The View From the Base of the Horseshoe Falls, c1920 by Ernest Fox Image Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
The tumblers of the rapids go white, go green,
go changing over the gray, the brown, the rocks,
The fight of the water, the stones,
the fight makes a foam laughter
before the last look over the long slide
down the spread of a sheen in the straight fall. ‡‡‡‡Then the growl, the chutter, ‡‡‡‡down under the boom and the muffle, ‡‡‡‡the hoo hoi deep, ‡‡‡‡the hoo hoi down. ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡this is Niagara.
Source: Carl Sandburg. The People, Yes. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1936. Section 70
The Horseshoe Fall, Niagara, From the Canadian Ferry Landing, 1840. by Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling. Colour tint by Erna Jahnke Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
Unshipeveryoar,forourlaborisdone, Ourfreedomisgained,andourmanhoodiswon! Thetoilsweendured,andthedangers,arepast! Wearefree! we are FREE,weareFREEthenatlast!
Source: Anti-Slavery Songs: A Selection From the Best Anti-Slavery Authors. Salem, Ohio: I. Trescott & Co., 1849
To-day I stand a pilgrim on thy verge,
Old Niagara! and my willing ear
Drinks in the deep bass of thy wondrous voice—
“The voice of many waters”! On they come,
From Erie’s greener depths, and bright St. Clair,
And Huron fathomless, and far off Michigan;
And chaste Superior hoardeth not his wealth,
But sends his affluence to thy giant tide.
On, on they come, commingling as they run,
And, leaping in their joyance, in one mighty flood,
Pour their libation from thy trembling verge.
Earth’s joyous angel, Beauty, hovers round,
And plumes her wing amid thy snowy cloud;
And when yon glorious orb is slanting o’er
Thy battlements his beams, her mystic hand
Shapes from the elements a child of light;
Thy cloud of incense its baptismal font,
And cradle of her offspring newly born.
Now as I gaze, Time’s solemn centuries,
Hoar spirits of the past, call from their hollow tomb,
Nor tell us when thou wert not. When Horeb’s rock,
Touched by the feeble wand of Israel’s leader, gave
Its fountains for her lips, e’en then thy thunder tones,
Vibrating along these cliffs, shook earth and air.
When bearded time was in his infancy,
He played amid thy foam. When Memnons marble gave
It’s first weird music to the morning beam,
A kindred shaft fell on thy pillared mist,
And Iris lingered round these rocks, and smiled.
Sublimity is thee; thou art sublimity;
And the great seal of Deity is fixed
forever on thy brow! ’Tis no idolatry
To stand a mute-lipped worshipper at thy shrine,—
To feel our weakness, while our spirit kneels
Thus in the presence-chamber of the great I AM!
And listens to the anthem thou art ringing,
Ever from off thine altar to His praise.
A note to Frederick Douglass from Robinson, published before the poem:
Friend Douglass, —Being recently a November visitant at the great wonder of our western hemisphere, l ventured to pencil some thoughts upon a theme, which, although the frequent subject of the painter and the poet, will forever remain exhaustless.
As I stood upon the shelving ledge, and saw the mighty volume, sheeted with foam, making its majestic plunge into the fearful abyss, I thought it not an inapt emblem of the vast flood of light which Truth is now pouring upon the world; some rays of which, I trust, your Star is about to disseminate.
Respectfully yours,
J. E. Robinson
Rochester, November, 1847.
This poem appeared in the first issue of The North Star, Frederick Douglass’ anti-slavery newspaper, published in Rochester, NY. Read more about The North Star
Robinson also wrote the song We’re for Freedom Through the Land, published in Anti-Slavery Songs: A Selection From the Best Anti-Slavery Authors. Salem, Ohio: J. Truscott & Co., 1849
Many thanks to Arden Phair and Dennis Gannon for tracking down this poem and referring it to the NFPP
The knife of the sun at Niagara,
And the swallows,
Are beautiful;
But the voice and movement of the waters
Are gigantic—
A thousand naked men
Mad with the wine of beauty.
Source: Poetry, vol. 23, no. 2 (Nov. 1923)
N.B. This is not Benjamin Rosenbaum the science fiction writer (who was born in 1969)
Emily Helena Crummer Lodge, 1828-1864. Image courtesy of Michelle Ann Kratts
Her grave with spreading briar is grown,
And most the name o’er wends,
Upon the shattered fallen stone,
That tells of home and friends;
Are British hearts, so hard and cold,
And dead to Love’s bequest,
That Valor’s child forgotten sleeps,
In Stangers’ Rest?
O roll, Niagara’s mighty wave,
Sing to her in her dreams,
With tears of spray bedew her grave,
And sunlight flood with beams,
O birds at morn sing sweetly there,
Beside your happy rest,
And stars of night look kindly down,
In Strangers’ Rest.
Source: Kratts, Michelle Ann. The Missed: Tales of Spirit & Tragic End at Niagara Falls. 2013. Originally published in the Niagara Falls Gazette, August 1891.
The inscription states that Lodge “died many years ago at the Cataract House” hotel. Records indicate that she died in October 1864. For information about Lodge see chapter 2 of the Death Sketches section of The Missed by Michelle Ann Kratts
