Born in Charleston, S. C., 1829; died Columbia, S. C., 1867. Son of the bookbinder, William Henry Timrod, who published a volume of verse. Slender means prevented the son from taking the full course at the University of Georgia, and he became a tutor in the family of a Carolina planter. During the Civil War he was a correspondent of the Charleston “Mercury,” and assistant editor of the Columbia “South Carolinian.” The death of a favorite child and the destruction wrought by Sherman’s troops in Columbia broke up his little home, and after a severe struggle with poverty he fell a prey to disease. His poems, having the misfortune to appear in 1860, had attracted less attention than they deserved; but in 1873 they were republished, with a sketch of the author by Paul H. Hayne, and a revised edition has appeared, 1899.
Personal
Poor Timrod is the very Prince of Dolefuls, and swallowed up in distresses. He now contemplates separation from his wife, that she may go forth as a governess and he as a tutor, in private families. He can earn nothing where he is [Columbia]; has not a dollar, goes to bed hungry every night, and suffers from bad health. It is the mortifying thing to all of us, that none of us can help him. Burns and myself are both living from hand to mouth, and not unfrequently the hand carries nothing to the cavernous receptacle.
Nature, kinder to his senseless ashes than ever Fortune had been to the living man, is prodigal around his grave—unmarked and unrecorded though it be—of her flowers and verdant grasses, of her rains that fertilize, and her purifying dews. The peace he loved, and so vainly longed for through stormy years, has crept to him at last, but only to fall upon the pallid eyelids, closed forever; upon the pulseless limbs, and the breathless, broken heart. Still it is good to know that
| “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.” |
| See where he lies—his last sad home | |
| Of all memorial bare, | |
| Save for a little heap of leaves | |
| The winds have gathered there! | |
| One fair frail shell from some far sea | |
| Lies lone above his breast, | |
| Sad emblem and sole epitaph | |
| To mark his place of rest. |
No poet could have found a more unpropitious time for graceful love-songs, and for lyrics in praise of spring and woodland,—to fit “a green thought in a green shade,”—than that in which the shy young poet began to sing. Repose had gone from the troubled South, and the ominous days were carrying it nearer and nearer to war. It was no time for music, and Timrod was not one to draw the gaze of busy men. Later, when the fever of war heated his verse, men carried his stirring songs in their hearts, but forgot the singer. Later still, when they came back crushed and heart-broken, yet ready to take up manfully the struggle of life anew, it was still less the fortunate hour for the poet.
Timrod, though dwelling in the shadow of consumption, was healthily in love with life. Poverty, pain, lack of general appreciation, did not cloud, did not even dim, his high spirit. He died beautifully like a Greek philosopher and poet, with a Christian’s faith, receiving the sacrament.
General
His verses show him to have been as well convinced of the justice of the Southern cause as were any of his contemporaries; as patriotic and as confident of success. But although he once predicts that grass will grow in the streets of New York, and several times stigmatizes the Northern soldier as a Hun and a Goth, and a “ruffian foe,” he does such things less frequently than most other writers of his political creed; and nowhere, we believe, does he exhibit that indiscriminate bloodthirstiness of reprobation and disgust, the apparently sincere expression of which used to cause a good deal of sincere surprise among Northern people, and which, even to a good part of the Southern public itself, must, we imagine, have now and again caused the writing of its poets to seem fatiguing…. It would, however, be an injustice to Mr. Timrod to test his ability as a poet by the lyrics extorted from him by a savage commotion, for partaking in which his sensitive nature entirely unfitted him.
Timrod’s ode, sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, is, in its simple grandeur, the noblest poem ever written by a Southern poet.
The South has been unfortunate in the loss of promising writers. One such as Timrod, whose handiwork was skilful and often imaginative and strong. Timrod’s “Cotton Boll” was a forerunner of the method of a still finer poet than he, whose career was equally pathetic.
A man capable of painting so eloquently in words could hardly expect to be rich in more substantial ware!
His little book of verse is so good in its martial and general work, that it makes us speculate on the possibilities which might have come in a longer life of one whose inspiration was so vivid that he half expected the incarnate spirit of springtide to appear in rosy flesh before him, in his woodland walks, exclaiming,
| “Behold me! I am May!” |
Timrod’s was probably the most finely endowed mind to be found in Carolina, or indeed in the whole South, at this period. His German blood and his inherited qualities had given him a greater artistic endowment than any other Southern writer, save Poe, had been blessed with. He was able, except in the case of his sonnets, in which he evidently came under Simms’s influence, to control himself; was able to devote time and patience to the polishing and perfection of his verse; and, more than all, was able to distinguish between subjects that were proper and subjects that were alien to his art. In these respects he was slightly, but only slightly, superior to Hayne. But where Hayne and the generality of Southern poets possessed a delicate fancy, for the most part exercised on subjects not far removed from the commonplace, Timrod possessed an imagination which, if not lofty and wide embracing, was within its narrow range characterized by a singular intensity. He has not left much work behind him, and that work is marred by the effects which constant sickness and poverty and the stress of war necessarily had upon his genius; but he has left a few singularly beautiful poems, and one at least, the ode written for the occasion of the decoration of the Confederate graves in Magnolia Cemetery, that approximates perfection,—the perfection of Collins, not that of Lovelace. That he was dominated by Tennyson, just as Hayne was dominated by Tennyson and William Morris, and Simms by Wordsworth, is perfectly true; but his poetic powers were not only greater than those of his brothers, but also more akin to the powers of the great model he set himself.
His thin volume has many lovers; for if his muse is in less degree than Hayne’s—
| “A serious angel, with entrancëd eyes | |
| Looking to far-off and celestial things,” |
In spite of his impracticability, he is not an impractical poet; he is essentially a sane and masculine thinker. Approaching him, we suspect provincialism, but find a genial breadth that surprises us. His gamut of feeling is wide, and even in his war-songs, where one expects little restraint, we find this admirable self-control and breadth.
The first thing that impresses a student of Timrod’s work is its quiet possession of the absolute and abiding charm of spontaneity. This man sang because he had to sing. One never feels that he selected his themes; that he ever said to himself: “Here’s a good subject to festoon with rhymes;” but, on the contrary, the things came to him, craving expression—and found it…. Few, very few, traces of the influences of other poets appear in the mass of Timrod’s work. That he had absorbed the finest aromas of Tennyson’s carefully weeded garden one may not doubt; but his own growths have their own beauty, their own perfume; and in his war-songs there is a fervour, a fire, which is lacking in the martial measures of the stately master-craftsman.
He gave us probably the best of the war lyrics written in the South.
| How shall we praise him save with his own song? | |
| The distant note, the delicate strain is there, | |
| Of bees and sedge, of fields dim and apart; | |
| Then, keen with men, affairs, loss, glory, wrong, | |
| A various music storms along the air, | |
| Sweeps past the years, and shakes us to the heart! |
A poet born but not a poet made, and, therefore, despite the timeworn adage, not a thorough poet after all. This is what the impartial critic feels upon laying down the small volume…. Not a thorough poet, and yet with a very real poetic nature, and with many of the poet’s gifts. The pathos and the tragedy of his brief career find expression in words which he wrote not long before his death concerning his poetry: “I would consign every line of it to eternal oblivion for—one hundred dollars in hand!” It was the cry of a starving man; and in it may be read the secret of his failure to reach the mark of a high attainment. Very near it he came; often touched it; in his work we find very seldom the perfect whole, often the flashes of a rare genius.
