The Marshes of Glynn

The salt marshes of Glynn County, Georgia, immediately around the sea-coast city of Brunswick.

Clover.

`Clover’ is placed as the initial poem of a volume which was left in orderly arrangement among the author’s papers. His own grouping in that volume has been followed as far as possible in this fuller collection.

The Mocking-Bird.

“ … yon trim Shakespeare on the tree”

leads back, almost twenty years from its writing, to the poet’s college note-book where we find the boy reflecting: “A poet is the mocking-bird of the spiritual universe. In him are collected all the individual songs of all individual natures.”

Corn.

`Corn’ will hold a distinct interest for those who study the gathering forces in the author’s growth: for it was the first outcome of his consciously-developing art-life. This life, the musician’s and poet’s, he entered upon—after years of patient denial and suppression— in September, 1873, uncertain of his powers but determined to give them wing.

His “fieldward-faring eyes took harvest” “among the stately corn-ranks”, in a portion of middle Georgia sixty miles to the north of Macon. It is a high tract of country from which one looks across the lower reaches to the distant Blue Ridge mountains, whose wholesome breath, all unobstructed, here blends with the woods-odors of the beech, the hickory and the muscadine: a part of a range recalled elsewhere by Mr. Lanier, as “that ample stretch of generous soil, where the Appalachian ruggednesses calm themselves into pleasant hills before dying quite away into the sea-board levels”— where “a man can find such temperances of heaven and earth— enough of struggle with nature to draw out manhood, with enough of bounty to sanction the struggle—that a more exquisite co-adaptation of all blessed circumstances for man’s life need not be sought.”

My Springs.

Of this newly-written poem Mr. Lanier says in a letter of March, 1874: “Of course, since I have written it to print I cannot make it such as *I* desire in artistic design: for the forms of to-day require a certain trim smugness and clean-shaven propriety in the face and dress of a poem, and I must win a hearing by conforming in some degree to these tyrannies, with a view to overturning them in the future. Written so, it is not nearly so beautiful as I would have it; and I therefore have another still in my heart, which I will some day write for myself.”