Life and Song
“If life were caught by a clarionet,
And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
Should thrill its joy and trill its fret,
And utter its heart in every deed,
“Then would this breathing clarionet
Type what the poet fain would be;
For none o’ the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,
“Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
Or utterly bodied forth his life,
Or out of life and song has wrought
The perfect one of man and wife;
“Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
Might each express the other’s all,
Careless if life or art were long
Since both were one, to stand or fall:
“So that the wonder struck the crowd,
Who shouted it about the land:
‘His song was only living aloud,
His work, a singing with his hand!’”
Sidney Lanier, born in Macon, Georgia in 1842, is a fascinating character, a mixture of talents and intellectual conflicts informing his verse. He’s considered a flawed poet, and, justifiably, an overly romantic one, and yet, to use an irresistible musical analogy, he can hit notes unavailable to other, perhaps more reliable poetic players. The analogy is irresistible because Lanier claimed to have been able to play several musical instruments before he could form words on the page: his chosen instrument was the flute, and in later life he played in the Maryland Peabody Orchestra. He famously wrote: “Whatever turn I have for art is purely musical, poetry being, with me, a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes.”
Street Cries is a series of seven poems written between 1867 -79, and this week’s poem is Number V. You can read the whole series here, beginning with the Introductory Stanzas, which explain the concept. Time is imagined as “a market town / Where many merchant-spirits meet / Who up and down and up and down / Cry out along the street // Their needs as wares.” Lanier objected to the capitalism that increasingly dominated his society, and it’s as if he positions the sequence as its rebuttal by a pretended commodification of the “needs” that inform the creative impulse.
Lanier favours an allegorical approach in several of the Street Cries. In the first, Remonstrance, the “crier” is constantly enraged by the interference of Opinion (“Bigot Pretender unto Judgement’s throne”). The symbolism of a pilot-less ship and bloodstained deck in II, The Ship of Earth, effectively draws on his civil war memories, when his own vessel was captured. How Love Looked for Hell takes a more metaphysical turn, with Mind and Sense leading Love on a singularly unsuccessful quest, after which Tyranny sets a grim scene in which “Young Trade is dead”. (Trade, after all, has its uses, and the unemployed face poverty and hunger.) Life and Song is playful by contrast, but not trivial: it recreates the delight of musical facility in an appealing way. It’s followed by a panegyric to Richard Wagner that culminates in the excited couplet: “Thou, Thou, if even to thyself unknown / Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone.” The last short poem, in three triplets, is a celebration of Love despite the pain – and rather more conventional. Although the Street Cries exclude Lanier’s nature-writing (The Marshes of Glynn is usually considered his best poem) they make a good introduction to his more dramatic and declarative style, and the various passions informing his work.
Life and Song has an almost dotty but effective figure at its heart: the poet as a musical instrument, “a breathing clarionet”. The word-choice (“clarionet” as a variant of clarinet) fits perfectly into the jaunty tetrameter line. Lanier’s alliteration, particularly noticeable in the opening quatrain, is rarely obtrusive, but it’s almost impossible to read the poem and not hear throughout an agile woodwind instrument in performance. At the same time, the poem demonstrates, of course, that words and argument can’t be bypassed, even if the message is that “none of the singers ever yet / Has wholly lived his minstrelsy.” He goes on to imagine what that impossibility might look like, and solves the poet’s conflict between life and song in the willing response of the crowd at the end of the poem: “His song was only living aloud, / His work, a singing with his hand!” The conceits resonate beyond logic, but they are memorable all the same.
Had he lived in a later century, Lanier might have been influenced by the Dadaists or their inheritors, and chosen to work in sound alone. As it is, he is bound by the constraints of traditional prosody and syntax. He found no liberator in Walt Whitman, and yet, in a very different manner, he takes poetry at times into a new direction, and finds a way to give it a new American voice. On a smaller scale than Whitman in poetry or Wagner in music, Lanier adds importantly to the chorus (or orchestra) of artists who have succeeded in “saying” their time.
