He fled away into the oblivious West,

Unmourned, unblest.
Old hill! old hill! thou gashed and hairy Lear

Whom the divine Cordelia of the year,
E'en pitying Spring, will vainlystrive to cheer --

King, that no subject man nor beast may own,
Discrowned, undaughtered and alone --

Yet shall the great God turn thy fate,
And bring thee back into thy monarch state [191]

And majesty immaculate.
Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn,

Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn
Visions of golden treasuries of corn --

Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart
That manfully shall take thy part,

And tend thee,
And defend thee,

With antique sinew and with modern art.
____

Sunnyside, Ga., August, 1874.
Notes: Corn

As stated elsewhere (`Introduction', p. xvii [Part I]),
`Corn' was the first of Lanier's poems to attract general attention;

for this reason as well as for its absolute merit the poem deserves
careful study.

In the first of his letters to the Hon. Logan E. Bleckley,
Chief-justice of Georgia, dated October 9, 1874, Lanier tells us

how he came to write `Corn': "I enclose MS. of a poem
in which I have endeavored to carry some very prosaic matters

up to a loftier plane. I have been struck with alarm
in seeing the numbers of deserted old homesteads and gullied hills

in the older counties of Georgia: and, though they are
dreadfully commonplace, I have thought they are surely mournful enough

to be poetic."
In the introductory note to `Jones's Private Argyment'

I have incidentally stated the theme of `Corn'. Instead of adding
a more detailed statement of my own here, I give Judge Bleckley's

analysis of the poem, which occurs in his reply to the above-mentioned letter.
After giving various minute criticism (for Lanier had requested

his unreserved judgment), Judge Bleckley continues:
"Now, for the general impression which your Ode has made upon me.

It presents four pictures; three of them landscapes and one a portrait.
You paint the woods, a corn-field, and a worn-out hill.

These are your landscapes. And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious,
unthrifty cotton-planter who always spends his crop before he has made it,

borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year to year,
wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West.

Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person,
and you give its portrait with many touches of marvel and mystery

in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant
the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it

seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it
to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence

in the distant future."
A comparison of the first draft of `Corn', as sent Judge Bleckley,

with the final form shows that Lanier made many minute changes in the poem,
especially in the earlier part. Still this earlier draft agrees substantially

with the later, and was so fine in conception and execution
as to call forth this commendation of Judge Bleckley, which,

despite the shortcomings of `Corn', may with greater justice be applied
to the poem in its present form: "As an artist you seem to be Italian

in the first two pictures, and Dutch or Flemish in the latter two.
In your Italian vein you paint with the utmostdelicacy and finish.

The drawing is scrupulously correct and the color soft and harmonious.
When you paint in Dutch or Flemish you are clear and strong,

but sometimes hard. There is less idealization and more of
the realistic element -- your SOLIDS predominate over your fluids."

As already stated, Lanier has two other poems that indirectly treat the theme
of `Corn', namely, `Thar's More in the Man' and `Jones's Private Argyment'.

Moreover, he has `The Waving of the Corn', which, though charming,
is neither so elaborate nor artistic as `Corn'.

Among poems on corn by other writers may be mentioned the following:
1. Whittier's `The Corn-song' (before 1872), a poem of

praise and thanksgiving at the end of `The Huskers',
which tells of the gathering of the corn and of the "corn-husking",

known in the South as the "corn-shucking".
2. Woolson's (Constance F.) `Corn Fields', a description of Ohio fields,

in `Harper's Monthly', 45, 444, Aug., 1872.
3. Thompson's (Maurice) `Dropping Corn' (1877), a dainty love lyric,

in `Poems' (Boston, 1892), p. 78.
4. Cromwell's (S. C.) `Corn-shucking Song', a dialect poem,

in `Harper', 69, 807, Oct., 1884.
5. Coleman's (C. W.) `Corn', in `The Atlantic Monthly', 70, 228, Aug., 1892,

which, since it consists of but four lines and is more like Lanier's poem
than are the others, may be quoted:

"Drawn up in serried ranks across the fields
That, as we gaze, seem ever to increase,

With tasseled flags and sun-emblazoned shields,
The glorious army of earth's perfect peace."

6. Hayne's (W. H.) `Amid the Corn', a charmingaccount of the denizens
of the corn-fields, in his `Sylvan Lyrics' (New York, 1893), p. 12.

7. Dumas's (W. T.) `Corn-shucking' and `The Last Ear of Corn',
both life-like pictures of plantation life, in his

`The Golden Day and Miscellaneous Poems' (Phila., 1893).
Other interesting articles are: `Mondamin, or the Origin of Indian Corn',

in `The Southern Literary Messenger' (Richmond, Va.), 29, 12-13, July, 1859;
`A Georgia Corn-shucking', by D. C. Barrow, Jr., in `The Century Magazine'

(New York), 2, 873-878, Oct., 1882; and `Old American Customs: A Corn-party',
an account of a corn-husking in New York, in `The Saturday Review' (London),

66, 237-238, Aug. 25, 1888.
4-9. See `Introduction', p. xxxii [Part III], and compare `The Symphony',

ll. 183-190.
18. Paul Hamilton Hayne, whose love of nature rivals Lanier's,

has an interesting poem entitled `Muscadines' (`Poems', Boston, 1882,
pp. 222-224).

21. Compare `The Symphony', l. 117 ff.
57. See `Introduction', p. l [Part V].

125. In her introductory note to `Corn' Mrs. Lanier thus localizes the poem:
"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.'"

140. See `Jason' in any Dictionary of Mythology.*
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* Gayley's `The Classic Myths in English Literature' (Boston, Ginn & Co.)
is an excellent book.

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