Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!
Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.
So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends, —
From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee, —
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!
Notes
Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date.
The lyrical form of this poem is abab.
1. "[In his paper, My Hunt after the Captain, Dr.
Holmes has a paragraph upon an alleged
plagiarism in this poem. It will be found in the
notes at the end of this volume.]" (pp. 99-100)
"When a little poem called The Two Streams
was first printed, a writer in the New York
Evening Post virtually accused the author of it
of borrowing the thought from a baccalaureate
sermon of President Hopkins of Williamstown,
and printed a quotation from that discourse,
which, as I thought, a thief or catchpoll might
well consider as establishing a fair presumption
that it was so borrowed. I was at the same
time wholly unconscious of having met with
the discourse or the sentence which the verses
were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen
or heard either. Some time after this,
happening to meet my eloquent cousin, Wendell
Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told
me that he had once used the special
image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered at
Williamstown. On relating this to my friend
Mr. Buchanan Read, he informed me that he
too had used the image, -- perhaps referring to his
poem called The Twins. He thought Tennyson
had used it also. The parting of the streams
on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage
attributed to `M. Loisne,' printed in the
Boston Evening Transcript for Oct. 23,
1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head,
speaks of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one
portion going to the Atlantic, one to the Pacific.
I found the image running loose in my mind,
without a halter. It suggested itself as an
illustration of the will, and I worked the poem
out by the aid of Mitchell's School Atlas. The
spores of a great many ideas are floating about
in the atmosphere. We no more know where the lichens
which eat the names off from the
gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them
birth. The two match-boxes were just alike\;
but neither was a plagiarism. -- My Hunt after
`the Captain,' pp. 45, 46." (p. 340)
7. Athabasca: a river running north from the eastern
side of the Rocky mountains.
12. Oregon: an old name for the south-running Columbia
River, the source for which is north on the other side of
these mountains from the Athabaska River.
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Comments
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This is the sort of nature poem that one likes to discover. Yet Holmes wrote this poem without having visited the area of the Athabasca River, which underscores some of the difficulties and foibles about relating words and objects meaningfully.
Even so the poem captured ideas that are more novel than those of some descriptions in the modern, very explored world. Poets haven't been everywhere yet to write about everything perhaps, yet they can sojurn by a Virgin airlines for a few hundred dollars to distant parts of the world if necessary.
One day poets may write equally enthusiasticly about the oceans or volcanic rivers of extraterrestrial planets authentically.
Today the Athabasca River has a few difficulties Holmes didn't write about. The fishing has been crimped by narrow culverts that accellerate water to an impassable speed, the city of Jasper had been using the river for sewage disposal, a diversion project was built lower down to prevent the River from changing course into another River narrowly separated etc.
Edited on Feb 14, 2:09 p.m. because ''.
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