The Water Ouzel Poem by Harriet Monroe

The Water Ouzel

by Harriet Monroe

Little brown surf-bather of the mountains!
Spirit of foam, lover of cataracts, shaking your wings in falling waters!
Have you no fear of the roar and rush when Nevada plunges —
Nevada, the shapely dancer, feeling her way with slim white fingers?
How dare you dash at Yosemite the mighty —
Tall, white limbed Yosemite, leaping down, down over the cliff?
Is it not enough to lean on the blue air of mountains?
Is it not enough to rest with your mate at timberline, in bushes that hug
  the rocks?
Must you fly through mad waters where the heaped-up granite breaks them?
Must you batter your wings in the torrent?
Must you plunge for life and death through the foam?

 

- See more at: http://allpoetry.com/The-Water-Ouzel#sthash.eQjrzTu2.dpuf

This is just brief post about this poem I found with 'ouzel poem' search last night...sometimes when I sign off in the wee hours, I'll put a word, any word, in the google search box, and add 'poem'...likely it seems that every word has had a poem written about it, or at least included in a poem!  It's a charming poem, very true to the Valley, and too Ouzel, and, as it turns out, to John Muir...Harriet Monroe in 1908 was on a trek with the Sierra Club, and Muir, and wrote about Muir...here's link to old Sierra Club Bulletin...well, wait...lol...that link is to Muir's charming Ouzel essay...brb...here's Monroe story:
http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/monroe_tribute_scb_1916.aspx

quote

I wonder sometimes if there was ever such another lover of nature as John Muir. Never at least for me! He really loved every littlest thing that grows; studied the mole, the beetle, the lily, with complete and perfect sympathy. And for his glorious commanding love nothing was too sublime - not the sequoia, the cataract, the blizzard in the mountains.

unquote

Her meeting with Muir has a backstory...as a young writer, she was determined, and a church mouse, having not much funds, but a poem she published was republished illegally, and she garnered five thousand dollars for the copyright violation, or so wiki's take has it, and with this, and another five thousand from interested donors, she started up Poetry, the famous magazine with Pegasus...Cal State Fullerton library had a shelf of these, few of them ever opened, and I would sit on the library step stool and try and make sense of them...on occasion, I still do, but Poetry, and the Sierra Club Bulletin, have little of the charm today that they had back then...the magazine started up in 1915...Muir had a manner of speaking that impressed everyone...

quote

John Muir was there, mounted on the horse which he rode now and then when no woman would accept the loan of it. He was rapt, entranced; he threw up his arm in a grand gesture. "This is the morning of creation," he cried, "the whole thing is beginning now! The mountains are singing together" - ah, I can not remember his dithyrambic pæan of praise, which flowed on as grandly as the great white waters beside us. Four days later I made of it this poem, which offers something of what he said, though his free biblical rhythms feel somewhat cramped in my rhymes, and it was I who dragged the human beings in:
It is creation's morning
Freshly the rivers run.
The cliffs, white brows adorning,
Sing to the shining sun.
The forest, plumed and crested,
Scales the steep granite wall.
The ranged peaks, glacier-breasted,
March to the festival.
The mountains dance together,
Lifting their domed heads high.
The cataract's foamy feather
Flaunts in the streaming sky.
Somewhere a babe is borning,
Somewhere a maid is won.
It is creation's morning
Now is the world begun.

unquote

A curio here is a post up I've been wanting to do about the Old Egyptians...in the book I have about The Book of the Dead, the author in an essay grapples with the Egyptian world view, and has something like this to say...they didn't have a history of the moment of creation in the far distant past, like Adam and Eve, or like the Big Bang!, rather when they performed their ceremonies and rituals, and commemorated their creation stories, it wasn't about the past, but about that very day, that very morning... that creation, all of creation, was happening, beginning right then...for sometime...oh...rained a little over the last two days...oh...and an update...re-reading, I see she is right about dragging the people in, well, right if she had left those two lines out!...