No More Learning

`Sunrise', Mr. Lanier's latest completed poem, was written
while his sun of life seemed fairly at the setting,
and the hand which first pencilled its lines had not strength
to carry nourishment to the lips.

The three `Hymns of the Marshes' which open this collection
are the only written portions of a series of six `Marsh Hymns'
that were designed by the author to form a separate volume.

The `Song' of the Marshes, `At Sunset', does not belong to this group,
but is inserted among the `Hymns' as forming a true accord with them.


IV. 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. "


VII. A Song of Love.

`A Song of Love', like `Betrayal', belongs to the early plan
of `The Jacquerie'. It was written for one of the Fool's songs and,
after several recastings, took its present shape in 1879.


To Nannette Falk-Auerbach.