Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  The figure of William Blake, bright and huge

  Hung over the Thames at Sonning.

  An early poet of the river was William Dunbar who, in “In Honour of the City of London” (1501), greeted the Thames as triumphant:

  Above all ryvers thy Ryver hath renowne,

  Whose beryall stremys, pleasaunt and preclare,

  Under thy lusty wallys renneth down,

  Where many a swanne doth swymme with wyngis faire;

  Where many a barge doth saile, and row with ore,

  Where many a ship doth rest with toppe-royall.

  The poetic myth of the Thames is here given one of its first rehearsals—its “beryl” streams, its fame, its swans, and its association with royalty. This is the river sanctified by the poetic imagination.

  In the later sixteenth century there was a plethora of Thames poetry. This was the age when one of the principal landmarks of the Thames, Bankside, became the occasion or setting for the greatest of all English poetry. The association of Shakespeare with the Thames is generally neglected, but it was one of the highways of his invention. He lived beside it, first at Southwark and then later at Blackfriars. He crossed it continually, and indeed it became his primary means of transport. His plays were performed beside its banks, either at the Globe or at the indoor theatre in Blackfriars itself; when he writes of the tides, and of the merchant ships, he is considering the life of the Thames. “Tut, man, I mean thou’lt loose the flood, and in loosing the flood, loose thy voyage.” So speaks Panthino in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592), but he is referring to the tidal rhythm of the Thames rather than the Adige river. The Thames is the rough cradle with which Shakespeare was well acquainted.

  Edmund Spenser has been invoked at various points in this narrative, for the very good reason that he is the principal eulogist of the Thames. He is the celebrator of “wealthy Thamis” and of “silver streaming Thamesis.” He can in fact be described as the “river poet” of the sixteenth century, and his intended composition of “Epithalamion Thamesis” in 1579 confirms his identification with the Thames. He uses the river to suggest greatness, and the passage of English history; he adapts the river to elegy and to prophecy; he associates the river with nature and with art. It is a theme that Michael Drayton took up, in a contribution to England’s Helicon (1600), where he apostrophises “thou silver Thames, O clearest crystal flood.” The sixteenth-century river indeed survives in poetry and historical legend as the silver Thames, the crystal Thames, the sweet Thames. It was reported that the oars of the London watermen, in that century, could become entangled with water-lilies while they kept stroke “to the tune of flutes.” The myth of England’s glittering destiny, under the aegis of the Virgin Queen, was deeply implicated in such presentations of the Thames as the river of magnificence. It was an image that reappeared in the poetry of later centuries, with the “silver-footed Thamesis” of Herrick and the “silver Thames” of Pope.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the reaches of the Thames by Twickenham and Richmond were haunted by the poets. In the more antique guide-books of the river there are phrases such as “here Cowley wrote,” “here Pope took the air in a boat,” “here is Thomson buried,” “here Denham stood when he imagined the beautiful eulogium upon the river which has been so often quoted,” “here Swift was shown by King William how to cut asparagus in the Dutch way.” The Thames became the new Helicon, the favoured home and haven of the Muses.

  It has been said with some truth, however, that there has been no great poem devoted to the Thames; the river has no bard. There have been attempts at such a composition, among them John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill”(1641). It is in fact Denham’s one famous poem, endlessly quoted and an-thologised since its first publication. A poem of moderate temper, and of unmatched technical ability, it was considered to be a model of English poetry, with its gentle cadence and its elevated diction, its chastened imagery and its generous sentiment. The Thames is described as gentle and spacious, a source both of wealth and of pride. It renders “both Indies ours,” in terms of trade, and its “fair bosom is the world’s exchange,” emphasising its most important value in the seventeenth century. It was published immediately before a period of unprecedented English turmoil, the Civil Wars, and can be read as an invocation of calmness or moderation. The Thames itself was described as temperate and bountiful; it was never provoked into extremes, never impetuous or unpredictable. Thus it became a wished-for paradigm. In the middle of the struggles of the 1640s the poem might then be read as a nostalgic homage to a golden period of peace; in subsequent decades it was interpreted as an eloquent restatement of the central English principles of moderation and equity. It had a talismanic quality, all the more arresting for its use of the Thames itself as an image of good order:

  O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

  My great example, as it is my theme!

  Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

  Strong without rage, without o’erflowing, full.

  In the same decade Robert Herrick wrote a lachrymose elegy to the river, “His Teares to Thamasis” (1648), in which he bids its waters “fare-ye-well for ever” after his removal to a country parsonage. He sends the river his sweetest kiss, regretting that he will no longer take a barge to Richmond or to Kingston:

  Nor in the summer’s sweeter evenings go

  To bathe in thee (as thousands others doe)…

  This is one of the few references to the evident fact that the river was used for swimming or bathing by “thousands” of citizens. He laments his departure from “my Beloved Westminster” and explains that he was born near the banks of the Thames in “Golden-cheap-side.” Those who are born by the river, like Turner in Maiden Lane and Milton in Bread Street, claim an especial affinity with it.

  The life of John Milton is evidence of this. Every citizen of London was then also a citizen of the river. As Milton wrote in Damon’s Epitaph (1639), Thamesis meus ante omnes—“my Thames above all the rest.” After university he resided from 1632 to 1638 at Horton, close to the place where the river Colne is in confluence with the Thames; here, on the banks of the tributary, he composed “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro,” “Lycidas” and the masque of Comus. In Comus, for example, there is a reference to that place:

  By the rushy fringed bank,

  Where grows the willow and the osier dank.

  In “Lycidas,” too, there seems to be some inspired memory of the river’s territory:

  Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use

  Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks.

  In the seventeenth century Horton was altogether a watery region, with rivulets running through the meadows among rushes and water-plants; by the sides of the roads there were slow runnels in place of ditches, in which it was still possible in the nineteenth century to see minnows. Milton, like Shelley, enjoyed the presence of water to the extent that the Thames may be considered to be a primary agent of his imagination. He invokes the river when he contemplates the theme of a British epic, and considers it to be a river of cultural memory. “Thamesis meus”—my Thames—suggests an act of identification or appropriation at once intimate and ultimately unidentifiable. It suggests almost infantine closeness.

  When Boswell took a sculler with Samuel Johnson to Greenwich, “we were entertained with the immense number and variety of ships that were lying at anchor, and with the beautiful country on each side of the river.” Once they had arrived at their destination, Boswell took from his coat-pocket a copy of Johnson’s poem “London” (1738), and read out the lines:

  On Thames’s banks in silent thought we stood:

  Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood.

  This is the mythical river, the picturesque river of the eighteenth century that by dint of association and tradition remained the paradigm of the Thames in a period when it was in fact undergoing a fundamental alteration.

  The pattern of riparian habit
ation is nowhere more apparent than in the life of Alexander Pope, who stayed close to the river all of his life. He was born in the old City of London, within sight and sound of the Thames; at a later date he had a study in Battersea, facing the Thames, where he wrote “An Essay on Man.” He then lived on the margins of Windsor Forest, and then briefly at Chiswick by the river. But his most famous riverside residence was at Twickenham where the garden of his “villa” reached down to the north bank of the Thames. He purchased the house in 1718 and remained there until his death in 1744.

  His favoured work here was the building of a river grotto, and in a letter to his friend Blount he described how

  from the river Thames you see through my arch up a walk in the wilderness to a kind of open temple, wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner; and from that distance, under the temple, you look down through a sloping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river passing suddenly and vanishing as through a perspective glass.

