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
In volume i of these Publications, at pages 52, 53 and 199, allusion is made to Mr. Job Hoisington (there spelled less correctly, Hoysington) and a full account is given of the circumstances of his death, and the discovery of his remains. The publication of these stories of the olden time serves to link the early days with the present, and to call up in the minds of those perhaps far away from the places where the events which they narrate occurred, associations which give life to the “Dead Past.” To illustrate this, and add interest to the poem here given, it is suitable to quote a paragraph from a letter to the editor, by Lyman C. Draper, LL.D., of Madison, Wisconsin, Corresponding Secretary of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. He says: “I am delighted with your volume of publications. It does great credit to your Society, and to those who have shared in its production. My maternal grandfather, Job Hoisington, is worthily mentioned; his oldest daughter, my mother, is yet spared, at the age of eighty-five.”
But the story itself of the tragic end of Mr. Hoisington did not escape the fate of many another similar one in those earlier days; since it, like for instance, that of the crime and execution of the Three Thayers (see volume i, page 122) fell into the hands of an elegiac poet. He did upon it a (rhymed) execution, – inflicted upon it a (poetic) violence, – rivalling that suffered by the person whose decease was bewailed, or – celebrated. These primitive effusions of the Muse became household words with the people of that generation, now nearly passed away; many of whom, as for instance the late Mrs. Dr. John E. Marshall, mother of Orsamus H. Marshall, Esq ., could repeat them verbatim et literatim. It is fitting that amid the ordinary utterances of historians, in prose, the “fine phrenzy” of those poetically inclined should now and then find expression in these grave pages.
The poem is here reprinted from an ancient copy, without date, in the possession of the Society. An endorsement states that this copy was “preserved by Heman B. Potter, Esq.; and by his daughter, Mrs. George R. Babcock, presented to the Buffalo Historical Society.”
The original heading of the poem is reproduced below, as nearly as the modern resources of the printer’s art allow. An ornamental head – piece, in the original, is very appropriately composed of Death’s – heads and cross – bones, according well with the subject and the remarkable reflections of the poem itself. – Ed.
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)
