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."*
--
* Quoted in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 61.
--
The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", February, 1875, and at once
attracted the attention of some discriminating readers of magazines,
notably Mr. Gibson Peacock, the editor of the Philadelphia "Evening Bulletin",
who reviewed it in a most sympathetic manner, and became
one of the poet's best friends during the remainder of his life.
It is noteworthy that the scenery of the poem should be
so distinctively and realistically Southern. There is in the first part
all of Lanier's love of the Southern forest: the shimmering forms
in the woods, the leaves, the subtlety of mighty tenderness
in the embracing boughs, the long muscadines, the mosses, ferns, and flowers,
are all delicately felt and described -- with a suggestion of Keats.
As he wanders from this forest to the zigzag-cornered fence,
his fieldward-faring eyes take in the beauty of the cornfield,
"the heaven of blue inwoven with a heaven of green." One tall corn captain
becomes to his mind the symbol of the poet-soul sublime, who takes from all
that he may give to all. The picture of the thriftless and negligent
Southern farmer, "a gamester's cat'spaw and a banker's slave,"
shows Lanier's keen insight into Southern conditions, which he had,
while living in Macon, studied with much care and which he now lifted
into the realm of poetry.
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