# Maryland, my Maryland, and other poems/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
These poems have been collected and are published at the request of the many friends of James Ryder Randall, who died on the 15th day of January, 1908, in Augusta, Ga.
Mr. Randall was born in Maryland, and, although circumstances compelled him to live for many years far away from his native State, he never lost his intense love for the place of his birth, and it was the hope of his life, in later years, to close his career in dear old Maryland.
When he was last in Baltimore, he was persuaded to surrender to friends the stray poems, which he had written, at various times, that they might be published in book form.
His great poem, which Oliver Wendell Holmes declared to be the greatest war song of any nation, ​“Maryland, My Maryland,” constitutes the main feature of this publication. The circumstances under which it was penned are thus described by himself:
“In April, 1861, I read in the New Orleans Delta news of the attack on the Massachusetts troops as they passed through Baltimore.
“This account greatly excited me. I had long been absent from my native city, and the startling event there influenced my mind. That night I could not dismiss from my mind what I had read in the paper. About midnight I arose, lit a candle and went to my desk. Some powerful influence seemed to possess me, and almost involuntarily I proceeded to write the song of ‘My Maryland.’
“I remember that this idea seemed to take shape as music in my brain—some wild air that I can not now recall. The whole poem was dashed off rapidly when once begun. It was not composed in cold blood, but under what may be considered a conflagration of the senses, if not an inspiration of the intellect. No one was more surprised that I was as the widespread and instantaneous popularity I had been so strangely stimulated to write.”
Published in the last days of April, 1861, his war song fired the Southern heart.
It displays the warmth of youth with the valor of the soldier, and pleads with his mother State to vindicate her peerless chivalry. After the war, his deep religious devotion turned his heart in kindness to those, who had been on the other side in the fratricidal strife, and he wrote the beautiful poem “At Arlington.” A devoted friend of Colonel Randall thus described the circumstances under which that poem was written. In the hearts of some of his triumphant foes the gall of bitterness still lingered, and “on one Decoration Day,” so the story goes, “the graves of Federal soldiers at Arlington Cemetery were heaped with flowers, and some pious women strewed a few garlands on the nearby graves of some Confederate dead. Whereupon, some Northern men, ​who saw the loving act, trampled under foot the garlands placed on the “Rebel Sod.””
But when the sun rose next morning the flowers were decking the Confederate graves, and this was how it happened:
Jehovah judged, abashing man: For in the vigils of the night, His mighty storm-avengers ran Together in one choral clan, Rebuking wrong, rewarding right; Plucking the wreaths from those who won, The tempest, heaped them dewy bright On Rebel graves at Arlington.
Other poems of rare beauty adorn this little book; but the grandest of all in spirituality of thought, in sublime religious faith, and in beseeching supplication is that of “Resurgam:”
Banished from thee! where shall I find For my poor soul A safe retreat from storms that blind Or seas that roll? Come to me, Christ, ere I forlorn, Sing ’neath the wave, And on this blessed Easter morn A lost one, save!
Baltimore, February 7, 1908.