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Poem Outlines

Chapter 3: THE DYSPEPTIC
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.

THE DYSPEPTIC

Frown, quoth my lord Stomach,
And I lowered.
Quarrel, quoth my lord Liver,
And I lashed my wife and children,
Till at the breakfast-table
Hell sat laughing on the egg-cup.
Lie awake all night, quoth my two Masters,
And I tossed, and swore, and beat the pillow,
And kicked with disgust,
And slammed every door tight that leads to sleep and heaven.
[Credo, and Other Poems]
Foul Past, as my Master I scorn thee,
As my servant I love thee, dear Past.

One of your cold jelly-fish poets that find themselves cast up by some wave upon a sandy subject, and so wrinkle themselves about a pebble of a theme and let us see it through their substance—as if that were a great feat.

Cousin cloud
the wind of music
blow me into wreath
and curve of grace
as it bloweth thee.
And then
A gentle violin mated with the flute,
And both flew off into a wood of harmony,
Two doves of tone.

I have great trouble in behavior. I know what to do, I know what I at heart desire to do; but the doing of it, that is work, that labor is. I construct in my lonesome meditations the fairest scheme of my relations to my fellow-men, and to fellow-events; but when I go to set the words of solitary thought to the music of much-crowded action, I find ten thousand difficulties never suspected: difficulties of race, temperament, mood, tradition, custom, passion, unreason and other difficulties which I do not understand, as, for instance, the failure of contemporary men to recognize genius and great art.

I made me a song of serenade,
And I stole in the Night, in the Night,
To the window of the world where man slept light,
And I sang:
O my Love, my Love, my Fellow Man,
My Love.

I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage and I said:

"I know that thou art the word of my God, dear Violet:
And Oh the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads.
Measure what space a violet stands above the ground,
'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that."
[Written on the fly-leaf of
Emerson's "Representative
Men," between 1874 and
1879]
While I lie here under the tree,
Comes a strange insect and poises an instant at my cheek,
And lays his antennæ there upon my skin,
Then perceiving that I have nothing of nutriment for him,
He leaves me with a quiet indifference which, do all I can,
Crushes me more than the whole world's sarcasm,
And now he is gone to the Jamestown weed, there,
And is rioting in sweetness.
I did not think so poorly of thee, dear Lord,
As that thou wouldst wait until thou wert asked
(As many think),
And that thou wouldst be ugly, like a society person,
Because thou wert not invited.
[1881]
Tender wiles, transparent guiles,
Tears exhaling into smiles.

A man does not reach any stature of manhood until like Moses he kills an Egyptian (i. e., murders some oppressive prejudice of the all-crushing Tyrant Society or Custom or Orthodoxy) and flies into the desert of his own soul, where among the rocks and sands, over which at any rate the sun rises dear each day, he slowly and with great agony settles his relation with men and manners and powers outside, and begins to look with his own eyes, and first knows the unspeakable joy of the outcast's kiss upon the hand of sweet, naked Truth.

But let not the young man go to killing his Egyptian too soon: wait till you know all the Egyptians can teach you: wait till you are master of the technics of the time; then grave, and resolute, and aware of consequences, shape your course.

Thought, too, is carnivorous. It lives on meat. We never have an idea whose existence has not been purchased by the death of some atom of our fleshy tissue.

O little poem, thou goest from this brain chargeable with the death of tissue that perished in order that thou mightst live: nourish some soul, thou that hast been nourished on a human body.

Do you think the 19th century is past? It is but two years since Boston burnt me for witchcraft. I wrote a poem which was not orthodox: that is, not like Mr. Longfellow's.

All roads from childhood lead to hell,
Hell is but the smoke about the monstrous fires
Kindled from }
Rising from  } frictions of youth's self with self,
Passion rubbed hard 'gainst Purpose, Heart 'gainst Brain.
[1874-5]
Tolerance like a Harbor lay
Smooth and shining and secure,
Where ships carrying every flag of faith were anchored in peace.