Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Willa Cather (1873-1947)
Chapter 16 -- Underground Rivers in English Fiction
We'll have more to say about the literary device in Chapter 29, but here's a metaphor from
Cather's O Pioneers, Winter Memories, II (1913).
Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an
underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and
then sank again to flow on under her own fields. Nevertheless, the underground stream was
there.
From "Coming, Aphrodite!" in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920),
The Captive took out the bar that was beneath a stone in the floor of the passage, and put in its
stead a rush-reed, and the youth stepped upon it and fell through into a cavern that was the
bed of an underground river, and whatever was thrown into it was not seen again.
And here is arguably the best penned passage pertaining to an underground river in the whole of
literature. It's worth reading twice.
Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it.
He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was
the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was
far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness
under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, hut the sound of a great flood
moving with majesty and power. -- Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
The archbishop-to-be listens to the earth giving birth.
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