The River Humber by Stevie Smith

THE RIVER HUMBER

No wonder
The river Humber
Lies in a silken slumber.

For it is dawn
And over the newly warm
Earth the mists turn,

Wrapping their gentle fringes
Upon the river where it hinges
Upon the perfect sleep of perfected images.

Quiet in the thought of its felicity,
A graven monument of sufficiency
Beautiful in every line the river sleeps complacently.

And hardly the dawn distinguishes
Where a miasma languishes
Upon the waters’ farther reaches.

Lapped in the sleeping consciousness
Of its waves’ happiness
Upon the mudbanks of its approaches,

The river Humber
Turns again to deeper slumber
Deeper than deeps in joys without number.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 81.