Great River!
A prize-poem attempts to get the Thames
The Thames by Richard Hippisley Domenichetti
How great, how vast, the fine river is! So Richard Hippisley Domenichetti, student, poet, avers. The Thames — life blood of England’s very heart. Tied by floating, immaterial cables to all the seas and oceans of the world. And made of one, of one whole, with all other rivers. The canals of Venice, the blue Danube, the great and blood-filled Tiber. All are together. The Thames among them, its waters almost Babylonian.
And think, too, of all those waterways whose spirits and molecules animate that great network whose waters sustain London. How great the river is, drank from by Spenser, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Pope, the very river we see before us. A river panelled on all sides by a million streets, a dozen millions of men and women.
A river that, while not, some may say, beautiful, has inspired the beauty to be made by others. The light that gave fire to Turner’s works. The scene of many a nautical pageant and spectacle. The place where, lest we forget, the men and ladies were rowed up to the Traitors’ Gate, to face the desolate place of execution. All this is known.
Such a history! So immense the story of this place. From a source far gone inland, hidden in grassy oblivion, to the greatest city ever seen in the world. So Domenichetti says. Is it not grand?
This poem has much to be said for it. It’s geographic but not dull. Impressionistic. Its form is not a prison; it moves around. Some immense, pages-long stanzas are followed by three shortish remarks on a single side. Long monologues, for instance describing a somewhat fanciful scene of the death of Turner, are followed by brief asides.
In the notes we learn that some travellers in the eighteenth, or sixteenth, or even earlier centuries got great pleasure from watching the Thames. They saw in it almost the canals of Venice, or so Domenichetti quotes them as having said.
This poem is a would-be grand one. It can be moody, on occasion; a little morbid, too. As so many poems written by nineteenth century divines were apt to be. Much talk of water flowing ever onward, almost approaching a Tennysonian idea of the great, permanent sea into which all are washed in good due time — when they, of course, cross the bar. (Though Domenichetti never quite says this.)
The poem also gives a sense of light and colour even though, it’s just possible, the grey, misty banks of a dull brown river might not naturally offer one. Domenichetti does his very best to add all the great glamour of vanished ages. It was here, need we hear once again, that Thomas More was said to have boarded the boat to take him to the Tower — stepping from the river-edge of his Chelsea home into the great torrent of the Thames with an easy heart, and into fate.
It is here — snapping to Domenichetti’s present day — that Cleopatra’s Needle now adorns. It’s not among the desert sands of Egypt, forged by their nameless gods, Domenichetti writes, but upon Embankment made by enterprising man.
Outside is a modern, vivid world, in this poem. London still lives; is still the centre of the world. Has been since Roman foundation almost two thousand years before. This is not a backwater, not a decaying Ravenna, not a fifteenth century Rome where the palaces and amphitheatres were looted for building materials. For Domenichetti, London is still the place, still the heart, still very much it.
A watery thoroughfare alight with the movement and the colours of passing boats. Just as it had been for centuries before.
So many millions, Domenichetti writes, have been born, have lived and hurried past, and have died, in lands watered by the river. What a metaphor a poet — not necessarily Domenichetti, as it happens — could make of this!
Great river, another poet may have said, accept my offering. Though this may have been, had he considers it, a little atavistic, a little pagan, not quite to Mr Domenichetti’s taste.
Instead, the river is just a natural feature. A feature of the world given a little personification, if only periodically.
It might be dull, this naturalism. But this is a river that nourished flowers, that made men and women and past ages. A river of dreams, often dreamt about, often seen in metaphor and oracle.
A place of opal fires, shrouded by silver mist. Covered, its whole length long, with spires made up of poplar trees, covered over by arboreal boughs made into rough arches.
It’s said that, in Japan, there are some who spend many years painting the same precise composition of a geographic feature — let’s say Mount Fuji — over and over again, with the hope of getting something, at least once, of its true essence. If that approach may work anywhere, may suit anything, it must be true of the Thames.
And this poem, for all its good, does not crack it.
It does not capture the thing in full. This is just a prize poem. Domenichetti was many years from the psychogeography that would one day be so fashionable. It’s just a poem. And the Thames remains a great river, a river whose stories are beyond rendering, beyond getting down on paper.