Watching waterfalls
A waterfall portfolio of paintings, prints and photographs all water-source material for last week’s ‘why watch waterfalls’.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’ 1798
Last week I posted on ‘why do we want waterfalls?’ This splashy gallery is by way of experimental material. If water-watching really is all about the white noise, or the positively charged ions, then there should be zero pleasure to be had from these purely screen-based samples.
Does this one look sort-of familiar? The Steall Falls occupy the background of the Tri-Wizard Tournament in Harry Potter Four (Gobbet of Fire)1.
William and Dorothy will have passed this one on their way to the daffodils.
When I first looked on the Falls of Clyde (in 1803) I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said ‘How majestic!’ it was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying, ‘Thank you, Sir! That is the exact word for it’, when he added eodem flatu [in that same breath], ‘Yes! How very pretty!’
ST Coleridge ‘Table Talk’ 1827
Poor Coleridge could make no answer and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.
Dorothy Wordsworth ‘Recollections’.
And curling and whirling and purling and twirling,
And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping,
And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing;
And so never ending, but always descending,
Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending
All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, —
And this way the water comes down at Lodore.
Robert Southey, from ‘The Cataract of Lodore’ 1820
If reading on email, the rest of this may shortly get cropped off by Gmail.
This small but well regarded waterfall is half a mile from Wordsworth’s house at Rydal Mount. It’s seen here from the special little summerhouse built for looking at it from.
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.Gerard Manley Hopkins 1881
In the dying days of 1799, William and Dorothy walked the length of Wensleydale, hunting down these waterfalls.
‘I visited twice the fall of Terni – which beats every thing’
Byron 1817
The roar of waters! – from the headlong height
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;
The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV.69)
Okay I know it's actually ‘goblet’. Does Dumbledore’s pet phoenix Fawkes feature ‘giblets of fire’?
Scrolling through this, its like the water flows from picture to picture, and you've made a meta-waterfall
an impressive collection of art, photography and poetry. Thanks :)