Poetry of and about Niagara Falls & the Niagara River – the waterfalls, the city, the history, the stunters, and everything else Niagara
My doctor
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡(so official!)
Told me
that I needed to
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡slow
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡down.
“That you speak and walk so quickly is a symptom
‡‡‡‡‡of your anxiety. It feeds it.”
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡And so
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡I started
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡to write
Source: The author, 2019
‡‡‡‡ The orient beam now peers from yonder East,
And roseate blushes tinge the verge of heaven,
While sable night withdraws her dark blue veil,
Bespangled deep with sparkling gems of light,
And fair Aurora shoots th’ empurpled ray, —
The earliest ray of radiant, dewy, morn,
Sublime the scene! Earth and her children lie
Silent as death, while, high above, the arch
Of the celestial spheres glows with the fires
That light immensity, and swift revolves,
In its diurnal circuits, around the poles,
Silent as death, is all, except yon burst
Tremendous, from the deep, embowell’d earth,
Silence, as from Etna’s boiling gulph, the roar
Of rolling thunders issues, on the wing
Outstretch’d, of the quiescent air, and stung
Th’ astonish’d ear of night. As yet the morn,
Slow lingering, skirts the sky; — but soon its beams
Reveal the floating mount, that lay, but late,
A gloomy bank upon the blue expanse,
And shew, as from some cloudclapt eminence,
The dusky volume of incumbent spray,
High heap’d in midway heaven, that hangs condensed
As threatening tempest o’er the rushing surge,
Whence it, evolving, steams, and hurries up,
In rapid flight, and tosses, whirls, and rolls,
And wheels sublime, in convoluted wreaths
And giant columns huge, immense, and spouts,
In swelling masses, from the thundering gulph,
Obscure and dark, that rages deep below,
And plunging, tumbling, tossing, foaming drives,
With furious blast, the mounting spray that shoots
Heavenward, in changeful evolution swift,
Until it mingles with the mass above,
Thus seems the cataract when now the morn
Hath chased the dense obscurity away,
That close enveloped all, while night her veil
Hung o’er the world. But soon gay morning spreads
A lucid mantle o’er the rising scene —
The fields — the woods — the flood precipitant,
Resistless rolling down the giant steep —
The stormy bosom of the wave below,
Seen partial and obscure — the heaving mounds
Of broken water, that tumultuous rush,
Rebounding forceful, from the hollow rocks,
Now here, now there, and jostling, mingling; plunge
And sink in swift succession — all above,
The shelving rocks, projecting, threatening hang
Suspended as it were — their shaggy heads
Crown’d with dense foliage that, dependent, skirts
The farthest edge — the trees that, dripping, drink
The falling spray, the river rough above
That boiling, plunging o’er its rugged bed,
In hurried fury storms, and roars and bounds,
From rock to rock, and dreadful smokes along
To gain the farthest brink, and thus to shoot,
And tumbling, strike to the continuous peal
That deep, incessant, rolls its thunder thro’
The troubled air, whilst earth, convulsive, shakes,
And owns the force, resistless, of the flood.
‡‡‡‡ Wonder of wonders, hail! fain would I strike
My lyre to thee, and from its deepest chords,
Awake the theme, sublime; but deeper, oh!
Thy thousand thunders toll. My trembling muse
Casts round on thee her wilder’d, anxious gaze —
Starts back upon herself, and shrinks before
Th’ aspiring thought of such adventurous song.
Source: Burwell, Adam Hood. The Poems of Adam Hood Burwell, Pioneer Poet of Upper Canada. ed. by Dr. Carl F. Klinck. (Western Ontario History Nuggets no. 30, May 1963). London, Ont.: Lawson Memorial Library, The University of Western Ontario, 1963
Originally published in The Scribbler (Montreal), III, 105-106, February 13, 1823
Adam Hood Burwell published poems under the pen name Erieus
emtage2
I imagine the falls are all
peppermint tea,
the clouds are whipped cream,
and the water’s deep roar
is the tea kettle’s scream.
Source: The Author, May 2019
emtage1
Come feel the thunder that can’t be un-felt
from the great green glass conveyor belt
franticly dealing with all it’s been dealt.
Niagara morning to Niagara night
the cloud creation has oversight
from a cloud of gulls in constant flight.
The deep green marble factory floor
is scattered with scraps the machinery tore
from the cumulonimbus it ships up to soar
in the blue.
Source: The Author, May 2019
June 17, 1848. Charles Ellet, Jr., the civil engineer who designed the suspension bridge soon to be built over Niagara Falls, today tested the service span to be used in its construction by driving his horse across the planking. – Brooklyn Eagle
I, Charles Ellet, Jr., licensed engineer
son of a provident Quaker farmer
now stand at the gorge where Niagara Falls
offers a prospect so sublime no rival
as yet is known on this great globe of ours.
