|  In
this series of articles about the craft of poetry, I have had
a number of examples of how poets treat a variety of subjects;
and several of these have been concerned with water. However,
in reviewing the list, I noticed that I have not treated poetry
concerning lakes. This is a little surprising, since one of the
groups of poets that we have looked at was known as the Lakes
Poets (Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), Coleridge (1772 – 1834), and
Southey (1774 – 1843). Sir Walter
Scott (1771 – 1832), who was our subject a few weeks ago,
wrote a major poem entitled The Lady of the Lake. Furthermore,
the Arthurian legends, which informed a significant amount of
English poetry at one time or another, also use the image of a
lake, with a different lady (or at least her arm) playing the
important role of catching Excalibur on Arthur’s death.
However,
the actual number of poems that have specifically been written
about lakes as such is not as large as I would have thought. Here
is what is perhaps Wordsworth’s best known poem, which does mention
a lake, albeit peripherally:
I wander’d
lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales
and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous
as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves
beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in
glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft,
when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
 He
wrote this in 1804, but the image appears to have been earlier,
and may have been from his sister Dorothy. The lake referred to
is believed to be Rydal Water, in the Lake District; it could
have been Grasmere, which is adjacent and a larger body of water.
Hartley Coleridge (1796 – 1849), the eldest son of Wordsworth’s
collaborator, wrote a well-known parody:
He lived
amidst th' untrodden ways
To Rydal Lake that lead: --
A bard whom there were none to praise,
And very few to read.
Behind a cloud his mystic sense,
Deep-hidden, who can spy?
Bright as the night, when not a star
Is shining in the sky.
Unread
his works -- his 'Milk-white Doe'
With dust is dark and dim;
It's still in Longman's shop, and Oh!
The difference to him!
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Hartley’s father, also mentions a lake, again peripherally,
in his poem The Presence of Love:
And in
Life's noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould
my Hopes, you fashion me within;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro' all my Being, thro' my pulse's beat;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking
to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the Lot that made me love you.
 Robert
Southey, the third of the Lake Poets, wrote a ballad, Donica,
based on a Finnish legend; here is an extract:
High on
a rock, whose castled shade
Darken'd the lake below,
In ancient strength majestic stood
The towers of Arlinkow.
The fisher
in the lake below
Durst never cast his net,
Nor ever swallow in its waves
Her passing wings would wet.
The cattle
from its ominous banks
In wild alarm would run,
Tho' parched with thirst and faint beneath
The summer's scorching sun.
For sometimes
when no passing breeze
The long lank sedges waved,
All white with foam and heaving high
Its deafening billows raved;
And when
the tempest from its base
The rooted pine would shake,
The powerless storm unruffling swept
Across the calm dead lake.
John Keats
(1795 - 1821) wrote La
Belle Dame Sans Merci, and here is opening stanza:
O what
can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
 In
his long poem, The Lady of the Lake, Sir Walter Scott
describes the lake, Loch Katrine, as follows:
And now,
to issue from the glen,
No pathway meets the wanderer's ken,
Unless he climb with footing nice
A far-projecting precipice.
The broom's tough roots his ladder made,
The hazel saplings lent their aid;
And thus an airy point he won,
Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
One burnished sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled,
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek, and bay,
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light,
And mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
High on the south, huge Benvenue
Down to the lake in masses threw
Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled,
The fragments of an earlier world;
A wildering forest feathered o'er
His ruined sides and summit hoar,
While on the north, through middle air,
Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare.
 Another
group of poems describes the Great Lakes. The following is from
David HB Drake. David HB Drake is from Wisconsin, and has been
called "a gentle troubadour" and "elemental folksinger".
His music is inspired by his voyages across Midwestern prairies
and the waters of the Great Lakes (check
out his website here).
“Great
Lakes were known to deepwater salt sailors as the “Lakes of
Amerikey”. Salt water sailors looked down on the Great Lakes
sailors as “farm boys” who were sailing around in puddles and
certainly a tall ship sailor was superior to one of those “teakettles”
(steamboats). They thought that until they tried sailing the
Lakes.
The Great
Lakes are quite possibly the most dangerous waters on earth.
Storms roar off the Great Plains at hurricane force with very
little warning. It was the dangers of Great Lakes shipping that
created the National Weather Service.
Unlike
the ocean, there is always a “lee shore” only hours away. The
water of the Lakes is more likely to go “green” (turn to ice)
and build up topside until the boat “turns turtle” (turned upside
down). A phenomena like the “Three Sisters”- three waves to
the aft of a ship in rapid succession, could drive you into
the bottom, as is suspected of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Finally,
a sailor in the water was more likely to die of hypothermia
sooner or sink since salt water is more buoyant and is a more
consistent temperature. The Great Lakes are a treasure to cherish
and a beauty to behold, but a healthy respect for their power
is also wise.” (Read more about shipwrecks
on the Great Lakes here.)
Here is the
opening of a lyric of Drake's – for the whole poem visit his website!
Come all
you bold young sailor lads who sail the briny breeze
And heed my tale of the men who sail the boats of the inland
seas
You that scoff and jeer at the sailors here and think they have
such ease
When the journey's short from the inland ports In the Lakes
of A-mer-i-key
If you take your fleet where the water's sweet, there's something
you should know
No quarter's shown when the gale wind's blowing' and the sky
has filled with snow
When your decks are froze and the rail dips low there's nowhere
left to flee
Then from bow to stern make a turtle turn on the Lakes of A-mer-i-key
CHORUS:
So say a prayer for those who dare to sail on the fresh north
seas
If you drink too deep you'll forever sleep in the Lakes of A-mer-i-key
Our first
Poem of the Week is The
Winter Lakes by William Wilfred Campbell (1861 - 1918).
