BY J. R. LOWELL¹.

[Published in The Pioneer. A Literary and Critical Magazine, Jan 1843 (1,1)]

[Edited and annotated by Valerie Hoke for the University of Arizona Antebellum Magazine Edition Project, May 4, 2015.]

[Editor's Note]

 

Our love is not a fading earthly flower;
     Its winged seed dropt down from paradise,
And nursed by day and night, by sun and shower,
     Doth momently to fresher beauty rise:
To us the leafless autumn is not bare,
     Nor winter’s rattling boughs lack lusty green,
Our summer hearts make summer’s fulness where
     No leaf or bud or blossom may be seen:
For nature’s life in love’s deep life doth lie,
     Love—whose forgetfulness is beauty’s death,
Whose mystic key these cells of thou and I
     Into the infinite freedom openeth,
And makes the body’s dark and narrow grate
The wide-flung leaves of heaven’s palace-gate.

 

 

Editor’s Note

In addition to founding and editing The Pioneer, James Russell Lowell, the author of this sonnet², was known as a key figure in 19^th century American literature and culture, especially because of his poems, abolitionist essays, and diplomatic appointments by President Rutherford B. Hayes (“James Russell Lowell”). Lowell’s most famous work is arguably A Fable for Critics, a satirical work written in verse that he published anonymously in 1848 (“A Fable for Critics”). Interestingly, despite his past contributions to The Pioneer, Edgar Allan Poe penned a review of A Fable for Critics in The Southern Literary Messenger, another periodical, in which he expressed his distaste for Lowell’s work:

By the publication of a book at once so ambitious and so feeble – so malevolent in design and so harmless in execution – a work so roughly and clumsily yet so weakly constructed – so very very different, in body and spirit, from anything that he has written before – Mr. Lowell has committed an irrevocable faux pas and lowered himself at least fifty per cent in the literary public opinion (“NOTICES OF NEW WORKS”).

Although unrelated to the above sonnet, A Fable for Critics and its esteemed audience demonstrate Lowell’s notoriety in the literary culture of the time; to study his lesser-known poetry can only add to the considerable (but still not extensive) production of scholarly material about his work.  

Here, Lowell’s “SONNET,” in its reflection on love and death, promotes the idea that love cannot die, even though natural objects that have a lifespan most certainly will. The entire January 1843 issue of The Pioneer, it seems, has a common theme of life vs. death running through its collected works, and this sonnet is no exception: “Love—whose forgetfulness is beauty’s death,” suggests this idea that the disappearance of love would be the end of all things beautiful (Lowell). Rather than meditate on the love between two individuals, then, the sonnet speaks of the eternal love produced by all of humanity. A few pieces after this sonnet comes a poem called “The Poet and Apollo,” in which death is referred to as a “last and greatest gift” (H, P.). Unlike “SONNET,” this poem treats death as the final accomplishment of an otherwise extraordinary life. Perhaps, then, the remainder of the related content in the January 1843 issue of The Pioneer can be examined through a lens created by these two takes on death: one that equates it with the loss of beauty, and another that views it as a substantial gift. Beyond that, since Lowell clearly held interest in the ideas of life and death in the material he both wrote and edited, interested readers might examine how these ideas are further represented in the larger collection of his literary and editorial work.