Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
Edie, of Jean Stein's Edie: American Girl (1994), recalls the poem.
You can actually hear the wind in the pines, which is a
completely different sound than oak trees or just no trees at all.
It's a beautiful sound. I love it. And I know that there were only
two places on the ranch that you could go and really listen to it.
It was music. And what else was there? Oh, there were the
Uplands, and that's where Edie wanted to stay. That was
dangerous in a storm. So much violence. The ranch was
potential violence -- both human and natural.
Do you know Coleridge? "Kubla Kahn?"
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
The ranch was all these things and, boy oh boy, does Coleridge
know what he's taking about.
Likewise, the main character of Valerie Malmont's Death, Snow,
and Mistletoe (2000) remembers the lines.
Curious about where it went, I got out of the truck to take a look. Along the base of the building
were several arches, about three feet high, covered with wire mesh. To look through one, I
knelt on the cracked macadam parking lot and saw that beneath the building the creek spread
out into a huge tar-black lake. There was no way to tell how deep it was, but the water was so
still and dark it gave the appearance of being bottomless.
My favorite childhood poem by Coleridge came to mind and I recited,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
It was here that Bernice had dreamed of building her "stately pleasure dome."
We included snippet from the poem "Darkened" by Douglas Wilson, Untune the Sky: Occasional,
Stammering Verse (2001),
Oblique, opaque, and never ending
Poets wander, ever wending
DOWN, STILL DOWN, TO A SUNLESS SEA.
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l
412