Some Late Sonnets of Gildersleeve Found at Sewanee

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, the eminent classicist who founded this journal, is remembered primarily as an authority on matters of grammar and philology; he was in addition something of a poet, although of limited ability, who specialized in sonnets.¹ In the archives of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, I recently found a number of sonnets written by Gildersleeve, all of them apparently from late in his long life.² As these may be of interest to the readership of this journal, AJP's current editor has graciously allowed these nugae of her distinguished predecessor to be reprinted here.

What follows below are seven sonnets written when Gildersleeve was evidently in or nearly in his nineties,³ all of which were copied in longhand by his niece, Mrs. Leon D. (Eleanor) Kirby, a longtime Sewanee resident.⁴ When and why Mrs. Kirby made these transcriptions is uncertain, although her reasons appear to have been personal.⁵ She was not a practiced amanuensis (see below n. 14), and the text of the sonnets is largely as she copied them out, with only minor corrections.⁶ Because these require in places a little explication, I have supplied a brief commentary as well. From the appearance of his name fairly littering the footnotes, readers will ascertain that Professor Ward Briggs has been tremendously helpful to me in putting together this "Brief Mention."

It was in one of his own late "Brief Mentions," in fact, that Gildersleeve outlined his theory that "the modern sonnet [is] an analogon on a large scale" to the elegiac distich (AJP 41.2 [1920]: 200 = Miller 1930, 402). As he continues, "The octave . . . represents the hexameter, the sextet, the pentameter, and the likeness to the latter is heightened by the use of terza rima."⁷ He ends his remarks on the matter thus:

The Greeks kept prose and poetry steadily apart . . . but the elegiac distich was open to all; and I may claim Hellenic authority for introducing my sonnets into the company of grave grammarians. If that chiffonier Diogenes Laertius might try his hand on epigram, why not I try mine at sonnets?

In a letter to Paul Shorey, Gildersleeve had assessed his own poetic endeavors as "mere embroideries of more or less familiar texts" that are "at best . . . bits of versified rhetoric" (Briggs 1987, 346). On the other hand, as Shorey himself had maintained in a long New York Times tribute, "Everything that Gildersleeve did counted" (January 27, 1924, 14). No doubt the sonnets are of greater historical than literary value, although this is a judgment better perhaps left to the individual tastes of AJP's current company of grave grammarians.

1. Callimachus to Heraclitus (The Old Greek Page)

They told me Heraclitus, thou wast dead.
Death is the common lot, too well I know,
Of every thing that lives and moves below
The brazen heavens. But Ah! what tears I shed
When I recalled how oft the hours sped.
Unheeded they would come unheeded go
While our discourse kept up its happy flow
Until the sun sank to his ocean bed
Long since, long since, my Halicarnassian friend
[. . . thou hast returned to dust.]
Thy play is over, and thy work is done.
The angel Azrael who makes an end
Of mortal men, thy tuneful voice hath hushed
And yet thy Nightingales live on, sing on.

2. To Joseph Packard

They told me Joseph Packard, thou wast dead
Death is the common lot, too well I know,
Of every thing that lives and moves below
The brazen heavens. But Ah! what tears I shed,
When I recalled how oft the hours sped.
Unheeded they would come, unheeded go
While our discourse kept up its happy flow.
[Until the sun sank to his ocean bed]
And now dear comrade, old Confederate friend
Ashes to ashes art thou, dust to dust.
The...