Poets love rivers. Look up "river" on PoemHunter.Com and you will get twelve pages of results. 119 poems. In the anthology of London poems we read for my Poetry & Place class, somewhere around a third of the contents were inspired by the Thames. This is a tendency that has intrigued me ever since we started the course back in June -- the tendency of so many poets, ostensibly writing about a city, to select as their focus no man-made landmark, but the city's river itself.
Take, for example, Edmund Spenser's famed "Prothalamion," a 180-line nuptial song written on the event of a double wedding of English nobles. Somewhat ironically, the marriage itself isn't really even mentioned until the final three stanzas. Interestingly enough, the theme the first seven focus on, and that serves to unite the poem in its entirety, is the river Thames. Spenser introduces the "silver streaming" river, "paynted all with variable flowers," in the first few lines, and ends each stanza ends by repeating the line, "Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song." The editor's note states, "Early and late, rivers run through the poetic landscape of Spenser's verse, watering and refreshing all that country." Why is Spenser, why are so many of the poets, so enchanted with the river as a source of inspiration?
Though I have never put it in words before, I think I may know. I grew up in a river town. Not just a town near a river, but a town that is in many ways defined by the river. Its name, appropriately enough, is Milford, called thus because it contains both a water-powered mill and a ford, as in shallow place to cross the river. The river, by the way, is the Delaware, and it has taught me, through personal experience, of the magic that called to Spenser, and to many of the other poets we've been reading. For a river is many things. It is at once a mode of transportation and an obstacle hindering transportation. It is a part of nature we imagine we have conquered, with our dams and bridges, but every now and then, it floods its banks and rips up foundations by their roots, tossing entire houses about like matchboxes.
That might sound melodramatic to some, but I assure you it's no exaggeration. As I said, the Delaware has taught me many things, and one of them is to respect the sheer power of water. For every year, around mid-March, the same river that I swam in on hot summer days, skipped rocks on as I licked at ice cream cones, and drove across without a second thought on my way to New York or New Jersey turned into a raging, muddy, debris-filled icy torrent, and anyone who knew better stayed away from the banks until the current resumed a more normal flow. But some years, the combination of snow melt and heavy rains turn this torrent into a full-fledged flood. I'll never forget the sight of porches, trailers, and complete houses hurling down the river and smashing into bits on bridge pilings. Water, like God himself, gives life and takes it away.
But how it does give. There is a reason so many cities around the world are built on rivers. They offer protection, supply fish to eat and water to drink, irrigate crops, aid in transportation, facilitate trade and commerce, and are an endless source of entertainment. You could say they are the ultimate multitaskers. Yet they are also something else. Rivers are beautiful. We surround them with ugly buildings, we pollute them with our garbage, but there is in them an inherent pulchritude that we cannot spoil. The sight of a pale sun rising, sending its reflection slowly out over the water, the sound of gentle lapping as tiny waves break on the stony shore, the knowledge that no matter what trouble the world has gotten itself into, the swift-flowing current will go on, following its course to the sea... it's no wonder the poets are so enchanted.
"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." - Norman Maclean
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