Sidney Lanier

“ For Bob is our mocking-bird. He fell to us out of the top of a certain great pine in a certain small city on the sea-coast of Georgia. In this tree and a host of his lordly fellows which tower over that little city, the mocking-birds abound in unusual numbers. They love the prodigious masses of the leaves, and the generous breezes from the neighboring Gulf Stream, and, most of all, the infinite flood of the sunlight which is so rich and cordial that it will make even a man lift his head towards the sky, as a mocking-bird lifts his beak, and try to sing something or other. ”

“ I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam
Will break as a bubble o'er-blown in a dream, —
Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night,
Over-weighted with stars, over-freighted with light,
Over-sated with beauty and silence, will seem
But a bubble that broke in a dream,
If a bound of degree to this grace be laid,
Or a sound or a motion made.
But no: it is made: list! somewhere, — mystery, where?
In the leaves? in the air?
In my heart? is a motion made:
'Tis a motion of dawn, like a flicker of shade on shade. ”

“ Do stir with thanks to thee, as stirs this morn
With waving of the corn.
Unseen, the farmer’s boy from round the hill
Whistles a snatch that seeks his soul unsought,
And fills some time with tune, howbeit shrill;
The cricket tells straight on his simple thought—
Nay, ’tis the cricket’s way of being still;
The peddler bee drones in, and gossips naught;
Far down the wood, a one-desiring dove
Times me the beating of the heart of love:
And these be all the sounds that mix, each morn,
With waving of the corn. ”

“ The clover-stems
Still cover all the space; but now they bear,
For clover-blooms, fair, stately heads of men
With poets’ faces heartsome, dear and pale—
Sweet visages of all the souls of time
Whose loving service to the world has been
In the artist’s way expressed and bodied. Oh,
In arms’ reach, here be Dante, Keats, Chopin,
Raphael, Lucretius, Omar, Angelo,
Beethoven, Chaucer, Schubert, Shakespeare, Bach,
And Buddha (sweetest masters! Let me lay
These arms this once, this humble once, about
Your reverend necks—the most containing clasp,
For all in all, this world e’er saw!) ”

“ Thou that shouldst bear thy fruit, yet virgin live,
As she that bore a man yet sinned not,
Thou that shouldst challenge the most special eyes
Of Heaven and Earth and Hell to mark thee, since
Thou shouldst be Heaven’s best captain, Earth’s best friend,
And Hell’s best enemy—false Pope, false Pope,
The world, thy child, is sick and like to die,
But thou art dinner-drowsy and cannot come:
And Life is sore beset and crieth ‘help!’
But thou brook’st not disturbance at thy wine:
And France is wild for one to lead her souls ”

“ Ye are all my children, merchants.
Merchant: We have no time, we have no time to listen to idle dreams.
Aldhelm: But I, poor Aldhelm, say you nay;
Till ye hear me, ye have no time
Neither for trade nor travelling;
Till ye hear me ye have no time to fight nor marry nor mourn;
There is not time, O World,
Till you hear me, the Poet Aldhelm,
To eat nor to drink nor to draw breath.
For until the Song of the Poet is heard
Ye do not live, ye can not live.
O noonday ghosts that gabble of losing and gaining,
Pitiful paupers that starve in the plenteous midmost
Of bounty unbounded. ”

“ Mine ear, though fain, had pain to follow:
‘Tara!’ it twanged, ‘tara-tara!’ it blew,
Yet wavered oft, and flew
Most ficklewise about, or here, or there,
A music now from earth and now from air.
But on a sudden, lo!
I marked a blossom shiver to and fro
With dainty inward storm; and there within
A down-drawn trump of yellow jessamine
A bee
Thrust up its sad-gold body lustily,
All in a honey madness hotly bound
On blissful burglary. ”

“ And Love be known as the marriage of man with the All—
Till Science to knowing the Highest shall lovingly turn,
Till Art to loving the Highest shall consciously burn,
Till Science to Art as a man to a woman shall yearn,
—Then morn!
When Faith from the wedding of Knowing and Loving shall purely be born,
And the Child shall smile in the West, and the West to the East give morn,
And the Time in that ultimate Prime shall forget old regretting and scorn,
Yea, the stream of the light shall give off in a shimmer the dream of the night forlorn. ”

“ Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,
⁠For a mete and a mark
⁠To the forest-dark:—
⁠So:
Affable live-oak, leaning low,—
Thus—with your favor—soft, with a reverent hand,
(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,
⁠Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea. ”

“ Self of my self. Lo, through my sense doth steal
Clear cognizance of all selves and qualities,
Of all existence that hath been or is,
Of all strange haps that men miscall of chance,
And all the works of tireless circumstance:
Each borders each, like mutual sea and shore,
Nor aught misfits his neighbor that’s before,
Nor him that’s after—nay, through this still air,
Out of the North come quarrels, and keen blare
Of challenge by the hot-breath’d parties blown ”

“ All the world knows how Dickens puts a personality on his canvas: he always gives us a vividly descriptive line of facial curve, of dress, of form, of gesture and the like, which distinguishes a given character. Whenever we see this line we know the character so well that we are perfectly content that two rings for the eyes, a spot for the nose and a blur for the body may represent the rest; and we accept always with joy the rich mirthfulness or pathetic matter with which Dickens manages to invest such hastily drawn figures. ”

“ Each artist—gift of terror!—owns his will.
For thee, Cloud,—if thou spend thine all
Upon the South's o'er-brimming sea
⁠That needs thee not; or crawl
To the dry provinces, and fall
Till every convert clod shall give to thee
Green worship; if thou grow or fade,
Bring on delight or misery,
⁠Fly east or west, be made
Snow, hail, rain, wind, grass, rose, light, shade;
What matters it to thee? There is no thee. ”

