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Rivers

by Sir John Collings Squire

Rivers I have seen which were beautiful,

Slow rivers winding in the flat fens,

With bands of reeds like thronged green swords

Guarding the mirrored sky;

And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hills

To valleys of meadows and watercress-beds,

And bridges whereunder, dark weed-coloured shadows,

Trout flit or lie.

I know those rivers that peacefully glide

Past old towers and shaven gardens,

Where mottled walls rise from the water

And mills all streaked with flour;

And rivers with wharves and rusty shipping,

That flow with a stately tidal motion

Towards their destined estuaries

Full of the pride of power;

Noble great rivers, Thames and Severn,

Tweed with his gateway of many grey arches,

Clyde, dying at sunset westward

In a sea as red as blood;

Rhine and his hills in close procession,

Placid Elbe, Seine slaty and swirling,

And Isar, son of the Alpine snows,

A furious turquoise flood.

All these I have known, and with slow eyes

I have walked on their shores and watched them,

And softened to their beauty and loved them

Wherever my feet have been;

And a hundred others also

Whose names long since grew into me,

That, dreaming in light or darkness,

I have seen, though I have not seen.

Those rivers of thought: cold Ebro,

And blue racing Guadiana,

Passing white houses, high-balconied,

That ache in a sun-baked land,

Congo, and Nile and Colorado,

Niger, Indus, Zambesi,

And the Yellow River, and the Oxus,

And the river that dies in sand.

What splendours are theirs, what continents,

What tribes of men, what basking plains,

Forests and lion-hided deserts,

Marshes, ravines and falls:

All hues and shapes and tempers

Wandering they take as they wander

From those far springs that endlessly

The far sea calls.

O in reverie I know the Volga

That turns his back upon Europe,

And the two great cities on his banks,

Novgorod and Astrakhan;

Where the world is a few soft colours,

And under the dove-like evening

The boatmen chant ancient songs,

The tenderest known to man.

And the holy river Ganges,

His fretted cities veiled in moonlight,

Arches and buttresses silver-shadowy

In the high moon,

And palms grouped in the moonlight

And fanes girdled with cypresses,

Their domes of marble softly shining

To the high silver moon.

And that aged Brahmapootra

Who beyond the white Himalayas

Passes many a lamassery

On rocks forlorn and frore,

A block of gaunt grey stone walls

With rows of little barred windows,

Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silk

Are hidden for evermore....

But O that great river, the Amazon,

I have sailed up its gulf with eyelids closed,

And the yellow waters tumbled round,

And all was rimmed with sky,

Till the banks drew in, and the trees' heads,

And the lines of green grew higher

And I breathed deep, and there above me

The forest wall stood high.

Those forest walls of the Amazon

Are level under the blazing blue

And yield no sound save the whistles and shrieks

Of the swarming bright macaws;

And under their lowest drooping boughs

Mud-banks torpidly bubble,

And the water drifts, and logs in the water

Drift and twist and pause.

And everywhere, tacitly joining,

Float noiseless tributaries,

Tall avenues paved with water:

And as I silent fly

The vegetation like a painted scene,

Spars and spikes and monstrous fans

And ferns from hairy sheaths up-springing,

Evenly passes by.

And stealthier stagnant channels

Under low niches of drooping leaves

Coil into deep recesses:

And there have I entered, there

To heavy, hot, dense, dim places

Where creepers climb and sweat and climb,

And the drip and splash of oozing water

Loads the stifling air.

Rotting scrofulous steaming trunks,

Great horned emerald beetles crawling,

Ants and huge slow butterflies

That had strayed and lost the sun;

Ah, sick I have swooned as the air thickened

To a pallid brown ecliptic glow,

And on the forest, fallen with languor,

Thunder has begun.

Thunder in the dun dusk, thunder

Rolling and battering and cracking,

The caverns shudder with a terrible glare

Again and again and again,

Till the land bows in the darkness,

Utterly lost and defenceless,

Smitten and blinded and overwhelmed

By the crashing rods of rain.

And then in the forests of the Amazon,

When the rain has ended, and silence come,

What dark luxuriance unfolds

From behind the night's drawn bars:

The wreathing odours of a thousand trees

And the flowers' faint gleaming presences,

And over the clearings and the still waters

Soft indigo and hanging stars.

* * * * *

O many and many are rivers,

And beautiful are all rivers,

And lovely is water everywhere

That leaps or glides or stays;

Yet by starlight, moonlight, or sunlight,

Long, long though they look, these wandering eyes,

Even on the fairest waters of dream,

Never untroubled gaze.

For whatever stream I stand by,

And whatever river I dream of,

There is something still in the back of my mind

From very far away;

There is something I saw and see not,

A country full of rivers

That stirs in my heart and speaks to me

More sure, more dear than they.

And always I ask and wonder

(Though often I do not know it):

Why does this water not smell like water?

Where is the moss that grew

Wet and dry on the slabs of granite

And the round stones in clear brown water?

And a pale film rises before them

Of the rivers that first I knew.

Though famous are the rivers of the great world,

Though my heart from those alien waters drinks

Delight however pure from their loveliness,

And awe however deep,

Would I wish for a moment the miracle

That those waters should come to Chagford,

Or gather and swell in Tavy Cleave

Where the stones cling to the steep?

No, even were they Ganges and Amazon

In all their great might and majesty,

League upon league of wonders,

I would lose them all, and more,

For a light chiming of small bells,

A twisting flash in the granite,

The tiny thread of a pixie waterfall

That lives by Vixen Tor.

Those rivers in that lost country,

They were brown as a clear brown bead is,

Or red with the earth that rain washed down,

Or white with china-clay;

And some tossed foaming over boulders,

And some curved mild and tranquil,

In wooded vales securely set

Under the fond warm day.

Okement and Erme and Avon,

Exe and his ruffled shallows,

I could cry as I think of those rivers

That knew my morning dreams;

The weir by Tavistock at evening

When the circling woods were purple,

And the Lowman in spring with the lent-lilies,

And the little moorland streams.

For many a hillside streamlet

There falls with a broken tinkle,

Falling and dying, falling and dying.

In little cascades and pools,

Where the world is furze and heather

And flashing plovers and fixed larks,

And an empty sky, whitish blue,

That small world rules.

There, there, where the high waste bog-lands

And the drooping slopes and the spreading valleys,

The orchards and the cattle-sprinkled pastures

Those travelling musics fill,

There is my lost Abana,

And there is my nameless Pharphar

That mixed with my heart when I was a boy,

And time stood still.

And I say I will go there and die there:

But I do not go there, and sometimes

I think that the train could not carry me there,

And it's possible, maybe,

That it's farther than Asia or Africa,

Or any voyager's harbour,

Farther, farther, beyond recall....

O even in memory!