Streams

DEAR water, clear water, playful in all your streams,
As you dash or loiter through life who does not love
To sit beside you, to hear you and see you,
Pure Being, perfect in music and movement?

Air is boastful at times, earth slovenly, fire rude,
But you in your bearing are always immaculate,
The most well-spoken of all the older
Servants in the household of Mrs. Nature.

Nobody suspects you of mocking him, for you still
Use the same vocables you were using the day
Before that unexpected row which
Downed every hod on half-finished Babel,

And still talk to yourself: nowhere are you disliked.
Arching your torso, you dive from a basalt sill,
Canter across white chalk, slog forward
Through red marls, the aboriginal pilgrim,

At home in all sections, but for whom we should be
Idolaters of a single rock, kept apart
By our landscapes, excluding as alien
The tales and diets of all other strata.

How could we love the absent one if you did not keep
Coming from a distance, or quite directly assist,
As when past Iseult’s tower you floated
The willow pash-notes of wanted Tristram?

And Homo Ludens, surely, is your child, who make
Fun of our feuds by opposing identical banks
And transferring the loam from Huppim
To Muppim and back each time you crankle.

Growth cannot add to your song: as unchristened brooks
Already you whisper to ants what as Brahma’s Son,
Descending his titanic staircase
Into Assam, to Himalayan bears you thunder.

And not even man can spoil you: his company
Coarsens roses and dogs, but, should he herd you through a sluice
To toil at a turbine or keep you
Leaping in gardens for his amusement, Innocent still is your outcry, water, and there,
Even, to his soiled heart racing at what it is,
Speaks of a sort of world, quite other,
Altogether different from this one

With its envies and passports, a polis like that
To which, in the name of scholars everywhere,
Gaston Paris pledged his allegiance
As Bismarck’s siege-guns came within earshot.

Lately, in that dale of all Yorkshire’s the loveliest,
Where off its fellside helter-skelter Kisdon Beck
Jumps into Swale with a Boyish shouting,
Sprawled out on grass, I dozed for a second

And found myself following a croquet tournament
In a calm enclosure with thrushes popular:
Of all the players in that cool valley
The best with the mallet was my darling,

While, on the wolds that begird led it, wild old men
Hunted with spades and hammers, monomaniac each,
For a megalith or a fossil,
And bird-watchers stalked the mossy beech-woods.

Suddenly, over the lawn, we started to run
For lo! through the trees, in a cream and golden coach
Drawn by two baby locomotives,
The god of mortal doting approached us,

Flanked by his bodyguard, those hairy armigers in green
Who laugh at thunderstorms and weep at a blue sky;
He thanked us for our cheers of homage
And promised X and Y a passion undying.

With a wave of his torch he commanded a dance:
So round in a ring we flew, my dear on my right,
When I awoke. But fortunate seemed that
Day because of my dream, and enlightened,

And dearer, water, than ever your voice as if
Glad — though goodness knows why — to run with the human race,
Wishing, I thought, the least of men their
Figures of splendor, their holy places.