No More Learning

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.

This sonnet was originally written in the German and published
in a German daily of Baltimore, while the author's translation
appeared at the same time in the Baltimore `Gazette'.


To Our Mocking-Bird.