“ The hive is of gold undazzling, but oh, the Bee,
The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee,
Of dazzling gold is the great Sun-Bee
That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea.
Yet now the dew-drop, now the morning gray, [131]
Shall live their little lucid sober day
Ere with the sun their souls exhale away.
Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew
The summ'd morn shines complete as in the blue
Big dew-drop of all heaven: with these lit shrines
O'er-silvered to the farthest sea-confines,
The sacramental marsh one pious plain
Of worship lies. ”

“ As long as I remain alive, my eyesight will be the worse. Whenever I go against the wind, my eyes will water, and peradventure my head will burn, and I shall have a giddiness every new moon. Cursed be the fire in which it was forged! Like the bite of a mad dog is the stroke of this poisoned iron." And they went to meat.
And the next day they came again to the palace, and they said, "Shoot not at us any more, unless thou desirest such hurt and harm and torture as thou now hast, and even more. Give me thy daughter, and, if thou wilt not give her, thou shalt receive thy death because of her." ”

“ As Love will carve dear names upon a tree,
Symbol of gravure on his heart to be,
So thought I thine with loving text to set
In the growth and substance of my canzonet;
But, writing it, my tears begin to fall—
This wild-rose stem for thy large name’s too small!
Nay, still my trembling hands are fain, are fain
Cut the good letters though they lap again ”

“ Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float,
As if a rose might somehow be a throat:
"When Nature from her far-off glen
Flutes her soft messages to men,
The flute can say them o'er again;
Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone,
Breathes through life's strident polyphone
The flute-voice in the world of tone.
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? ”

“ Wide-armed, thou dropp’st on knightly knee:
‘Dear Love, Dear Freedom, go with me!’
VII.
Then all the beasts before thee passed—
Beast War, Oppression, Murder, Lust,
False Art, False Faith, slow skulking last—
And out of Time’s thick-rising dust
Thy Lord said, “Name them, tame them, Son;
Nor rest, nor rest, till thou hast done.”
VIII.
Ah, name thou false, or tame thou wrong,
At heart let no man fear for thee:
Thy Past sings ever Freedom’s Song,
Thy Future’s voice sounds wondrous free;
And Freedom is more large than Crime,
And Error is more small than Time. ”

“ And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And Peredur stood, and compared the blackness of the raven and the whiteness of the snow and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady that best he loved which was blacker than jet, and to her skin which was whiter than the snow, and to the two red spots upon her cheeks which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be.
Now Arthur and his household were in search of Peredur. "Know ye," said Arthur, "who is the knight with the long spear, that stands by the brook up yonder?" ”

“ We can conceive a mere man fronting all these terrors of storm and thunder with unbowed head and serene countenance, in the consciousness that the whitest of these lightnings cannot singe an eyelash of his immortal personality; how, then, can it be expected that we shall be greatly impressed with the endurance of these ills by a god to whose greater resistive endowment the whole system of this gross thrust-and-smite of iron and fire is no more than the momentary tease of a gnat! To the audience of Æschylus, not so; they shiver and groan; they know not themselves. ”

“ I would not cumber thine ascent
Nor drag thee back into the night;
But the great sea-winds sigh with me,
The fair-faced stars seem wrinkled, old,
And I would that I might lie with thee
There in the grave so cold, so cold!
Grave walls are thick, I cannot see thee,
And the round skies are far and steep;
A-wild to quaff some cup of Lethe,
Pain is proud and scorns to weep.
My heart breaks if it cling about thee,
And still breaks, if far from thine.
O drear, drear death, to live without thee,
O sad life — to keep thee mine.
. . . . .
Marsh Hymns.
Between Dawn and Sunrise. ”

“ Thy music sets my world at ease,
And melts my passion's mortal cry
In satisfying symphonies.
It soothes my accusations sour
'Gainst thoughts that fray the restless soul:
The stain of death; the pain of power;
The lack of love 'twixt part and whole;
The yea-nay of Freewill and Fate,
Whereof both cannot be, yet are;
The praise a poet wins too late
Who starves from earth into a star;
The lies that serve great parties well,
While truths but give their Christ a cross;
The loves that send warm souls to hell,
While cold-blood neuters take no loss ”

“ Then exclaimed the female dwarf, "Haha, goodly Peredur, son of Evrawc! The welcome of Heaven be unto thee, flower of knights, and light of chivalry."
"Of a truth, maiden," said Kai, "thou art ill bred to remain mute for a year at the court of Arthur, and then to speak as thou dost of such a man as this." And Kai kicked her with his foot, so that she fell to the ground senseless.
"Tall man," said Peredur, "show me which is Arthur." ”

“ Yet the weak-eyed pipe-stem-legged young man impresses me as more of a man, more of a democratic man, than the tallest of Whitman's roughs; to the eye of my spirit there is more strength in this man's daily endurance of petty care and small weariness for love; more of the sort of stuff which makes a real democracy and a sound republic, than in an army of Whitman's unshaven loafers. ”

“ And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?
The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
To the terminal blue of the main.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn. ”

“ Thus we cannot take any final or secure solace in the discipline and system of our schools and universities until we have also learned to regulate this fascinating universal teacher which has taken such hold upon all minds, from the gravest scholar down to the boot-black shivering on the windy street corner over his dime-novel,—this educator whose principles are fastening themselves upon your boy's mind, so that long after he has forgotten his amo and his tupto, they will be controlling his relations to his fellow-man, and determining his happiness for life. ”