Corn
Read "Corn" by Sidney Lanier, a richly descriptive poem that celebrates fields of growing corn while connecting the American landscape with agriculture, labor, economic life, nature, abundance, and the relationship between humanity and the land.
To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
The beech dreams balm, as a dreamer hums a song;
Through that vague wafture, expirations strong
Throb from young hickories breathing deep and long
With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring
And ecstasy of burgeoning.
Now, since the dew-plashed road of morn is dry,
Forth venture odors of more quality
And heavenlier giving. Like Jove's locks awry,
Long muscadines
Rich-wreathe the spacious foreheads of great pines,
And breathe ambrosial passion from their vines.
I pray with mosses, ferns and flowers shy
That hide like gentle nuns from human eye
To lift adoring perfumes to the sky.
I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green
Dying to silent hints of kisses keen
As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen.
I start at fragmentary whispers, blown
From undertalks of leafy souls unknown,
Vague purports sweet, of inarticulate tone.
Dreaming of gods, men, nuns and brides, between
Old companies of oaks that inward lean
To join their radiant amplitudes of green
I slowly move, with ranging looks that pass
Up from the matted miracles of grass
Into yon veined complex of space
Where sky and leafage interlace
So close, the heaven of blue is seen
Inwoven with a heaven of green.
I wander to the zigzag-cornered fence
Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense,
Contests with stolid vehemence
The march of culture, setting limb and thorn
As pikes against the army of the corn.
There, while I pause, my fieldward-faring eyes
Take harvests, where the stately corn-ranks rise,
Of inward dignities
And large benignities and insights wise,
Graces and modest majesties.
Thus, without theft, I reap another's field;
Thus, without tilth, I house a wondrous yield,
And heap my heart with quintuple crops concealed.
Look, out of line one tall corn-captain stands
Advanced beyond the foremost of his bands,
And waves his blades upon the very edge
And hottest thicket of the battling hedge.
Thou lustrous stalk, that ne'er mayst walk nor talk,
Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
That leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme --
Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
By double increment, above, below;
Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry
That moves in gentle curves of courtesy;
Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense,
By every godlike sense
Transmuted from the four wild elements.
Drawn to high plans,
Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
Yet ever piercest downward in the mould
And keepest hold
Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
That gave thee birth;
Yea, standest smiling in thy future grave,
Serene and brave,
With unremitting breath
Inhaling life from death,
Thine epitaph writ fair in fruitage eloquent,
Thyself thy monument.
As poets should,
Thou hast built up thy hardihood
With universal food,
Drawn in select proportion fair
From honest mould and vagabond air;
From darkness of the dreadful night,
And joyful light;
From antique ashes, whose departed flame
In thee has finer life and longer fame;
From wounds and balms,
From storms and calms,
From potsherds and dry bones
And ruin-stones.
Into thy vigorous substance thou hast wrought
Whate'er the hand of Circumstance hath brought;
Yea, into cool solacing green hast spun
White radiance hot from out the sun.
So thou dost mutually leaven
Strength of earth with grace of heaven;
So thou dost marry new and old
Into a one of higher mould;
So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold,
The dark and bright,
And many a heart-perplexing opposite,
And so,
Akin by blood to high and low,
Fitly thou playest out thy poet's part,
Richly expending thy much-bruised heart
In equal care to nourish lord in hall
Or beast in stall:
Thou took'st from all that thou mightst give to all.
O steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot
Where thou wast born, that still repinest not --
Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot! --
Deeply thy mild content rebukes the land
Whose flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand
Of trade, for ever rise and fall
With alternation whimsical,
Enduring scarce a day,
Then swept away
By swift engulfments of incalculable tides
Whereon capricious Commerce rides.
Look, thou substantial spirit of content!
Across this little vale, thy continent,
To where, beyond the mouldering mill,
Yon old deserted Georgian hill
Bares to the sun his piteous aged crest
And seamy breast,
By restless-hearted children left to lie
Untended there beneath the heedless sky,
As barbarous folk expose their old to die.
Upon that generous-rounding side,
With gullies scarified
Where keen Neglect his lash hath plied,
Dwelt one I knew of old, who played at toil,
And gave to coquette Cotton soul and soil.
Scorning the slow reward of patient grain,
He sowed his heart with hopes of swifter gain,
Then sat him down and waited for the rain.
He sailed in borrowed ships of usury --
A foolish Jason on a treacherous sea,
Seeking the Fleece and finding misery.
Lulled by smooth-rippling loans, in idle trance
He lay, content that unthrift Circumstance
Should plough for him the stony field of Chance.
Yea, gathering crops whose worth no man might tell,
He staked his life on games of Buy-and-Sell,
And turned each field into a gambler's hell.
Aye, as each year began,
My farmer to the neighboring city ran;
Passed with a mournful anxious face
Into the banker's inner place;
Parleyed, excused, pleaded for longer grace;
Railed at the drought, the worm, the rust, the grass;
Protested ne'er again 'twould come to pass;
With many an `oh' and `if' and `but alas'
Parried or swallowed searching questions rude,
And kissed the dust to soften Dives's mood.
At last, small loans by pledges great renewed,
He issues smiling from the fatal door,
And buys with lavish hand his yearly store
Till his small borrowings will yield no more.
Aye, as each year declined,
With bitter heart and ever-brooding mind
He mourned his fate unkind.
