the connection between poetry and music and allowed the concepts of both to intertwine in his work. He also believed that these art forms could help heal the nation in the years after the Civil War.

The bust's unveiling in Georgia, naturally, was celebrated with poetry. One of the poets who presented for the occasion was William Hamilton Hayne (son of poet Paul Hamilton Hayne). His "Poem for the Unveiling of the Bust of Sidney Lanier, October 17, 1890":

Unveil the noble brow, the deep-souled eyes,
Wherein melodious unities
   Of Music and of Poetry were born,
   For undeterred by care's half sluggish thorn—
Barbed oft with suffering—he bravely brought
To Song's full bloom his Lyric buds of thought.

Here love and homage shall alike proclaim
The undying whiteness of our poet's fame;
Wed to the marble, yet exempt from the cold
As winter clouds blessed by the sun's warm gold.

                    And now I hear
                    Far off yet clear
                Two voices that are one—
             For drawing close to Music's feet
             'Tis thus her Lyric sister sweet
                Sings of their cherished son!

Strong-winged and free each mood of me
   Thrilled through his heart and brain,—
His soul was lit by lights that flit
   Across the waving grain!
The marshes drear he made a prayer
   With words whose wondrous flight
Bore thoughts that reach, through rhythmic speech,
   To sunlands out of sight!

He let no seed from Doubt's dark weed
   Fall in the holy shrine
Where song was bred, by music led
   To beckoning heights divine!
And seldom mute his silver flute
   Invoked with matchless art
Each wave of sound by Silence bound
   Within her vestal heart!

Death's arctic fear—"a cordial rare"
   To his enraptured dream,—
Came from the blue his spirit knew
   Of love and faith supreme!
His "Sunrise" song, with rapture strong,
   Rose like a lark in light
Who feels the sway of sovereign Day
   Reign o'er the mists of night!

He loved the flow of winds that blow
   To "odor-currents" set,—
The gem-like hue of fleeting dew,
   Frail rose and violet,—
The soul in trees whose litanies
   His reverent spirit heard;
The corn-blades rife with vernal life,
   The rune of bee or bird!

Strong-winged and free each mood of me
   Thrilled through his heart and brain,—
His soul was lit by lights that flit
   Across the waving grain.
The marshes drear he made a prayer
   With words, whose wondrous flight
Bore thoughts that reach, through rhythmic speech,
   To sunlands out of sight!

*The image included here is an early photograph of the original bust at Johns Hopkins University. It was copied for the public library at Macon.

Lanier: Love hears the poor-folks' crying

"About four days ago," wrote Sidney Lanier, "a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me... I call it 'The Symphony.'" The letter, dated March 24, 1875, was addressed to Lanier's friend Gibson Peacock. "I personify each instrument in the orchestra," he continued, "and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music."

The long poem became one of Lanier's most-remembered works, in part for its final line: "Music is Love in search of a word." Its critique of society, however, is more visible in its first lines:

"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The Time needs heart—‘tis tired of head:
We’re all for love," the violins said.
"Of what avail the rigorous tale
Of bill for coin and box for bale?"

Lanier elsewhere lamented that trade, commerce, and the economy dictated the direction of society, including the arts. Businessmen the country in a stranglehold, he worries poetically, and the almighty dollar oppresses common people and, worse, prevents creativity from flourishing:

“Yea, what avail the endless tale
Of gain by cunning and plus by sale?
Look up the land, look down the land
The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand
Wedged by the pressing of Trade’s hand
Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore:
They sigh a monstrous foul-air sigh
For the outside leagues of liberty,
Where Art, sweet lark, translates the sky
Into a heavenly melody."

But, Lanier reminds readers, an appreciation for love and beauty as seen in music could overturn all this:

        Sweet friends,
        Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends
        For I, e'en I,
        As here I lie,
A petal on a harmony,
Demand of Science whence and why
Man's tender pain, man's inward cry,
When he doth gaze on earth and sky?
I am not overbold:
        I hold
Full powers from Nature manifold...

And ever Love hears the poor-folks’ crying,
And ever Love hears the women’s sighing,
And ever sweet knighthood’s death-defying,
And ever wise childhood’s deep implying,
But never a trader’s glozing and lying.

