Two poetic techniques used frequently in this poem are alliteration—the repetition of the first sound in words, such as "flee from folly" and "laving laurel"—and internal rhyme, which places rhyming words inside of lines instead of at the end, as in "pain" and "plain" in line 8 or "sighed" and "abide" in line 18. Write a few stanzas, speaking from the point of view of some natural phenomenon, emphasizing these two techniques.

Choose a street or highway that passes near where you live and write a description of its journey from the road's perspective.

Investigate the history of modern irrigation methods that have taken over the responsibilities the Chattahoochee claims for itself in this poem.

Walt Whitman wrote around the same time as Lanier, but his poems about the American landscape were more free-flowing, less stylized. Read some of Whitman's poetry and...