Today’s Poem: The Raven Days
Today’s Poem: The Raven Days
Sidney Lanier, Andrew Hudgins, and the imaginative sympathy of a living tradition
The Raven Days
by Sidney Lanier
Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken, And but the ghosts of homes to us remain, And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token From friend to friend of an unspoken pain. O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow, Bring to us in your whetted ivory beaks Some sign out of the far land of To-morrow, Some strip of sea-green dawn, some orange streaks. Ye float in dusky files, forever croaking. Ye chill our manhood with your dreary shade. Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking, We lie in chains, too weak to be afraid. O Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow, Will ever any warm light come again? Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrow Begin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?
Like Henry Timrod, whose “Retirement” appeared here back in February, Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) was memorialized as a “poet of the Confederacy.” Fourteen years younger than Timrod, Lanier — an organist and self-taught flautist as well as a writer — began writing poems only after the end of the war, and in its shadow. This shadow, for him, was also the shadow of his own lingering death from tuberculosis, contracted during his military imprisonment at Point Lookout, Maryland, in the last year of the conflict. It was the shadow, too, of his constant anxiety, in his illness, to keep his young family financially afloat by his writing and music.
Poems such as “The Marshes of Glynn” (set as a cantata by the English composer Andrew Downes in 1985) and “The Song of the Chattahoochee” translate the German Romanticism Lanier loved into the idiom of the American South, its landscapes and people, which and whom he also loved. Today’s Poem, “The Raven Days,” symmetrical in its four iambic-pentameter abab quatrains, raises a lament for those landscapes and people, scarred by defeat.
“The Raven Days” is a public elegy, its emotion mediated through its conventional, restrained form and consciously elevated poetic diction. This emotion is the general emotion of a people, not a person, for whom and to whom the poem proposes to speak. Its allusive raven, borrowed from the Old Testament story of Elijah, fed by ravens in the desert, suggests the defeated South as a kind of collective prophetic figure in exile — unironically “in chains,” though we might find that image ironic now.
Like his audience, Lanier’s speaker is less an identifiable, singular personality than a public mouthpiece, the voice of the vates or bard or laureate. This voice speaks not for itself alone, but for an “us” whose whose tomorrow looks dark. His raven, though it might have fed Elijah, also recalls the sonorous “nevermore” of Poe’s famous “Raven” of 1845 — but in this instance, the poet appropriates the image of a private loss to serve a collective grief.
“The Raven Days” finds a companion piece in the contemporary poet Andrew Hudgins’s (b. 1951) “Raven Days,” an entry in the 1988 book-length cycle After the Lost War, and obviously meant as a response to, or a meditation on, this particular poem of Lanier’s. In these 20th-century poems — “After the Wilderness,” for example — a fictionalized Sidney Lanier speaks in a direct, discursive voice channeled through Hudgins’s own. Taken as a whole, After the Lost War offers a fascinating example of the way literary tradition is meant to operate: as a living conversation of the present with the past, strikingly marked by imaginative sympathy.
Hudgins’s “Raven Days” (which you can also read here) reworks Lanier’s generalized evocation of suffering, anchored by the central figure of the raven, into a more personal, bleached-bones lyric meditation. For Hudgins, the raven becomes a dryly “ambiguous bird,” who “knows his way around a desert / and a corpse, and these are useful skills.” The fictional Lanier of the contemporary poem, more wry, less formally controlled in his private musings, less called upon to speak for a whole people, contemplates the “ambiguous” raven as, simultaneously, a sign of degradation — “we live on carrion” — and the emblem of a grim hope, absent in the Lanier original, that somebody after all might make it out alive.
Again, it’s interesting to look at these poems side by side and to consider that in a living tradition, what’s at stake is not the rejection or rehabilitation of the past’s voices, but the begetting of fresh art through engagement with those voices. The later poem takes up the poetic conventions of its own era: the singular and personal I speaker, the relaxation (though not the abandonment) of form, the ironic humor that characterizes Hudgins’s work.
Via those conventions, the contemporary poem seeks to penetrate the mask of public elegy, to access some imaginative vision of the particular mind, the more complex and personal human voice, behind that mask. It is its own poem, of a piece with its own moment in time — a moment, like its art, inevitably informed by what preceded it. It translates the vatic public voice of the post-Civil-War poet into the voice of a lonelier but more strangely cheerful Elijah, prophesying to himself in the wilderness.
I don't think Elijah is the reference here though - his raven was a symbol of hope and rescue sent by God. Perhaps Noah's raven which fails to find dry land. More generally ravens were associated with feeding on the dead of battlefields.
Whether from the Civil War period, the trenches of World War I, the gulags of the Soviet Union, or the death camps of the Germans or Japanese in World War II, and the list goes on, the loss of what was once a thriving life, community, ethos, and perhaps in some cases a way of life, just vanishes. It, no more than a loved one, from a funeral, can be revived. Still it's memory permeates one, for good or ill, like the corpse of a long dead lover, only this one still has the bare bones of its outline, and is still peopled, though only some may remember what was there before. The melody is over but the memory lingers on.