Lanier: a huge cantle out of the world

Though (wrongly) forgotten today, poet and travel writer Bayard Taylor had a major impact on his generation. His death in Germany in 1878 at the age of 53 inspired several poetic tributes, for example. Among his many admirers was Sidney Lanier (pictured). On December 21, 1878, Lanier wrote a letter to a friend, noting his surprise over the death of Taylor:

Bayard Taylor's death slices a huge cantle out of the world for me. I don't yet know it, at all; it only seems that he has gone to some other Germany, a little farther off. How strange it all is: he was such a fine fellow, one almost thinks he might have talked Death over and made him forego his stroke. Tell me whatever you may know, outside the newspaper reports, about his end.

Only a few months earlier, Lanier (then living in Baltimore, Maryland) paid a visit to Taylor. Though the two missed one another, Lanier kindly returned a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass which he had borrowed. In a letter to Taylor from February of 1878, Lanier calls the book "a real refreshment to me — like rude salt spray in your face."

Taylor, who had shown an interest in Lanier's poem "The Symphony," called him "the representative of the South in American song." In 1876, Taylor presented at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia and, hoping to re-connect the North and South through poetry, invited Lanier to write an original cantata for the celebration. After Taylor's death, Lanier also wrote a poem "To Bayard Taylor":

Not into these, bright spirit, do we yearn
    To bring thee back, but oh, to be, to be
Unbound of all these gyves, to stretch, to spurn
    The dark from off our dolorous lids, to see
Our spark, Conjecture, blaze and sunwise burn,
    And suddenly to stand again by thee!

Lanier: Love in search of a word

In a letter dated September 28, 1871, Sidney Lanier wrote to his wife that he had just returned from a performance at St. Paul's Church, where he heard compositions for trombone and organ. Though he enjoyed it, he noted he would have enjoyed it more if his wife had been with him:

Hadst thou been with me to hear these horn-tones, so pure, so noble, so full of confident repose, striking forth the melody in midst of the thousandfold modulations... like a calm manhood asserting itself through a multitude of distractions and discouragements and miseries of life, — hadst thou been there, then, how fair and how happy had been my day.

Lanier, in New York at the time, had a hard time having fun without his wife. He wrote, "For I mostly have great pain when music, or any beauty, comes past my way, and thou art not by."

The Georgia-born Lanier had a unique career embracing both poetry and music. For a time, he played with a symphony in Maryland. His musical interest is reflected in one of his greatest poems, "The Symphony" (1875), which also notes that music (or beauty) is worthless without love. From its final stanza:

And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word.

Taylor: the greater task, for thee to live!

As part of the nation's centennial celebration on July 4, 1876, Pennsylvania poet and travel writer Bayard Taylor (pictured) was chosen to present an original poem in Philadelphia. They also asked him to find someone to write an original Cantata. He first thought of Edmund Clarence Stedman, but he was out of the country. So he wrote to Sidney Lanier: "I am sure you can do this worthily. It's a great occasion, — not especially for poetry, as an art, but for Poetry to assert herself as a power."

Lanier agreed to it, and his cantata (set to music by Dudley Buck) was performed at the opening ceremonies of the centennial celebration in May. The event was a proud representation of both North and South.

The crowd gathered in Independence Square (site of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed) to hear Taylor recite his poem, "Centennial Ode." This is the final stanza:

     Look up, look forth, and on!
     There's light in the dawning sky:
The clouds are parting, the night is gone:
     Prepare for the work of the day!
     Fallow thy pastures lie
     And far thy shepherds stray,
And the fields of thy vast domain
     Are waiting for purer seed
     Of knowledge, desire, and deed,
For keener sunshine and mellower rain!
     But keep thy garments pure:
Pluck them back, with the old disdain,
     From touch of the hands that stain !
     So shall thy strength endure.
Transmute into good the gold of Gain,
Compel to beauty thy ruder powers,
     Till the bounty of coming hours
     Shall plant, on thy fields apart,
With the oak of Toil, the rose of Art!
     Be watchful, and keep us so:
     Be strong, and fear no foe:
     Be just, and the world shall know!
With the same love, love us, as we give;
     And the day shall never come,
     That finds us weak or dumb
     To join and smite and cry
In the great task, for thee to die,
And the greater task, for thee to live!

