Six Centuries of English Poetry: Tennyson to Chaucer

THE BROOK.

I come from haunts of coot1 and hern,2
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker3 down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps,4 a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland5 set
With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel,
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel6 covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom,7 I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeams dance
Against my shady shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly8 bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

NOTES.

This little lyric forms a part of "an idyl" of the same title, published in 1855. The poet introduces it in the following manner:

"Here, by this brook, we parted; I to the East
And he to Italy—too late—too late:
......... Yet the brook he loved
..... seems, as I re-listen to it,
Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,
To me that loved him; for, 'O brook,' he says,
'O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,
'Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? replies:
'I come from haunts of coot and hern,'" etc.

In reading this poem, observe how strikingly the sound is made to correspond to the sense.

1. coot. A wild water-fowl, resembling the duck.2. hern. Heron.3. bicker. To move unsteadily.4. thorps. Small villages. A. S. thorpe. From Ger. trupp, a troop.5. foreland. A promontory.6. hazel covers. Hazel thickets.7. gloom. Glimmer, shine obscurely.8. shingly. Gravelly.

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