Campbell was a Canadian poet, born in Berlin, Canada West (now
Ontario). He is best remembered (Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia
of Literature tells me) for his first collection of poems,
Lake Lyrics and Other Poems, published in 1889, from
which this poem comes.
Another American
poet who wrote often about the Great Lakes was Carl Sandburg (1878
– 1967) who moved to Chicago in 1913. This poem, The Harbor,
was published in 1912 and is from a collection called Chicago
Poems:
Passing
through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city's edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.
 Here
are a few lines from Helen of Troy by Sara Teasdale (1884
– 1933); the poem dates from a collection published in 1911:
Men's lives
shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.
And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake
With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes
The vision of me. Always I shall be
Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light
That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold
Each one his dream that fashions me anew; --
With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars
Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow
Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.
Poets also
wrote about the Italian lakes, notably Lake Como and Lake Bellagio.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) wrote a poem entitled
Caddenabia - Lake of Como. Here is the beginning:
No sound
of wheels or hoof-beat breaks
The silence of the summer day,
As by the loveliest of all lakes
I while the idle hours away.
I pace
the leafy colonnade
Where level branches of the plane
Above me weave a roof of shade
Impervious to the sun and rain.
At times
a sudden rush of air
Flutters the lazy leaves o'erhead,
And gleams of sunshine toss and flare
Like torches down the path I tread.
By Somariva's
garden gate
I make the marble stairs my seat,
And hear the water, as I wait,
Lapping the steps beneath my feet.
George
Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) also liked the Italian lakes,
but here is a sonnet directed to Lac Léman in Switzerland
(also called Lake Geneva):
Rousseau
-- Voltaire -- our Gibbon -- De Staël --
Leman! these names are worthy of thy shore,
Thy shore of names like these! wert thou no more,
Their memory thy remembrance would recall:
To them thy banks were lovely as to all,
But they have made them lovelier, for the lore
Of mighty minds doth hallow in the core
Of human hearts the ruin of a wall
Where dwelt the wise and wondrous; but by thee
How much more, Lake of Beauty! do we feel,
In sweetly gliding o'er thy crystal sea,
The wild glow of that not ungentle zeal,
Which of the heirs of immortality
Is proud, and makes the breath of glory real!
 Not
my favorite among Byron’s short poems, actually! Speaking of which,
here is another Lord: Alfred, Lord
Tennyson (1809 – 1892), and a few stanzas from one of the
songs in his monody, Maude; this is the song that begins “Come
into the garden, Maude”. As some of you may know by now, I really
admire Tennyson’s romantic poetry:
I said
to the rose, "The brief night goes
In babble and revel and wine.
O young lordlover, what sighs are those
For one that will never be thine?
But mine, but mine," so I sware to the rose,
"For ever and ever, mine."
And the soul of the rose went into my blood,
As the music clash'd in the hall;
And long by the garden lake I stood,
For I heard your rivulet fall
From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,
Our wood, that is dearer than
all;
From the meadow your walks have left so sweet
That whenever a March-wind sighs
He sets the jewelprint of your feet
In violets blue as your eyes,
To the woody hollows in which we meet
And the valleys of Paradise.
The slender acacia would not shake
One long milk-bloom on the tree;
The white lake-blossom fell into the lake,
As the pimpernel dozed on the
lea;
But the rose was awake all night for your sake,
Knowing your promise to me;
The lilies and roses were all awake,
They sigh'd for the dawn and thee.
William Carlos
Williams (1883 – 1963) had an early poem called A Goodnight,
and here is the opening:
Go to sleep—though
of course you will not—
to tideless waves thundering slantwise against
strong embankments, rattle and swish of spray
dashed thirty feet high, caught by the lake wind,
scattered and strewn broadcast in over the steady
car rails! Sleep, sleep! Gulls' cries in a wind-gust
broken by the wind; calculating wings set above
the field of waves breaking.
 The
second Poem of this Week is by Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972). It is
one of his Cantos, which many regard as the high point of his
poetry. This is Canto
XLIX, and is often called The
Seven Lakes Canto. The sources for the poem are three
Japanese-oriented manuscripts, although some of the material appears
to be Chinese in origin.
Of course,
some of you may wonder why I have not so far mentioned The
Lake Isle of Inisfree, by William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939):
I will
arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall
have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.
I will
arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
This was
written in London in 1890 about an island on Lough Gill (actually
called Iniscrewin), and I delayed including it because it is so
well known, and there have been several parodies, including one
by Ogden Nash that I included in an earlier one of these pieces.
In 1889, Yeats had written another lake poem that is much less
well-known, Ephemera:
'Your eyes
that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.'
And
then She:
'Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'
Pensive
they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
'Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.'
The woods
were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.
'Ah,
do not mourn,' he said,
'That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.'
The last
of my Poems of this Week is by Robert Burns (1759 – 1796), On
Scaring Some Water-Fowl in Loch Turit. I have selected this
because it is different from our expectations of Burns in that
it is not in the Scottish Lallans dialect; it was written in 1787.
So there
you are. A number of poems about lakes from Japan to Italy. I
would like to have included This is a Photograph of Me
by Margaret Atwood (1939- ), and more of the Great Lakes poets.
Then there is Robert Service:
The Northern
Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
But instead,
I am going to finish with one of my own. Because it’s my column!
The photograph
shows so little:
A shilling life of only facts.
Not the
subtle change in morning light, not
The texture of the washed pebbles, cold
fingers stroking for the waxy feel of jade.
Not the smell of the wind from the wet pines,
Or the quiet private whispers of the lake
waves in the early dawn.
Not the
feel of the sand under lonely feet
along the empty shore. Not
the shifting lines of mountains, snow-capped,
blurred through tears.
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