Poetry
The Marshes of Glynn
Sidney Lanier · 1878
Opening lines
Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, —
Text quoted from rpo.library.utoronto.ca
Synopsis
The poet has spent a whole June day in the shade of a grove of live oaks on the coast of Georgia; at sunset, he steps out of it before the salt marshes. He first describes the shelter, the interwoven branches and the green light filtered through the leaves, then the opening onto leagues of grass as high as the waist. The expanse that once frightened him no longer frightens him; there he feels freed from the weight of fate, and, as the marsh hen builds her nest on the wet ground, he wants to build his on the greatness of God. The tide will soon rise.
Context
The poem appears in 1878 in Boston, in A Masque of Poets, an anthology from a series in which no text is signed; the same volume gives a poem by Emily Dickinson. Written for the most part in Baltimore, it was meant to open a sequence of marsh hymns that the author did not complete; the posthumous edition of 1884, prepared by his widow, places it fourth and retouches the text. Its metre, which the author theorised in 1880 in The Science of English Verse, advances like the movements of a symphony. A plaque set up in 1956 in Brunswick marks the oak under which he used to come to look at the marsh.
Who it is for
A poem of 105 lines in a single flow, with no recorded French translation. The music of the text carries the meaning, and reading aloud yields more than reading with the eyes.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's high point and his most famous poem; on its anonymous publication, it was judged one of the best in the volume.
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