Sidney Lanier became identified with the Old South and the Lost Cause.
As I began to write the manuscript that became my historical novel Brookhaven, I knew I would use a 19th century poet as a kind of infusion into the story. three poets in particularly were closely associated with the Civil War – Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Sidney Lanier. A fourth – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – was a possibility.
Whitman is the poet today we connect to the war, but he wasn’t by the people who lived the war. Herman Melville was considered by the North to be THE poet of war during the time it raged, but he would be problematic for my novel, because it was largely set in the South. In the South, Sidney Lanier only became “the Civil War poet” years after the war, and particularly after his death in 1881, and his poems were less about the war and more about the postwar period. But to use Lanier’s poems was tempting.
In the end, I chose Longfellow, and for several reasons. He was hugely popular before the war. His oldest son enlisted and was seriously wounded. His wife died from a tragic accident during the war. And while he had been an ardent abolitionist, Longfellow was among the few who were horrified at the human devastation wrought by the war, so much so that he regretted the role he had played in advancing radical abolition.
His horror is well taken; it’s estimated that up to 750,000 soldiers died on both sides, out of a total population of 31.4 million (1860 census). Everyone knew or were related to someone who had died, was seriously wounded, or suffered amputation. The war left deep and personal scars on both sides. A century after the war ended, my grandmother still referred to the Civil War as “the war of northern aggression” and would not travel to “Yankee states.”
Sidney Lanier’s birthplace in Macon, Georgia
Except for Edgar Allen Poe, Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) was the best-known Southern poet of the 19th century. Born in Georgia, he enlisted in the Confederate Army in late 1860. He was 18. Four years later, he was a pilot for a blockade runner named the Lucy. He was captured and sent to prison in Maryland, where he contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually take his life.
After the war, he became a musician, a hotel clerk, a church organist, author of a novel, Tiger Lilies (1867), a teacher, a lawyer, a poet, and eventually a professor at Johns Hopkins University. His poems were published by several magazines, and his poetry was admired by Longfellow. Poetry was strictly a money-making opportunity for Lanier; this was a period when newspapers and magazine alike published (and paid for) poetry.
I have, or might have, a personal connection to one of his poems. Before moving to Mississippi, the Youngs lived in Georgia in the countryside near Savannah. South of Savannah is Glynn County, rumored within the family to be the inspiration for name my grandparents gave to my father, which eventually became mine. One of Lanier’s most popular poems was “The Marshes of Glynn,” the fourth section of his “Hymn of the Marshes.” It’s an engaging story, but I learned during my Brookhaven research never to trust family legends.
What has to be sheer coincidence is that Lanier died on Sept. 7, 1881, and on that day 70 years later, I was born.
I like “The Marshes of Glynn,” and I like Lanier’s poetry in general. But a poem I particularly like is this one, which (without being cited) became the inspiration for the sections of Brookhaven set during the Reconstruction period.
The Raven Days (1871)
Sidney Lanier in 1870, about the time he wrote “The Raven Days”
Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken,
And but the ghosts of homes to us remain,
And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token
From friend to friend of an unspoken pain.
O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks
Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow,
Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks.
Ye float in dusky files, forever croaking.
Ye chill our manhood with your dreary shade.
Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,
We lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.
O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,
Will ever any warm light come again?
Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow
Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?
Many consider this poem to be a kind of anthem for what has come to be known as the “Lost Cause,” or how the defeated South found solace in believing what it had done in seceding and fighting a war was something noble and good. Many Southerners truly believed they were fighting for the freedoms described by the Declaration of Independence and spelled out in the Constitution.
The Sidney Lanier monument in Piedmont Park, Atlanta. Courtesy Wikipedia.
That cause had been lost, but it endured in memory. It came to frame how many in the South understood the Civil War, Reconstruction, their own history, and even themselves. Lanier, perhaps unintentionally, captured that belief in one of his most lauded poems about the Civil War, “The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson.” Generally forgotten, or perhaps conveniently forgotten, was the brutality of the slave economy that Old South had depended upon.
After his death, admirers made sure he was lionized and remembered. A college and several high schools were named after him. Johns Hopkins and Duke University erected statues. Music was written using his poems as lyrics. Streets and two lakes were named after him, as was a ship built during World War II. UCLA in California even has a memorial scholarship named for him.
I’m not sure what Lanier himself would think of his identification with the Lost Cause. He probably would have been too busy trying to provide for family to care. But I think he would have been gratified to know that neither he nor his poems are forgotten.
Photo by Hiroyuki Takeda, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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