In dust, in rain, with might and main,
He nursed his cotton, cursed his grain,
Fretted for news that made him fret again,
Snatched at each telegram of Future Sale,
And thrilled with Bulls' or Bears' alternate wail --
In hope or fear alike for ever pale.
And thus from year to year, through hope and fear,
With many a curse and many a secret tear,
Striving in vain his cloud of debt to clear,
At last
He woke to find his foolish dreaming past,
And all his best-of-life the easy prey
Of squandering scamps and quacks that lined his way
With vile array,
From rascal statesman down to petty knave;
Himself, at best, for all his bragging brave,
A gamester's catspaw and a banker's slave.
Then, worn and gray, and sick with deep unrest,
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 vainly strive 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
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.
Corn Summary and Analysis
Sidney Lanier's poem moves from a shaded, enchanted walk through the woods into a larger meditation on what corn, and the cornfield, can mean. At first the countryside seems alive with motion, breath, fragrance, and near-human presence: leaves caress, branches embrace, and the whole landscape feels animated by tenderness and inward music. The eye then reaches the fence line and the cultivated field, where the speaker begins to read the corn as a moral and artistic emblem. What begins as a description of nature gradually becomes an argument about discipline, growth, abundance, and the power to transform raw material into something generous and useful.
The speaker is a reflective observer whose imagination works by analogy. He sees the corn plant as a model for the poet, the good citizen, and the steadfast householder: rooted, patient, self-renewing, and able to gather strength from all conditions. The poem then sharpens into social criticism, contrasting the cornfield's stable fertility with the wasteful speculation and debt that ruin the cotton economy and leave the land exhausted. By the end, the corn stands not only for agricultural promise but for a healthier vision of work, rootedness, and renewal, one that might restore both landscape and society.
Tone in Corn
Lanier's tone is admiring, celebratory, and at moments admonitory, as if he were praising a moral ideal through the image of a plant. The mood shifts from lush wonder in the opening woodland passage to grave reflection and civic concern in the later stanzas. Readers feel both delight in the abundance of the natural world and unease at the damaged social world the poem contrasts with it.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in Corn
- Art as growth from many sources - The poem presents the finest creation as something that gathers from darkness and light, hardship and beauty, then turns those materials into a fuller, more harmonious form.
- Rootedness and stability - Corn is valued for staying in one place, drawing strength from the earth, and enduring season after season, unlike the unstable habits of speculation and debt.
- Work versus waste - The poem contrasts patient cultivation with reckless commerce, suggesting that honest labor produces lasting wealth while gambling on quick gain destroys both land and character.
- Abundance and generosity - Corn becomes a sign of fullness that nourishes widely, and the speaker links that fertility to the ethical duty to give to all rather than hoard for oneself.
- Nature as spiritual and moral teacher - The landscape is not just beautiful; it instructs the observer in humility, balance, contentment, and the proper relation between strength and grace.
- Harmony of opposites - The poem repeatedly values reconciliation: earth and heaven, strength and softness, old and new, physical labor and ideal aspiration.
- Regional and civic renewal - The ruined hill and the cornfield stand in contrast, implying that the land and the community need a return to sustainable, life-giving practices.
Literary Devices in Corn
- Extended metaphor - Corn becomes an elaborate comparison for the poet, the moral life, and a healthier social order, allowing the poem to move from botany to ethics to national critique.
- Personification - Trees, leaves, mosses, and the hill itself are given human qualities, making the natural world feel conscious, responsive, and instructive.
- Simile - The poem uses many comparisons, such as leaves to hands and cultivated images to human actions, to turn observation into vivid moral reflection.
- Apostrophe - The direct address to corn and to the hill gives the poem urgency and ceremonial force, as if the landscape itself were being praised or admonished.
- Alliteration - Repeated consonant sounds intensify the music of the verse and help imitate the richness and density of the scenes described.
- Imagery - Sensory details of sight, sound, smell, and touch create a luxuriant physical world that supports the poem's larger abstractions.
- Contrast - The poem sets the fertile cornfield against the degraded cotton economy, making the central values of patience and steadiness stand out more sharply.
- Allusion - References to classical figures and biblical or literary echoes elevate corn from a crop into a symbol of cultural and moral significance.
- Personification of economy and landscape - Trade, commerce, and the hill are treated almost as characters, helping the poem critique social systems through landscape description.
Symbolism in Corn
- Corn - It symbolizes patient labor, rooted strength, abundance, and the poet's ideal of generous creation.
- The fence - The boundary marks the meeting point between wild nature and cultivated order, where the poem begins its moral comparison.
- The hill - The neglected hill suggests exhausted land, failed enterprise, and the consequences of short-sighted exploitation.
- Cotton - Cotton stands for speculative agriculture, debt, and an economy built on instability rather than nourishment.
- The cornfield - The field represents a better form of wealth: steady, communal, and sustaining rather than merely profitable.
- Roots and veins - These images suggest hidden sources of life, linking physical nourishment to inner character and artistic strength.
Historical Context of Corn
Sidney Lanier wrote during the post-Civil War era, when Southern writers often reflected on agriculture, regional identity, and the economic upheavals that followed the war. The poem belongs to a literary culture that valued close observation of nature but also used landscape to think about labor, modernization, and the moral health of society.
Its contrast between corn and cotton is especially meaningful in an American South marked by plantation agriculture, debt, and dependence on market forces. The poem's praise of corn as a steadier and more humane crop fits broader nineteenth-century debates about sustainable farming, local rootedness, and the costs of speculative commerce.