The Marshes of Glynn
Near St. Simons Island, Georgia
As you cross the causeway toward Saint Simons, you pass through a vast green sea of salt marsh, the Marshes of Glynn. These tidal flats have their own poet. His name was Sidney Lanier, born in Macon, Georgia, in eighteen forty two.
He served as a soldier for the Confederacy, was captured while piloting a blockade running ship, and caught the tuberculosis in a prison camp that would kill him at just thirty nine years old. Before he died, Lanier, who knew these marshes well, wrote what many consider his masterpiece, a long, rolling poem called The Marshes of Glynn. Much of it is believed to have been composed in Baltimore in eighteen seventy eight, drawing on his memory of these marshes.
In it he turns the wide marsh into an image of God's vastness and grace, the marsh grass and the tide standing in for something endless and forgiving. In Brunswick, a great live oak that Lanier is said to have frequented still stands, known today as the Lanier Oak. When you look out over this shimmering expanse of grass and water, you are seeing exactly what moved a dying poet to write.
