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Poems, translated and original cover

Poems, translated and original

Chapter 10: TO A WATERFALL.[11]
By E. F. Ellet
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Poetry

About This Book

A compact volume of translated and original lyric poems paired with a short tragic drama. The poems range from elegiac meditations on death, memory, and the fate of poets to vivid nature pieces about lakes, seas, and changing skies; they also include mythic and historical reflections, paraphrases of sacred texts, and shorter lyrical forms such as sonnets and songs. Recurrent concerns are remembrance versus oblivion, the consolations of landscape, poetic vocation, and the ceremonial practices surrounding burial, while the concluding tragedy adapts a Venetian incident into dramatic scenes.

TO A WATERFALL.[11]

Wild is your airy sweep,
Billows that foam from yonder mountain side—
Dashing with whitened crests and thundering tide
To seek the distant deep!
Now to the verge ye climb,
Now rush to plunge with emulous haste below;
Sounding your stormy chorus as ye go—
A never ending chime!
Leaping from rock to rock,
Unwearied your eternal course ye hold;
The rainbow tints your eddying waves unfold,
The hues of sunset mock!
Why choose this pathway rude,
These cliffs by gray and ancient woods o’ergrown?
Why pour your music to the echoes lone
Of this wild solitude?
The mead in green array,
With silent beauty woos your loved embrace;
Would lead you through soft banks, with devious grace,
Along a gentler way.
There, as ye onward roam,
Fresh leaves would bend to greet your waters bright:—
Why scorn the charms that vainly court your sight,
Amid these wilds to foam?
Alas! our fate is one—
Both ruled by wayward fancy!—All in vain
I question both! My thoughts still spurn the chain—
Ye—heedless—thunder on!