Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 31 -- Poems for Subterranean Sailors
According to Margaret Rees' World Socialist internet posting,
The second half of the poem assumes a languid conversational tone, mildly self-mocking and
tentatively disparaging the landscape. An invocation to the natural order is decried, the
concept of purity ebbs away in a neat didactic couplet. What is left is sediment.
Although we may lack the erudition to agree or disagree with Ms. Rees, we must be impressed
with the fact that water in limestone caverns is known to poets.
Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans' "Subterranean Streams" (1854) is a poem of the type
suitable for a parlor game in which a stanza is read, all but the last word, which the players rush
to guess. Give it a try.
Darkly thou glidest onward,
Thou deep and hidden wave!
The laughing sunshine hath not looked
Into thy secret .
Thy current makes no music
A hollow sound we hear,
A muffled voice of mystery,
And know that thou art .
Yet once will day behold thee,
When to the mighty sea,
Fresh bursting from their caverned veins,
Leap thy lone waters .
The answers: cave, near, free, host, guest, day
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There wilt thou greet the sunshine
For a moment, and be lost,
With all thy melancholy sounds,
In the ocean's billowy .
Wild is their course and lonely,
And fruitless in man's breast;
They come and go, and leave no trace
Of their mysterious .
Yet surely must their wanderings
At length be like thy way;
Their shadows, all thy waters, lost
In one bright flood of !
Not all underground river poetry lends itself to parlor entertainments, however. Take, for example
Moikom Zeqo's "The Miracle of Death," translated from the original Albanian by Wayne Miller.
The miracle of death is precise like the law.
Our bodies will decompose in their natural elements.
Perhaps we'll meet as underground streams,
As humus and salt at the roots of a plant
That will flourish and open its petals,
Astounding everything with its anonymous .
The answer (difficut for those not fluent in Albanian): "beauty"
James Dickey's poems are infused with anxiety and guilt upwelled by the memory of his brother
who died before Dickey was born. In "The Underground Stream" (1960) Dickey peers into a well,
seeking how his spirit could fall through the pool to find reconciliation with his sibling.
I lay at the edge of a well,
And thought how to bury my smile
Under the thorn, where the leaf,
At the sill of oblivion safe,
Put forth its instant green
In a flow from underground.
I sought how the spirit could fall
Down this moss-feathered well.
The motion by which my face,
Could descend through structureless grass,
Dreaming of love, and pass
Through solid earth, to rest
On the unseen water's breast,
Timelessly smiling, and free
Of the world, of light, and of me.
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