"Too Long, O Spirit of Storm", is the fused passion of the poet's heart appalled at the moral death of stagnation. It has all the intensity and subtlety of Shelley.
In "The Lily Confidante", delicate and fanciful as it is, the reply of the Lily "is a simple yet sacred melody", hallowing the purity of passion.
"The Arctic Voyager" suggests Tennyson's "Ulysses" in its high faith, lofty purpose, and sustained power.
"Spring" is the burst of the Southern spring, in its flooding life and glory and beauty. There is "a nameless pathos in the air." A wonderful revelation is going on before our eyes! No miracle could startle in the ever new creation, so strange and rapturous is this joy of sense and spiritual rebirth.
Nor was his genius only reflective, and creative, and playful; his was a trumpet voice also. When the blast of war sounded, his voice rang like a clarion in "Carolina" and "Cry to Arms". Beyond their local meaning, which kindles and thrills, now as then, the men of the South, they have an abiding, universal power from the standpoint of art; for there is nothing finer in all the martial strains of the lyric.
Paul Hayne, his brother poet, speaking of "Carolina", as "lines destined perhaps to outlive the political vitality of the State, whose antique fame they celebrate," said:--
"I read them first, and was thrilled by their power and pathos, upon a stormy March evening in Fort Sumter! Walking along the battlements, under the red light of a tempestuous sunset, the wind steadily and loudly blowing from off the bar across the tossing and moaning waste of waters, driven inland; with scores of gulls and white sea-birds flying and shrieking round me,--those wild voices of Nature mingled strangely with the rhythmic roll and beat of the poet's impassioned music. The very spirit, or dark genius, of the troubled scene appeared to take up and to repeat such verses as--
"'I hear a murmur as of waves That grope their way through sunless caves, Like bodies struggling in their graves, Carolina!
And now it deepens; slow and grand It swells, as rolling to the land, An ocean broke upon the strand, Carolina!
Shout! let it reach the startled Huns!
And roar with all thy festal guns!
It is the answer of thy sons, Carolina!'"
Profoundly appealing as are Timrod's war strains, for they are the heart-cry of a people, still it should be noted that there is scarcely a battle ode that does not close with an invocation to peace, such was the lofty nature of the poet. War to him was only the drawn sword of right, and truth, and justice, which accomplished, the prayer for peace was ever on his lips, as witness the noble invocation to Peace, closing his "Christmas", that has so often stirred and hushed at once the heart of the South.
The Ode, written for Memorial Day, April, 1867, of the Confederate graves at Charleston, was his last production. He had sung in lofty strains each phase of the struggle, its hope, its courage, its fear, its despair; he now sings his latest song, a wreath of flowers upon the unmarked graves of the Southern dead, and has hallowed these sacred mounds to his people in the words,--
"There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned!"
These poems are written in the life-blood of the poet and his generation. The patriotic fire, the devoted sacrifice and splendid achievement, that "Carolina", "Cry to Arms", "Unknown Dead", "Carmen Triumphale", "Charleston", "Storm and Calm", and the other of the war poems celebrate were not only the rushing tide of earnest feeling of a noble people then, but are now a part of the glory and heritage of the State, of the South, and of the American republic. They were the mighty heart-beats of that great epoch. They are now irrevocable history, and make these poems a part of the abiding literature of America.
"A Common Thought" is the poet's premonition of his end; but he sees no vision of the dying glory of sunset, no going out into the dark, no presentiment of a vague and gloomy voyage on a homeless sea; but in the sunshine, in the growing light of ever broadening day, amid the joy and splendor of nature, bright prophecy and intuition of immortality, is to come the sudden, solemn mystery of the whisper, "He is gone!" And so it was. For as the sun broadened into glad day, and the full radiance illumined and animated earth and sea and sky, "as it purpled in the zenith, as it brightened on the lawn," this rich young life, in its own fresh morning of genius and spiritual sunshine, passed, and in his own triumphant words,--
"not dies, no more than Spirit dies; But in a change like death was clothed with wings."
The Late Judge George S. Bryan
It would not be fitting that this memorial edition of Timrod's Poems should go forth to the world without proper recognition, on the part of the TIMROD MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION, of the relation occupied and the services rendered to the poet in his lifetime by the late Hon. George S. Bryan, of Charleston. During the whole of Timrod's career Judge Bryan was his devoted friend, ever ready to assist him materially, morally, and in every other respect.
His faith in Timrod's genius never wavered, and but for his early assistance, sympathy, and encouragement, much of the fruit of that genius would have been lost or wasted. He helped him in adversity, cheered him in his hours of anxiety and despondency, and from first to last, throughout the literary and spiritual history of the poet, he did more than any other friend to keep alive in his heart the steadfast flame of faith in his poetic destiny; Judge Bryan's name must always be inseparably connected with Henry Timrod's in the literary annals of South Carolina.
January, 1899.
POEMS OF HENRY TIMROD
Spring
Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air Which dwells with all things fair, Spring, with her golden suns and silver rain, Is with us once again.
Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court with green festoons The banks of dark lagoons.
In the deep heart of every forest tree The blood is all aglee, And there's a look about the leafless bowers As if they dreamed of flowers.
Yet still on every side we trace the hand Of Winter in the land, Save where the maple reddens on the lawn, Flushed by the season's dawn;
Or where, like those strange semblances we find That age to childhood bind, The elm puts on, as if in Nature's scorn, The brown of Autumn corn.
As yet the turf is dark, although you know That, not a span below, A thousand germs are groping through the gloom, And soon will burst their tomb.
Already, here and there, on frailest stems Appear some azure gems, Small as might deck, upon a gala day, The forehead of a fay.
In gardens you may note amid the dearth The crocus breaking earth; And near the snowdrop's tender white and green, The violet in its screen.
But many gleams and shadows need must pass Along the budding grass, And weeks go by, before the enamored South Shall kiss the rose's mouth.
Still there's a sense of blossoms yet unborn In the sweet airs of morn; One almost looks to see the very street Grow purple at his feet.
At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by, And brings, you know not why, A feeling as when eager crowds await Before a palace gate
Some wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start, If from a beech's heart, A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say, "Behold me! I am May!"
Ah! who would couple thoughts of war and crime With such a blessed time!
Who in the west wind's aromatic breath Could hear the call of Death!
Yet not more surely shall the Spring awake The voice of wood and brake, Than she shall rouse, for all her tranquil charms, A million men to arms.
There shall be deeper hues upon her plains Than all her sunlit rains, And every gladdening influence around, Can summon from the ground.
Oh! standing on this desecrated mould, Methinks that I behold, Lifting her bloody daisies up to God, Spring kneeling on the sod,
And calling, with the voice of all her rills, Upon the ancient hills To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves Who turn her meads to graves.
The Cotton Boll