Poems of Sidney Lanier/From the Flats

by Sidney Lanier

     What heartache—ne’er a hill!
Inexorable, vapid, vague and chill
The drear sand-levels drain my spirit low.
With one poor word they tell me all they know;
Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain,
Do drawl it o’er again and o’er again.
They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name:
     Always the same, the same.

     Nature hath no surprise,
No ambuscade of beauty ’gainst mine eyes
From brake or lurking dell or deep defile;
No humors, frolic forms—this mile, that mile;
No rich reserves or happy-valley hopes
Beyond the bend of roads, the distant slopes.
Her fancy fails, her wild is all run tame:
     Ever the same, the same.

     Oh might I through these tears
But glimpse some hill my Georgia high uprears,
Where white the quartz and pink the pebble shine,
The hickory heavenward strives, the muscadine
Swings o’er the slope, the oak’s far-falling shade
Darkens the dogwood in the bottom glade,
And down the hollow from a ferny nook
     Bright leaps a living brook!