Writing Against the Current: Anne Wilson’s Teisa and Labouring-Class River Poetry

Abstract

Pope’s Windsor Forest amply illustrates how rivers are important resources, poetically and otherwise. They have supplied energy for village mills and for factories. They have also provided a means of mobility, of travelling and trading. In the countryside, riverbanks have long offered a place for refreshment and relaxation, to water livestock or to fish. In geography, rivers serve as boundaries between counties or countries. While rivers can separate one region from another, they can also symbolically unite a nation or culture. Pope’s lines underscore that nearly every empire of antiquity, nearly every European nation, has a major river symbolically running through it, whether it be the Nile, the Tiber or the Thames. Rivers thus become synonymous with entire civilizations, in part because they make the development of those cultures possible, whether through providing water for irrigation or maritime access for trade. As Wyman Herendeen argues, the flow of the river from its source to the sea offers an analogy for a nation’s history and its destiny.² During the Renaissance, river iconography was widely used in the nation-building chorography of English writers such as Michael Drayton and William Camden. In early modern poetry, the celebration of symbolic marriages of rivers naturalized the often unnatural work of national unification and imperial assimilation.

Hail, sacred Peace! hail long-expected days,

That Thames’s glory to the stars shall raise!

Tho’ Tyber’s streams immortal Rome behold,

Tho’ foaming Hermus swells with tides of gold,

From Heav’n itself tho’ sev’n-fold Nilus flows,

And harvests on a hundred realms bestows;

These now no more shall be the Muse’s themes,

Lost in my fame, as in the sea their streams.¹