The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature

TWO: Sidney Lanier: The Scythe of Time, The Trowel of Trade

TWO Sidney Lanier: The Scythe of Time, The Trowel of Trade o isyour pastoral life whirled past and away"This wasHenry David Thoreau's reaction as he watched a cattle train roar through the woods near Walden Pond. The "ear-rending" sound of the train occursmany times in Thoreau's essay, always interrupting, always disturbing the beauty and serenity of his life in the woods. Thoreau was conducting an experiment in nature and also an exercise in the formation and use of images. In Walden train and pond are matched, opposed, and reconciled through Thoreau's intricate artistry, and one of the many revelations that emerges is that, except in art, the day when a pastoral life could be lived was gone, or soon would be. The southerner, picking up the pieces of his world after the Civil War, was forced like Thoreau to look upon a pastoral life being "whirled past and away" by the hurricane force of a great industrial power. His ordeal was at once more intensely and more romantically defined by him as he witnessed literally a scene that Thoreau only prophesied largely in symbolic terms, the destruction of awhole way of life. Sidney Lanier, who fought in the war and returned to Georgia to see both economic and artistic aspirations crushed, wrote a painfully personal version of Thoreau's elegy to Arcady in a letter to a northern friend in May of 1866: "I can scarcely discern any sight or sound of those old peaceful days that you and I passed on the 18 s Sidney Lanier 19 'Sacred soil of M[idway]5 —The sweet, half-pastoral tones that should come from out that golden time, float to me mixed with battle-cries and groans."1 A world that had been cultivated to be or appear to be a showcase of pastoral valueshad disappeared in the space of the years of war, and in its placewas a chaos so complete that evenmemories of "that golden time" were hopelessly marred. When the South began to function again, there was total confusion concerning priorities, programs, possibilities. The struggle for allat first was the sheer business of survival in a land almost completely devastated in terms of wealth, manpower , and leadership. Lanier was to write of this period that "with us of the younger generation of the South, since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying."2 For the southern artist the economic woes were compounded by aesthetic ones. Lanier could remarkthat "whereas I used to live wholly to makebeautiful things, I now live half-ly to make money: and I hate all half-way things."3 An artist who interpreted his past—as Lanier obviously did—as a kind of pastoral playground had an especially difficult conflict to resolve. There was no hope of restoring the Arcadian atmosphere which had existed as much (if not more) as astaple of the imagination as a part of reality. To be an artist in the immediate postwar South wasto be awareof both the new realities and the need to find a new language for the imagination. If pastoral inclinations could survive the holocaust (and they did for most, itseems) then the major task for the artist would be to find valid metaphors to use in bringing the pastoral ideology into some kind of dynamic alignment with the inescapable forces of contemporary history. Lanier did not look to the plantation past for such ametaphor. He seldom chose to make use of the powerful images that a plantation setting could provide, and in particular he ignored almost completely the Negro ascharacterand symbolof the Old South. The few 1. Sidney Lanier to Milton H. Northrup, May 12, 1866, in Sidney Lanier, Letters, 1857-1868,ed. Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey Starke, Vol. VII of Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier (Baltimore, 1945),221. 2. SidneyLanier to BayardTaylor,August 7,1875,in SidneyLanier,Letters, 1874-1877, ed. Anderson and Starke, Vol. IX of Centennial Edition,230. 3. Sidney Lanier to Harriet Fulton, January 22,1866, in Letters, 1857-1868, p. 211. 20 TheDream ofArcady Negro dialect poems that he wrote as a young man evidently only embarrassed him, for he wrote once to ask a friend, 'Tell me, ought one to be a little ashamed of writing a dialect poem?"4 It becomes instructive, therefore, to view Lanier asone of the first southern...