Sidney Lanier

“ Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,
⁠For a mete and a mark
⁠To the forest-dark:—
⁠So:
Affable live-oak, leaning low,—
Thus—with your favor—soft, with a reverent hand,
(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,
⁠Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea. ”

“ Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray loopping of light.
And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?
The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
To the terminal blue of the main. ”

“ Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
⁠Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
⁠And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
⁠And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
Affable live-oak, leaning low ”