If not always simple, Lanier is often forcible in the extreme, as in `The Symphony', `The Revenge of Hamish', `Remonstrance', and `Sunrise'.
Of course, it is open to any one to see in these poems the "rage"attributed to Lanier by Mr.Gosse, but I prefer to consider it divine wrath in all but the last, and in it wonder unutterable, which yet is so uttered that ears become eyes.I allude to the stanzas describing the break of dawn and the rising of the sun.
`Sunrise', ll.86-152.
Of the poet's marvelous euphony, `The Song of the Chattahoochee'
speaks clearly enough.As we have seen in our treatment of versification, it is here a question not of too little but of too much.
But, despite an occasional too great yielding to his passion for music, his extraordinary endowment in this direction gave Lanier a unique position among English poets.I quote again from Professor Kent:
"But if his sense of beauty made him a peer of our great poets, it was the heavenly gift of music that distinguished him from them.
Milton, it is true, whom he most resembles in this respect, had a knowledge of music, but not the same passion for it.Milton's music was more a recreation, an accompaniment of reverie; Lanier's was a fiery zeal;a yearning love, a chosen and adequate form of expression of his soul's deepest feeling.Combined with this passion for music was his technical knowledge of the art, and these combined formed at once the foundation and the framework of his poetry.He seems literally to have sung his poems; they are essentially musical, tuneful, and melodious.
Surcharged with music, he overflows in mellifluous numbers.Here, then, Lanier stands out differentiated in the choir of poets, and here we find that distinctive quality which is the very flavor of his writing."P.62.
While most of Lanier's poems are in a serious strain, several disclose no mean sense of humor.I refer to his dialect poems, such as `Jones's Private Argyment', `Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn', and `The Power of Prayer', especially the last, written in conjunction with his brother, Mr.Clifford Lanier.
There are passages in the poems no less pathetic than the poet's life.
In discussing his love of nature we have seen that he was a pantheist in the best sense of the term.So delicate was his sensibility that we do not wonder when we hear him declaring,"And I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered,"a saying as felicitous as the Roman's "I am a man, and, therefore, nothing human is stranger to me." The tenderness of the `Ballad of Trees and the Master' must touch all readers.
Few passages are more pathetic, I think, than that, in `June Dreams in January', telling of the poet's struggle for bread and fame, while "his worshipful sweet wife sat still, afar, within the village whence she sent him forth, waiting all confident and proud and calm."And, if there occurs therein a plaintive tone, let us remember that it is the only time that he complained of his lot, and that here really he has more in mind his dearer self, his wife, and that calm succeeded to unrest just as it does in this passage:
"`Why can we poets dream us beauty, so, But cannot dream us bread? Why, now, can IMake, aye, create this fervid throbbing June Out of the chill, chill matter of my soul, Yet cannot make a poorest penny-loaf Out of this same chill matter, no, not one For Mary, though she starved upon my breast?'
And then he fell upon his couch, and sobbed, And, late, just when his heart leaned o'er The very edge of breaking, fain to fall, God sent him sleep."`A Florida Sunday', ll.102-103.
`June Dreams in January', ll.68-78.
