Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 31 -- Poems for Subterranean Sailors
There's a subterranean river in Longfellow's The Courtship of Miles
Standish (1858).
Hence is the inner life of so many suffering women
Sunless and silent and deep, like subterranean rivers
Running through caverns of darkness, unheard, unseen, and
unfruitful,
Chafing their channels of stone, with endless and profitless
murmurs.
D. Parish Barhydt's "Ahyunta" (1851) is notable for its footnote.
Florida, rich are thy beauties and varied thy charms,
Where sweetest emotions are strung with alarms.
Seeming lakeletts of steel there empolish the plain,
Beware the dark sink! it is fathomed in vain;*
There earth wears a smile, but is hollow below,
And swift sunless rivers through wide caverns flow.
* The author became acquainted in Florida with the sudden recession of a large lake from its
banks to great an extent (nearly draining it entirely), that it could only be accounted for on the
hypothesis that a sudden caving of its bottom had opened a passage into the cavernous depths
below. He was also familiar with a legend of an Indian entering by chance a cave in the bank
of one river, and after dark and tortuous wanderings therein, emerging upon the bank of
another many miles distant.
We'll become better acquainted with the "cavernous depths below" Florida in Chapter 40,
Sinkholes.
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