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Poem Outlines

Chapter 10: FOR A FLOWER DECORATION OF SOLDIERS' GRAVES
By Sidney Lanier
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Poetry

About This Book

The book gathers brief sketches, unfinished drafts, and lyrical fragments that reveal preoccupations with nature, music, and spiritual yearning. Short outlines and condensed images move from marshland observation and elemental forces to reflections on creative process, the struggles of artistic craft, and questions of faith. Occasional narrative openings and musical metaphors show an attempt to capture fleeting inspiration, while epigrammatic lines and hymnlike passages underline a blend of scientific curiosity and devotional feeling. Editorial notes situate these pieces as intimations of larger poems left in fragmentary form.

FOR A FLOWER DECORATION OF
SOLDIERS' GRAVES

Unto your house, O sleepers,
Unto these graves that house you since ye died,
Unto these little rooms wherein ye sleep,
A serenade of Love who sings in flowers,
If sense more dim than thought
May pierce through the deep dream of death wherein ye lie.
In a silence embroidered with whispers of lovers,
As the darkness is purfled with fire-flies.
The feverish heaven with a stitch in the side,
Of lightning.
For Pray'r the Ocean is, where diversely
Men steer their course, each to a several coast,
Where all our interests so discordant be,
Half begging God for winds that
Would send the other half to hell.
As many blades of grass as be
In all thy horizontal round,
So many dreams brood over thee.

To stand with quietude in the midst of the prodigious Unknown which we call the World, also to look with tranquil eyes upon the unfathomable blackness which limits our view to the little space enclosed betwixt birth and death.

So pray we to the God we dimly hope
Against calamities we clearly know.

It may be that the world can get along without God: but I can not. The universe-finity is to me like the chord of the dominant seventh, always leading towards, always inviting onwards, a Chord of Progress; God is the tonic Triad, a chord of Repose.