Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 31 -- Poems for Subterranean Sailors
Of fauns recumbent on its lofty side
Heard not; and grass-blades laden with the tears
Of night dews, felt no quiver from thy tide?
Through days and weeks uncounted by the sun,
Thy waters in abysmal caves have lain
In slow lustration, ere they sought to run
Forth to the day, purged from earth's least stain.
Pallas-Athene of the rivers, thou!
Who leapest adult in thy glittering might
From yonder hoary mountain, Zeus's brow,
Whose cloven crags parted to give thee light.
Thou teachest us, wise virgin; as through caves,
Sad and tear-dropping, steal thy sobbing waves,
Then flash to day; so Virtue's weeping night
Shall surely break into the dawn's delight.
We will simply note that a century later, Dabney's biography of the Confederate hero remains in
print, but his poetry is absent from current anthologies.
In " and the Death of Lady Gregory," Irish University Review, March 22, 2004, Roy F. Foster
critiques W.B. Yeats' "Coole Park and Ballylee" (1931) which begins,
Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven's face
Then darkening through 'dark' Raftery's 'cellar' drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What's water but the generated soul?
and ends.
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.
According to Foster,
The lake, its underground river, his own Tower (effectively abandoned four years previously but
now reoccupied for poetic purposes), and the house at Coole are linked by the eternal image of
a soaring swan, which in turn suggests the journey of the soul (signaled by an implicit reference
to the Neo-Platonist Porphyry in the first verse). But it is also, he privately told his wife, 'a
symbol of inspiration'. All the house and its chatelaine had meant to him is concentrated into a
poem that should also be read as another installment in his mounting commentary on the
Anglo-Irish tradition and its importance for modern Irish life.
"In Praise of Limestone" (1948) by W.H. Auden is geologically specific about its underground
stream.
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
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