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W H Auden - River Profile
Work rating: Medium

     Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering
     head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an
     up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country,
     deadly to breathers,

     it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,
     where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,
     wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner`s-lamp country,
     already at ease with

     the mien and gestures that become its kindness,
     in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,
     flows as it should through any declining country
     in probing spirals.

     Soon of a size to be named and the cause of
     dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,
     down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,
     it plunges ram-stam,

     to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer
     strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,
     robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country,
     nightmare of merchants.

     Disemboguing from foothills, now in hushed meanders,
     now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile
     plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country,
     its regal progress

     gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,
     then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder
     retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,
     it changes color.

     Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete,
     now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,
     ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country,
     à-la-mode always.

     Broadening or burrowing to the moon`s phases,
     turbid with pulverised wastemantle, on through
     flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country
     it scours, approaching

     the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
     disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
     punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
     wearies to its final

     act of surrender, effacement, atonement
     in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
     attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
     image of death as

     a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely
     monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
     too, even as water, the selfless mother
     of all especials.
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