[893] Wash of Cold River

Wash of cold river
in a glacial land,
Ionian water,
chill, snow-ribbed sand,
drift of rare flowers,
clear, with delicate shell-
like leaf enclosing
frozen lily-leaf,
camellia texture,
older than a rose;

wind-flower
that keeps the breath
of the north-wind --
these and none other;

intimate thoughts and kind
reach out to share
the treasure of my mind,
intimate hands and dear
drawn garden-ward and sea-ward
all the sheer rapture
that I would take
to mould a clear
and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine.

 	-- H. D.

Notes:

Ionian: the Ionian Sea, an extension of the Mediterranean between Italy and
  Greece.
camellia: ornamental shrub with shiny leaves and bright flowers.
	-- http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/hd7.html

Today's poem is, even for HD, an unusually beautiful one. The delicate,
crystalline images create an impression that is *clean* in every sense of
the word - pure, elegant, uncluttered, and, as the poet suggests,
fundamentally cold and lifeless - 'marble to grace your inaccessible shrine'.

The choice of imagery is interesting - the pellucid tones of wind and water
play against the living tints of camellia and rose, but the overall
impression is one of colourlessness. Looking closer, this is deliberate -
'camellia texture' draws attention away from its visual properties; 'older
than a rose' evokes images of pale, faded petals, so that, ultimately, the
impression is of colour being not merely absent but actually drained from a
scene in which it might otherwise have been expected.

Again, there is an overwhelming impression of *silence* - sound, like
colour, is an attribute of life, and one that has likewise been drained from
the scene, though more subtly. What is left is a vision of rare but frigid
beauty, almost dreamlike in its ethereal remoteness, and capturing perfectly
the twin attributes of attractiveness and inaccessibility.

-martin