You could, if you were so inclined, devote an entire study to rivers — The River — as a theme in art and literature. Water generally packs a symbolic wallop, as a force of obliteration and renewal, but the river, as a figure, brings its own set of associations to the imaginative table. Rivers form boundaries. You cross from one side and arrive, on the other, in an entirely different place: the Promised Land, say, if the river you cross is the Jordan. If you cross the Styx, you’re in Hell. The underworld of Greek mythology, in fact, is watered by four other rivers, denoting sorrow, forgetfulness, lamentation, and fire. In Dante’s “Inferno,” this last river, Phlegethon, becomes a river of boiling blood. Entering a literary river, you risk either amnesia or being poached for all eternity.

But sometimes, even in art, a river is simply a river. Shorn of all its symbolic accretions, it remains a thing of mystery and music. Beginning in secret, it presses its way through changing landscapes, to reach ultimately for the sea. The nineteenth-century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana composed his symphonic poem “The Moldau” on this theme, evoking the changing voices of the river as it emerges and grows. The contemporary English poet Alice Oswald achieved something similar in her long poem “Dart,” which chronicles the life of the tidal Devonshire river in the voices of the people living along it and the voice of the river itself.

Today’s Poem of the Day, by the nineteenth-century Georgia poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), takes the Chattahoochee River, which flows through Georgia and Alabama, as its speaker — or, more accurately, its singer. Unlike Oswald’s Dart, which speaks the gurgle of a true river language, Lanier’s Chattahoochee speaks what we might think of as High Poetic English. But what Lanier achieves in this poem is more like what Smetana achieves in “The Moldau,” than anything else: a symphonic poem, a piece of music in language. What the words actually say is less important than the sounds they generate: the insistent refrains at the beginning and end of each stanza, the compelling tetrameter and trimeter rhythms, the end rhymes in their ababba patterns, the satisfying echo of internal rhymes. At the same time, this river does move forward, its progress reflecting a larger sense of progress, from its source in the untouched forest to its conclusion among burned fields and toiling mills.

The Song of the Chattahoochee 
by Sidney Lanier 
 
Out of the hills of Habersham, 
Down the valleys of Hall, 
I hurry amain to reach the plain, 
Run the rapid and leap the fall, 
Split at the rock and together again, 
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, 
And flee from folly on every side 
With a lover’s pain to attain the plain 
Far from the hills of Habersham, 
Far from the valleys of Hall. 
 
All down the hills of Habersham, 
All through the valleys of Hall, 
The rushes cried ‘Abide, abide,’ 
The willful waterweeds held me thrall, 
The laving laurel turned my tide, 
The ferns and the fondling grass said ‘Stay,’ 
The dewberry dipped for to work delay, 
And the little reeds sighed ‘Abide, abide, 
Here in the hills of Habersham, 
Here in the valleys of Hall.’ 
 
High o’er the hills of Habersham, 
Veiling the valleys of Hall, 
The hickory told me manifold 
Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall 
Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, 
The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, 
Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign, 
Said, ‘Pass not, so cold, these manifold 
Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, 
These glades in the valleys of Hall.’ 
 
And oft in the hills of Habersham, 
And oft in the valleys of Hall, 
The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone 
Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl, 
And many a luminous jewel lone 
— Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist, 
Ruby, garnet and amethyst —
Made lures with the lights of streaming stone 
In the clefts of the hills of Habersham, 
In the beds of the valleys of Hall. 
 
But oh, not the hills of Habersham, 
And oh, not the valleys of Hall 
Avail: I am fain for to water the plain. 
Downward the voices of Duty call —
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, 
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, 
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, 
And the lordly main from beyond the plain 
Calls o’er the hills of Habersham, 
Calls through the valleys of Hall. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.