Selected Poems of Sidney Lanier | Page 9

the speakers are the various musical
instruments. The violins begin:
"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The Time needs heart --
'tis tired of head."*
Then all the stringed instruments join with the violins in giving the wail
of the poor, who "stand wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand":
"`We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns,
We sieve
mine-meshes under the hills,
And thieve much gold from the Devil's
bank tills,
To relieve, O God, what manner of ills? --
The beasts,
they hunger, and eat, and die;
And so do we, and the world's a sty;

Hush, fellow-swine: why nuzzle and cry?
"Swinehood hath no
remedy"
Say many men, and hasten by,
Clamping the nose and

blinking the eye.
But who said once, in the lordly tone,
"Man shall
not live by bread alone
But all that cometh from the throne"?
Hath
God said so?
But Trade saith "No":
And the kilns and the
curt-tongued mills say "Go:
There's plenty that can, if you can't: we
know.
Move out, if you think you're underpaid.
The poor are
prolific; we're not afraid;
Trade is Trade."'
"Thereat this passionate protesting
Meekly changed, and softened till

It sank to sad requesting
And suggesting sadder still:
`And oh, if
men might some time see
How piteous-false the poor decree
That
trade no more than trade must be!
Does business mean, "Die, you --
live, I"?
Then "Trade is trade" but sings a lie:
'Tis only war grown
miserly.
If business is battle, name it so.'"**
--
* `The Symphony', ll. 1-2.
** `The Symphony', ll. 31-61.
--
Of even wider sweep than mercantilism is the spirit of intolerance; for,
while the diffusion of knowledge and of grace has in a measure
repressed this spirit, it lacks much of being subdued. I do not wonder
that Lanier "fled in tears from men's ungodly quarrel about God," and
that, in his poem entitled `Remonstrance', he denounces intolerance
with all the vehemence of a prophet of old.
But Lanier had an eye for life's beauties as well as its ills. To him music
was one of earth's chief blessings. Of his early passion for the violin
and his substitution of the flute therefor,
we have already learned.
According to competent critics he was possibly the greatest
flute-player*1* in the world, a fact all the more interesting when we
remember that, as he himself tells us,*2* he never had a teacher. With
such a talent for music the poet has naturally strewn his pages with fine
tributes thereto. In `Tiger-lilies', for instance, he tells us that, while
explorers say that they have found
some nations that had no god, he
knows of none that had no music, and then sums up the matter in this
sentence: "Music means harmony; harmony means love; and love
means -- God!"*3* Even more explicit is this declaration in a letter of
May, 1873, to Hayne: "I don't know that I've told you that whatever

turn I may have for art is purely MUSICAL; poetry being with me A
MERE TANGENT INTO WHICH I SHOOT SOMETIMES. I could
play passably on several instruments before I could write legibly, and
SINCE then the very deepest of my life has been filled with music,
which I have studied and cultivated far more than poetry."*4* We have
already seen incidentally that in his `Symphony'
the speakers are
musical instruments; and it is in this poem that occurs his felicitous
definition,
"Music is love in search of a word."*5*
In `To Beethoven' he describes the effect of music upon himself:
"I know not how, I care not why,
Thy music brings this broil at ease,

And melts my passion's mortal cry
In satisfying symphonies.
"Yea, it forgives me all my sins,
Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme,

And tunes the task each day begins
By the last trumpet-note of
Time."*6*
It was this profound knowledge of music, of course, that enabled Lanier
to write his work on `The Science of English Verse', and gave him a
technical skill in versification akin to that of Tennyson.
--
*1* See Ward's `Memorial', pp. xx, xxxi.
*2* Hayne's (P. H.) `A
Poet's Letters to a Friend'.
*3* `Tiger-lilies', p. 32.
*4* Hayne's `A
Poet's Letters to a Friend'. After settling in Baltimore
Lanier devoted more time to poetry than to music, as we may see from
this sentence to Judge Bleckley, in his letter of March 20, 1876: "As for
me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I must get upon
paper as many as possible of the poems
with which my heart is
stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket." *5* `The Symphony', l. 368.
*6*
`To Beethoven', ll. 61-68.
--
Like most great poets of modern times, Lanier was a sincere lover of
nature. And it seems to me that with him this love was as all-embracing

as with Wordsworth. Lanier found beauty in the waving corn*1* and
the clover;*2* in the mocking-bird,*3* the robin,*4* and the dove;*5*

in the hickory,*6* the dogwood,*6* and the live-oak;*7*
in the
murmuring leaves*8* and the