Chapter Poetry, South and North of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

Literature and Poetry.

But Sidney Lanier found also in Baltimore the first opportunity to gratify what had been the ambition of the years since his college course, -- the opportunity to study literature and the scientific principles of verse. The unfulfilled dream of his youth had been a systematic course in the German universities; this was not to be realized, but in the richly equipped Peabody Library he found his university. Never was there a more assiduous student. Especially did he devote himself to the field of Old English poetry. Soon there were invitations to lecture, and in the city he came to have an established reputation as a fascinating lecturer on English literature. In 1875, he first won recognition as a poet of more than ordinary power by the publication of Corn, in Lippincott's Magazine; four months later his remarkable poem, The Symphony, appeared in the same magazine. His new friendship with Bayard Taylor produced the invitation to write the words for the Centennial cantata. The first collection of his poems was published in 1877. In rapid succession he wrote three remarkable poems, The Revenge of Hamish, How Love looked for Hell, and The Marshes of Glynn. In 1879, the poet was appointed to a lectureship in the Johns Hopkins University. The fruit of this professional connection we have in two volumes, neither of which is characterized by scientific precision or minutely accurate scholarship; nevertheless The Science of English Verse and The English Novel are recognized as valuable contributions to the study of literature. The first of these volumes is an essay on the technical side of versification, embodying Lanier's theory of rhythm and tone color; it was his belief that the laws of verse are identical with those of music. A series of books for boys -- The Boy's King Arthur, The Boy's Froissart, etc. -- were the by-products from his studies of the ancient chronicles, put forth to enlarge the scanty income.

During the last two years of the poet's life the struggle for poetical achievement grew tragic. In November, 1880, he wrote his friend, Paul Hamilton Hayne:--

Ambitions unfulfilled.

"For six months past a ghastly fever has taken possession of me each day at about 12 M., and holding my head under the surface of indescribable distress for the next twenty hours, subsiding only enough each morning to let me get on my working harness, but never intermitting. . . . I have myself been disposed to think it arose purely from the bitterness of having to spend my time in making academic lectures and boys' books -- pot-boilers all -- when a thousand songs are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon."

Three years earlier he had written bravely in The Stirrup-Cup:--

"Death, thou'rt a cordial old and rare:
Look how compounded, with what care!
Time got his wrinkles reaping thee
Sweet herbs from all antiquity.

"David to thy distillage went,
Keats, and Gotama excellent,
Omar Khayyám, and Chaucer bright,
And Shakspere for a king-delight.

"Then, Time, let not a drop be spilt:
Hand me the cup whene'er thou wilt,
'T is thy rich stirrup-cup to me;
I'll drink it down right smilingly."

And now, in his greatest poem, Sunrise, completed soon after the date of his letter to Hayne, he could write in the same jubilant strain:--

   "-- manifold One,
I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun:
Old Want is awake and agog, every wrinkle a-frown;
The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town:
But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done;
   I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun:
How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run,
   I am lit with the Sun."

In 1881, Lanier was taken to the pine-lands in the mountains of North Carolina; and there in the September following he died. His grave is in Baltimore. A bronze bust of the poet is fittingly placed in one of the halls of the university where, for so brief a term, he taught.