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Poem Outlines

Chapter 12: WATER AT DAWN
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.

WATER AT DAWN

Gray iris of the eyeball earth,
Limpid Intelligence.

It is the easiest thing in the world to make one falsehood out of two truths.

O Science, wilt thou take my Christ,
Oh, wilt thou crucify him o'er
Betwixt false thieves with thieves' own pain,
Never to rise again?
Leave me this love, O cool-eyed One,
Leave me this Saviour.
Science: Down at the base of a statue,
A flower of strange hue
I dug, that I might see and know the root thereof,
And lo, the statue is prone, fallen.
They did but crucify the godhead of Christ,
(My God, my God, He said, why hast thou forsaken me?)
The manhood rose and lives forever,
The Leader, the Friend, the Beloved of all men and women,
The strongest, the wisest, the dearest, the sweetest.

Come with me, Science; let us go into the Church here (say in Georgia); let alone the youth here, they have roses in their cheeks, they know that life is delicious, what need have they of thee? But fix thy keen eye on these grave-faced and mostly sallow married women who make at least half this congregation—these women who are the people that carry around the subscription cards, and feed the preacher and keep him in heart always. See, there is Mrs. S.: her husband and son were killed in the war; Mrs. B.—her husband has been a thriftless fellow, and she has finally found out the damnable fact that she is both stronger and purer than he is, which she is, however, yet sweetly endeavoring to hide from herself and all people; Mrs. C. D. and the rest of the alphabet in the same condition;—Science, I grasp thee by the throat and ask thee with vehement passion, wilt thou take away the Christ (who is to each Deficiency in this house the Completion and Hoped Perfectness) from these women?

To-day
The Stars tease me, as it were gadflies:
And I cannot bear the impudent reds and yellows of the flowers.
To many inarticulate
Like the great vague wind
Against the wire, one word larger
Than some languages, nowhere flippant,
My song is of all men and times and thoughts,
Therefore many, caring not
For aught save one man, this time, and finance,
Many, many listen not
Because I sing for all.
Sang I of that little king
That owns this special little time,
The world were mine; but oh, but oh,
I sing all Time that hath no king.
And if I sang this man or that,
Haply the singer's fee I win;
But part's too little: I sing all:
I know not parties, cliques, nor times.

The old Obligation of goodness has now advanced into the Delight of goodness; the old Curse of Labor into the Delight of Labor; the old Agony of blood-shedding sacrifice into the tranquil Delight of Unselfishness. The Curse of the Jew of Genesis is the Blessing of the modern Gentile. It is as if an avalanche, in the very moment of crushing the kneeling villagers, should turn to a gentle and fruitful rain, and be minister not of death but of life.