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The Cataract of Lodore
by Robert Southey
. . . Rising and leaping, Sinking and creeping, Swelling and sweeping, Showering and springing, Flying and flinging, Writhing and ringing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting, Around and around With endless rebound: Smiting and fighting, A sight to delight in; Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. Collecting, projecting, Receding and speeding, And shocking and rocking, And darting and parting, And threading and spreading, And whizzing and hissing, And dripping and skipping, And hitting and splitting, And shining and twining, And rattling and battling, And shaking and quaking, And pouring and roaring, And waving and raving, And tossing and crossing, And flowing and going, And running and stunning, And foaming and roaming, And dinning and spinning, And dropping and hopping, And working and jerking, And guggling and struggling, And heaving and cleaving, And moaning and groaning; And glittering and frittering, And gathering and feathering, And whitening and brightening, And quivering and shivering, And hurrying and skurrying, And thundering and floundering; Dividing and gliding and sliding, And falling and brawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving, And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling, And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering; Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting, Delaying and straying and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling, And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming, And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing, And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, And curling and whirling and purling and twirling, And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing; And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending All at once and all o’er, with a mighty uproar, — And this way the water comes down at Lodore.
The birthday of Robert Southey (1774–1843) came this week, August 12. Our only mention of him thus far, here on Poems Ancient and Modern, was in this summer’s discussion of Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William,” a parody of Southey’s sententious 1799 poem, “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them.”
That may have left some of our readers with a view of the man as a moralistic hack, which, in truth, he often was. But the thing is, Southey was also a hack biographer and writer of popular history — pouring out innumerable pedestrian volumes of prose, with one shining exception, his 1813 Life of Nelson. And he was an indifferent, workaday hack of a poet, except that his pirate-comes-to-grief poem, “The Inchcape Rock,” won’t quite leave the mind once encountered:
. . . even in his dying fear
One dreadful sound could the Rover hear,
A sound as if with the Inchcape Bell,
The Devil below was ringing his knell.
The sour comedy of his “The Battle of Blenheim” has kept the poem from falling into complete unmemory for two hundred years:
“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why that I cannot tell,” said he,
“But ’twas a famous victory.”
“The Complaints of the Poor” is sharp. “My Days among the Dead are Past,” a poem about reading, speaks to those with shelves of books. Besides, Southey was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s brother-in-law (their wives were sisters), which kept him in touch with the center of Romanticism. For that matter — after his turn away from the Romantic cheer for the French Revolution and toward a Burkean conservatism — he was made poet laureate in 1813. It was a little out of want of anyone else acceptable, but he marked a distinct improvement on his predecessors Henry James Pye and Thomas Wharton, and a transition to the great Victorian poet laureates of Wordsworth and Tennyson. Southey needs some recognition as the solid B-rank poet he could be.
It was while he was poet laureate that Southey wrote Today’s Poem, an excerpt from “The Cataract of Lodore,” one of our lighter poems for Wednesdays. The Lodore Cataract is a 100-foot waterfall in the north of England, and Southey claims that a child asked him, in his role as the nation’s official poet, to describe the cataract in verse. Southey gave it to the kid, good and hard. A very fun poem to read aloud.
It’s fast-moving dimeter — or mostly dimeter, two beats per line, but notice how Southey is willing to let the rush of the poem break into occasional trimeter, a section of tetrameter, and even a few extra-metrical lines with six beats. He doesn’t seem to care, as long as the rhyme and the sound imitate the cascade of water down the rocks.
The poem is a lot of fun to read aloud.
I wonder if the longer lines at the bottom reflect an intent to shape the poem to imitate the widening of the water as its descends the cataract. A print from 1832 suggests that the waters spread out as they fall, though that may be an effect of perspective: https://www.antiquemapsandprints.com/categories/prints-and-maps-by-subject/landscapes-seascapes/product/cumbria-lodore-cataract-waterfall-cumberland-allom-1832-old-print/P-6-043983~P-6-043983
Ah that was fun! An excellent performance of the piece as well.