The Commemoration Ode
In April, 1865, the Civil War was ended and peace was declared. On
July 21 Harvard College held a solemn service in commemoration of her
ninety-three sons who had been killed in the war. Eight of these
fallen young heroes were of Lowell's own kindred. Personal grief thus
added intensity to the deep passion of his utterance upon this great
occasion. He was invited to give a poem, and the ode which he
presented proved to be the supreme event of the noble service. The
scene is thus described by Francis H. Underwood, who was in the
audience:
"The services took place in the open air, in the presence of a great
assembly. Prominent among the speakers were Major-General Meade, the
hero of Gettysburg, and Major-General Devens. The wounds of the war
were still fresh and bleeding, and the interest of the occasion was
deep and thrilling. The summer afternoon was drawing to its close when
the poet began the recital of the ode. No living audience could for
the first time follow with intelligent appreciation the delivery of
such a poem. To be sure, it had its obvious strong points and its
sonorous charms; but, like all the later poems of the author, it is
full of condensed thought and requires study. The reader to-day finds
many passages whose force and beauty escaped him during the recital,
but the effect of the poem at the time was overpowering. The face of
the poet, always singularly expressive, was on this occasion almost
transfigured--glowing, as if with an inward light. It was impossible
to look away from it. Our age has furnished many great historic
scenes, but this Commemoration combined the elements of grandeur and
pathos, and produced an impression as lasting as life."
Of the delivery and immediate effect of the poem Mr. Greenslet says:
"Some in the audience were thrilled and shaken by it, as Lowell
himself was shaken in its delivery, yet he seems to have felt with
some reason that it was not a complete and immediate success. Nor is
this cause for wonder. The passion of the poem was too ideal, its
woven harmonies too subtle to be readily communicated to so large an
audience, mastered and mellowed though it was by a single deep mood.
Nor was Lowell's elocution quite that of the deep-mouthed odist
capable of interpreting such organ tones of verse. But no sooner was
the poem published, with the matchless Lincoln strophe inserted, than
its greatness and nobility were manifest."
The circumstances connected with the writing of the ode have been
described by Lowell in his private letters. It appears that he was
reluctant to undertake the task, and for several weeks his mind
utterly refused to respond to the high duty put upon it. At last the
sublime thought came to him upon the swift wings of inspiration. "The
ode itself," he says, "was an improvisation. Two days before the
commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible--that
I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog,
and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night
writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child."
In another letter he says: "The poem was written with a vehement
speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor's
gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb,
and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece
magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it." In a note
in Scudder's biography of Lowell (Vol. II., p. 65), it is stated upon
the authority of Mrs. Lowell that the poem was begun at ten o'clock
the night before the commemoration day, and finished at four o'clock
in the morning. "She opened her eyes to see him standing haggard,
actually wasted by the stress of labor and the excitement which had
carried him through a poem full of passion and fire, of five hundred
and twenty-three lines, in the space of six hours."
Critical estimates are essentially in accord as to the deep
significance and permanent poetic worth of this poem. Greenslet, the
latest biographer of Lowell, says that the ode, "if not his most
perfect, is surely his noblest and most splendid work," and adds:
"Until the dream of human brotherhood is forgotten, the echo of its
large music will not wholly die away." Professor Beers declares it to
be, "although uneven, one of the finest occasional poems in the
language, and the most important contribution which our Civil War has
made to song." Of its exalted patriotism, George William Curtis says:
"The patriotic heart of America throbs forever in Lincoln's Gettysburg
address. But nowhere in literature is there a more magnificent and
majestic personification of a country whose name is sacred to its
children, nowhere a profounder passion of patriotic loyalty, than in
the closing lines of the Commemoration Ode. The American whose heart,
swayed by that lofty music, does not thrill and palpitate with solemn
joy and high resolve does not yet know what it is to be an American."
With the praise of a discriminating criticism Stedman discusses the
ode in his _Poets of America_: "Another poet would have composed a
less unequal ode; no American could have glorified it with braver
passages, with whiter heat, with language and imagery so befitting
impassioned thought. Tried by the rule that a true poet is at his best
with the greatest theme, Lowell's strength is indisputable. The ode is
no smooth-cut verse from Pentelicus, but a mass of rugged quartz,
beautiful with prismatic crystals, and deep veined here and there with
virgin gold. The early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt
line, 'weak-winged is song,' are scarcely firm and incisive. Lowell
had to work up to his theme. In the third division, 'Many loved Truth,
and lavished life's best oil,' he struck upon a new and musical
intonation of the tenderest thoughts. The quaver of this melodious
interlude carries the ode along, until the great strophe is reached,--
Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,
in which the man, Abraham Lincoln, whose death had but just closed the
national tragedy, is delineated in a manner that gives this poet a
preeminence, among those who capture likeness in enduring verse, that
we award to Velasquez among those who fasten it upon the canvas. 'One
of Plutarch's men' is before us, face to face; an historic character
whom Lowell fully comprehended, and to whose height he reached in this
great strophe. Scarcely less fine is his tearful, yet transfiguring,
Avete to the sacred dead of the Commemoration. The weaker divisions of
the production furnish a background to these passages, and at the
close the poet rises with the invocation,--
'Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!'
a strain which shows that when Lowell determinedly sets his mouth to
the trumpet, the blast is that of Roncesvalles."
W.C. Brownell, the latest critic of Lowell's poetry, says of this
poem: "The ode is too long, its evolution is defective, it contains
verbiage, it preaches. But passages of it--the most famous having
characteristically been interpolated after its delivery--are equal to
anything of the kind. The temptation to quote from it is hard to
withstand. It is the cap-sheaf of Lowell's achievement." In this ode
"he reaches, if he does not throughout maintain, his own
'clear-ethered height' and his verse has the elevation of ecstasy and
the splendor of the sublime."
The versification of this poem should be studied with some
particularity. Of the forms of lyric expression the ode is the most
elaborate and dignified. It is adapted only to lofty themes and
stately occasions. Great liberty is allowed in the choice and
arrangement of its meter, rhymes, and stanzaic forms, that its varied
form and movement may follow the changing phases of the sentiment and
passion called forth by the theme. Lowell has given us an account of
his own consideration of this matter. "My problem," he says, "was to
contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, which
should vary with varying moods, in which the transitions (including
those of the voice) should be managed without jar. I at first thought
of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those in
the choruses of _Samson Agonistes_, which are in the main masterly. Of
course, Milton deliberately departed from that stricter form of Greek
chorus to which it was bound quite as much (I suspect) by the law of
its musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. I wrote some
stanzas of the _Commemoration Ode_ on this theory at first, leaving
some verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased
when the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo rather
than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet
was gratified by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint
reminiscence of consonance."