Let men deride me as actor, rainmaker;
let it be said of me that I have loved
all carriageways and catwalks, all defiles
wide gaps and narrow verges to be bridged
am fond of women and horses equally
although the latter’s sensibility
is plainer far to read. However much
respect I hold for Nature’s rash downrush
her virginal ebullience, I itch
to take it in the compass of my fingers.
One does not “break” a horse, but wins its trust.
With towers and cables, not brute trusses;
with tact, not tug; suspension, not piled piers
I mean to overarch this wild splendor.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡* * *
Let them think me odd who see as if
asleep my silent self reflecting how
to span the rapids boiling at my feet
two hundred forty feet below the cliff
to be exact. An arrow from a bow?
A bird or a balloon? Why not a kite?
A kite could soar across the open rift!
The public loves such deeds. I’ll offer a prize,
a decent sort of prize, say five gold dollars
to the first man or boy who sends his string
to Canada.** The placard up three days
a local gap-toothed lad steps forth to win —
a widow’s son, shy skinny Homan Walsh.
He’s going to outlive me. Will he grow
up bold, race Thoroughbreds, get rich
performing acts of wild derring-do?
I don’t at this point know, nor know that
I’m to die a colonel in the Civil War
a hero slain leading a charge of rams
— warships rigged to ram opponents’ hulls —
on The Big Muddy to rout the Confederates.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡* * *
Backward looks are licensed. To look for-
ward isn’t done; is not acceptable.
But give me leave to leap beyond the date
of my flamboyance, 1848,
and introduce High-Jumping Sam: Sam Patch
clad all in white, who dives from the cliff into
the rainbowed pool at the foot of the cataract
and not content with one dive, makes it two.
Reprises at Genesee and straightway drowns.
Or Blondin in ’59 adored by thousands
who cheer his tightrope walk across the chasm.
He’ll have a score of successors, circus clowns
who mock the danger, simulate cold fear
half-fall, recover and go blithely on
some piggyback, some skipping rope, afire
with the same lust for fame and fortune
as those who dare chute down the drop in barrels.
The first a cooper proving his staves would hold
then scores of imitators taking the falls
by barrel, boat and cork, a steady parade
of madmen. And always the suicides . . .
Dramatic death! Love also knows no season.
Though bliss be brief that attends unbridled passion
romantic couples will hasten by canal
or rail to flaunt their ecstatic portion
fulfill the fleeting period of joy
that one wag titles “honey-lunacy.”
Some say the falls gently distract the lovers’
overweening focus on one another.
Some say the tumult of the cataract
conceals the newlyweds’ embarrassment
caught, as it were, in the rapturous nuptial act.
Others aver the falls’ ceaseless descent
evokes a rich manly response. Some brides
claim happy negative ions are produced
by falling water. You may take your choice
of savants, sages and hypotheses
but thus Niagara will come to boast
hotels and curio shops and carriage-rides
to vistas for photos of the just-now wived.
Skeptic I am, unmarried by design.
Still, might not the spectacle conjoin
male and female qualities into one?
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡* * *
Now let us turn back from this clairvoyant
glimpse to the day that Homan’s kite string held.
I tie it to a somewhat stouter cord
and next, a heavier one of finespun wire
and ever-mightier cables to support stout
wooden planks until from shore to shore,
just wide enough to let a phaeton pass,
a catwalk spans the gorge. The boards are spaced
to let rainwater through. Side rails? None.
I test it harshly across and back, first at
a walk, then jog, then crow-hop up and down
assured that it will hold. Once I trust it
I harness up my mare, to show she will.
A chestnut Morgan, foaled in my own barn
and trained to voice commands the way a skilled
driving horse need be, to keep from harm.
Vixen by name but not by temperament,
spirited, willing and confident.
Do not mistake submission, the highest
accolade man can bestow on a horse,
with truckling subservience. The mare must trust
the steady justice of the driver’s hand.
Fingers that speak, not snatch; a voice
that soothes and urges but withholds choice.
Vixen and I prepare to take our stand.
I stand up in the cart as in a chariot
the better she may sense we are allied
and ask her to move off at a rapid trot.
She never casts a glance to either side.
The crowd is aghast. Several women swoon.
The catwalk sways most fearfully but holds
beneath the mare and horseman in the sky
and that is how we cross, Vixen, my bold
partner, and I, Charles Ellet, Jr.,
bridge builder, licensed engineer.
**The kites were actually flown from Canada to the United States using the prevailing westerly winds. Both the poem and the painting have the kites flying from the United States to Canada.