Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855)
includes the poem "As Consequent, Etc.," a
portion of which follows.
As consequent from store of summer rains,
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
Or many a herb-lined brook's reticulations,
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
Songs of continued years I sing.
Chapter 31 -- Poems for Subterranean Sailors
Whitman's hydrology is, in fact, more accurate than some of his era's scientific teaching. And
while we're discussing Whitman, though it's not poetry, we'll cite "The Spanish Element in our
Nationality" (1883), in his Complete Prose Works (1891).
As to the Spanish stock of our Southwest, it is certain to me that we do not begin to appreciate
the splendor and sterling value of its race element. Who knows but that element, like the
course of some subterranean river, dipping invisibly for a hundred or two years, is now to
emerge in broadest flow and permanent action?
We'll visit the San Marcos in Texas in Chapter 48, Diversity in Darkness, Texan Ecology, but here
we'll meet the river poetically. From the Library of Southern Literature 3, 1909,
Robert Lewis Dabney's fame in literature will rest, and justly so, on his work in prose {he was
the biographer to Stonewall Jackson}, yet in leisure hours he turned aside to poetry and
produced verses, some of which are not unworthy of preservation as witness the opening lines
of his poem, "The San Marcos River"
Mysterious river! Whence thy hidden source?
The rain-drops from far distant field and fell,
Urging through countless paths their darkling
course,
Combine their tiny gifts thy flood to swell.
What secrets hath thy subterranean stream
Beheld; as it hath bathed the deepest feet
Of everlasting hills, which never beam
Of sun or star or lightning's flash did greet?
Over what cliffs rushed thou in headlong fall
Into some gulf of Erebus so deep
Thy very foam was black as midnight's pall
And massive roof of rock and mountain steep
Suppressed thy thunders, so that the quick ears
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