Lines 1-10

The Chattahoochee River begins in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northeast Georgia, in Habersham County, and flows into Hall County (where the Buford Dam has since created Lake Lanier— named for the poet). From there, it flows southwest through Atlanta to Alabama, where it turns south, forming the Georgia-Alabama border. It ends at the southwest corner of Georgia bordering Florida, in another recently created lake, Lake Seminole, having watered the East Gulf Coastal Plain. Naturally, during its course, the river includes rapids and waterfalls, and its bed narrows and widens.

Line 3

The "I" of line 3 is the river itself. Lanier uses personification to turn the poem into an allegory of a person motivated by love ("a lover's pain") to resist temptations ("flee from folly") and do his duty, which is to water the plain. Lanier thus gives the river's flow moral significance and provides a lesson...