Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 32 -- To Cross the Styx
We could compile a lenghy list of crossing-the-river songs, but we'll mention just one more,
"Standing by the River, Waiting for the Boatman" by the Syanley Brothers. As bluegrass muisic
tends to avoid Greek references, Charon's not named, but we know the boatman.
Here I stand by this chilly water waitin' for my final call,
Standing by the river looking beyond.
Gazin' toward the land of fadeless beauty o'er the surges rise and fall,
Standing by the river looking beyond.
Standing by the river waiting for the boatman,
Listen to the music on the other shore.
I can hear the angels singing out a welcome
With my friends and loved ones (with my friends have gone before).
Music from the land of endless glory fallin upon my listening ear,
Standing by the river looking beyond.
Faces of my friends I often vision forms of loved ones oft appear,
Standing by the river looking beyond.
Shadows of night are swiftly falling lo I hear the boatman's oar,
Standing by the river looking beyond.
Many are the voices sweetly calling I must tarry hear no more,
Standing by the river looking beyond.
In modern literature, we can turn to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1964), a story of a river crossing
between life and death. A line from the Odyssey, "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes
would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades," inspired the title.
Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a
murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface
dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the
surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly
significant, as though just beneath the surface something
huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of
and into light slumber again.'
It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the
mules' knees, yellow, skummed with flotsam and with thick
soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a
driven horse. Through the undergrowth it goes with a
plaintive sound, a musing sound; in it the unwinded cane and
saplings lean as before a little gale, swaying without
reflections as though suspended on invisible wires from the
branches overhead. Above the ceaseless surface they stand
-- trees, cane, vines-rootless, severed from the earth,
spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed
desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful
water.
Unfortunately for Faulkner's characters, they lacked a subterranean ferryman.
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