[Christopher Mulrooney]

Sidney Lanier saw the Real through Christ's crystal clear as the great fourth stanza of "Song of the Chattahoochee":

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd oft in the hills of Habersham,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd oft in the valleys of Hall,
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl,
And many a luminous jewel lone
—Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist,
Ruby, garnet and amethyst—
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTIn the clefts of the hills of Habersham,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTIn the beds of the valleys of Hall.

"A Florida Sunday" is an evocation pure as any of Florida, and there is homesickness in "From the Flats":

BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTOh might I through these tears
But glimpse some hill my Georgia high uprears,
Where white the quartz and pink the pebble shine,
The hickory heavenward strives, the muscadine
Swings o'er the slope, the oak's far-falling shade
Darkens the dogwood in the bottom glade,
And down the hollow from a ferny nook
Bright leaps a living brook!

The famous "Hymns of the Marshes" are what Georgia is like, so that when in "Ireland" he offers against the famine "the main and cordial current of our love," he prophesies Finnegans Wake.

Hart Crane's noble tribute to "Psalm of the West", Pound's rare salute to "A Ballad of Trees and the Master", bespeak a poet loudly ignored.

His great Cantata for the Centennial would serve as well in 1976.

I submit here one short poem of his that shows the essence of his art, being an evocation of a rainy day that is essentially close to Verlaine, and observe the strata in his stratagem:

Souls and Rain-Drops

Light rain-drops fall and wrinkle the sea,
Then vanish, and die utterly.
One would not know that rain-drops fell
If the round sea-wrinkles did not tell.

So souls come down and wrinkle life
And vanish in the flesh-sea strife.
One might not know that souls had place
Were't not for the wrinkles in life's face.



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited April 17, 2001).]

[Tim Murphy]

Warmest thanks, Christopher, for posting these jewels. He's indeed a loudly ignored poet, but one with an exquisite ear. I think his notion--"that the laws governing music and verse are identical, and that time, not accent, is the important element in verse rhythms" (Oxford Companion to American Lit)--is as goofy as some of my own wilder notions on prosody. But the effect of his putting his theories into practice is often glorious. Like his fellow Victorians, Swinburne and Tennyson, Lanier is a metrist whose sophistication puts us to shame.

A Ballad of Trees and the Master

Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little grey leaves were kind to him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods he came.

Out of the woods my Master went,
And he was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
'Twas on a tree they slew Him--last
When out of the woods he came.

[graywyvern]

(snip)
>Like his fellow Victorians, Swinburne and Tennyson, Lanier >is a metrist whose sophistication puts us to shame.

i second that. actually, i find there is more to learn
from the experts of versification (& here i add: Bridges
& W S Gilbert) than poets of greater stature whose power
is too overwhelming to leave us with tricks we can use.
in fact i can think of only one poet of the 1st rank who
was also a prosody wonk--Milton--& more & more his music
is all that's left of him.

since you mention Tennyson (currently being bashed on a
sidelane of de-Frosting) i will just add my opinion that
no one in the last 100 years has had as good an ear for
purely sonic effects, with the single exception of Sylvia
Plath who didn't live to fufilll her potential.

[Tim Murphy]

Gray, please recall that my comment to the Dark Horse began "I yield to no man in my love for Tennyson." No bashing over there. I second your point on his sonic richness: "The murmur of unnumberable bees" indeed! To Milton I'd add Auden as a first rank prosody wonk, although for sheer ingenuity in the invention of 986 forms, nobody holds a candle to Hardy.