After Taylor's death two years later, John Greenleaf Whittier (who wrote a hymn for the same centennial celebration) assessed the writer's career: "It is perhaps too early to assign him his place in American literature... His Centennial ode [and others]... are sureties of the permanence of his reputation."

Serenity in spite of all contingencies

It was only after a short career that the Georgia-born poet/novelist Sidney Lanier struggled with tuberculosis. When he could, he traveled in search of health while still writing — when he could.

He wrote a letter to his friend, Gibson Peacock, on May 26, 1877. The letter reads, in part:

I long to be steadily writing again. I'm taken with a poem pretty nearly every day, and have to content myself with making a note of its train of thought on the back of whatever letter is in my coat-pocket. I don't write it out, because I find my poetry now wholly unsatisfactory in consequence of a certain haunting impatience which has its root in the straining uncertainty of my daily affairs; and I am trying with all my might to put off composition of all sorts... [until] next week's dinner shall remove this remnant of haste, and leave me that repose which ought to fill the artist's firmament while he is creating. Perhaps indeed with returning bodily health I shall acquire strength to attain this serenity in spite of all contingencies.

The same year he wrote this letter, 1877, his book Poems was published, a 94-page book of previously-published works. One of the poems was "Rose-Morals"; this is part I:

  Would that my songs might be
    What roses make by day and night —
Distillments of my clod of misery
      Into delight.

  Soul, could'st though bare thy breast
    As yon red rose, and dare the day,
All clean, and large, and calm with velvet rest?
      Say yea — say yea!

  Ah, dear my Rose, good-bye;
     The wind is up; so; drift away.
That songs from me as leaves from thee may fly,
      I strive, I pray.

The book did not sell particularly well and Lanier worried about taking care of his family. Soon after, he was offered a position as lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. He then became much more prolific than the above letter might suggest. He wrote several books over a short period of time — some of which had to be published posthumously. Lanier died in 1881 at the age of 39.

Sidney Lanier: for love and not for hate

The Georgia-born poet Sidney Lanier joined a secret literary society while a student at Oglethorpe University. There, he fostered his love of literature (and entertained his friends by playing the flute). He was a diligent student and became somewhat pious. He graduated in 1860 at the top of his class. Within six months, his home state of Georgia voted to secede from the United States.

As a Southerner, Lanier carefully weighed his options with both the Union and the Confederacy but the Civil War broke out too quickly. As he wrote:

An afflatus of war was breathed upon us. Like a great wind it drew on, and blew upon men, women, and children. Its sound mingled with the serenity of the church organs... It sighed in the half-breathed world of sweethearts... It thundered splendidly in the impassioned appeal of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole in the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the gray airs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms.

Lanier became a Confederate soldier but, once the war was over, he somewhat regretted the decision. He rejoiced in the overthrow of slavery but mostly he was disappointed at the cost of the war: "a million of men slain and maimed, a million of widows and orphans created; several billions of money destroyed; several hundred thousand of ignorant schoolboys who could not study on account of the noise made by the shells." He lamented the resulting poverty and ruin of so many people.

On April 26, 1870, Lanier gave a public speech, the "Confederate Memorial Address." It begins:

In the unbroken silence of the dead soldierly forms that lie beneath our feet; in the winding processions of these stately trees; in the large tranquility of this vast and benignant heaven that overspreads us; in the quiet ripple of yonder patient river, flowing down to his death in the sea; in the manifold melodies drawn from these green leaves by wandering airs that go like Troubadours singing in all the lands; in the many-voiced memories that flock into this day, and fill it as swallows fill the summer, — in all these, there is to me so voluble an eloquence to-day that I cannot but shrink from the harsher sounds of my own human voice.

In the after effects of war, Lanier calls for silence, for people to listen to nature and, especially, for tranquility. "We shall bear our load of wrong and injury with the calmness and tranquil dignity that become men and women who would be great in misfortune... To-day we are here for love and not for hate. To-day we are here for harmony and not for discord."