  He deemed the river to be a sacred place, worthy of a “temple” in honour of its deity, and placed shards of glass and polished shells within the grotto so that it shone like an icon of holiness upon the bank. He composed an inscription, too, for:

  Thou who shalt step where Thames’ translucent wave

  Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave,

  Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil,

  And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill…

  In the eighteenth book of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1469–70), Lancelot retreats to Windsor Forest, where he inhabits a hermitage beside a spring. It is a prologue to Pope’s residence at his father’s house in Binfield, close to Windsor Forest and the river Loddon which decants into the Thames; upon one of the trees in an enclosure there was carved “Here Pope Sung.” He could never get away from the river; he had to live beside it, like one of those classical deities whose existence depended upon the calm ministrations of the rivers of Greece. He declared once that there were “no scenes of paradise, no happy bowers, equal to those on the banks of the Thames.” The river was his Arcadia, a sylvan retreat, to which he addressed his muse:

  Fair Thames, flow gently from this sacred spring

  While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing…

  Blest Thames’s shores the brightest beauties yield

  Feed here my lambs, I’ll seek no distant field.

  The City—Battersea—Windsor—Chiswick—Twickenham: that is the odyssey of Alexander Pope’s life, a journey along the banks of the Thames from which he never deviated. He was truly the genius loci.

  There are other votaries of the river. James Thomson, the once famous author of The Seasons (1730) that became the pastoral bible of the eighteenth century, included the Thames within his capacious view. He wrote part of that naturalistic epic by the river at Hammersmith, in the Dove Coffee-house (now the Dove public house). In it we will find the lines:

  Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames

  Fair—winding up to where the Muses haunt…

  Beside the river at Cliveden he wrote the masque, Alfred, which has the sole distinction of containing the song “Rule Britannia!” He constantly haunted the Thames, managing to live and die and be buried by the river. The Thames could be said to have killed him. Thomson caught a chill when sailing in an open boat from London to Kew, and never recovered.

  With Thomson we may place Thomas Gray. In his “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742), he asked “Father Thames”:

  Who foremost now delight to cleave

  With pliant arm thy glassy wave?

  To which the only answer must be, the same boys as you and your companions once were. Again the river prompts matters of time and memory. To provoke melancholy seems to be one of the more enduring attributes of the river.

  But Pope’s true successor as the river poet, the poet haunted by the river, must be Percy Bysshe Shelley. The river entered his head. His verses flow with it. He grew up by the river, at Syon House Academy in Isleworth, at Eton and at Oxford, and that early acquaintance seems to have affected his destiny. All his short life he loved rivers, and the poets that sang of rivers. He emulated Pope by living on the borders of Windsor Forest in the summer of 1815; while here he engaged in his favourite pastime of boating on the Thames, and explored the stretches of the river from Windsor to Cricklade in a wherry. He was on a pilgrimage to the source of the river. He was able to navigate as far as Inglesham, where the river vegetation and all the attendant weeds impeded his progress. It was a common enough occurrence. This was the point where the water barely covered the hooves of the cattle.

  He was accompanied on this river journey by Thomas Love Peacock who had already written The Genius of the Thames (1812). Theirs was a school of river poetry. Peacock lived at Chertsey when he was a child, and was eventually buried at Shepperton. The beginning and end of his life were associated with the Thames, in a pattern that seems to have dominated many lives. Peacock left a portrait of Shelley, on this journey, in the novel Crotchet Castle (1831) where he depicts “Mr. Philpot” who “would lie alone for hours, listening to the gurgling of the water around the prow, and would occasionally edify the company with speculations on the great changes that would be effected in the world by the steam navigation of rivers…”

  They stopped for two nights in Lechlade, and the path between the church and the river there is still known as “Shelley’s Walk.” So does a poet of the river impress himself upon his surroundings. Inspired by the fifteenth-century church itself Shelley composed “A Summer Evening Churchyard.” The changefulness and variousness of the Thames perhaps prevent the composition of a great poem in its honour; it is made up of small scenes and images like that of the Lechlade churchyard. It cannot inspire an heroic measure, or a sense of the sublime; it encourages the poetry of shadow and of seclusion, of rest and of retreat. These are not epic themes.

  Yet on his return from Lechlade Shelley composed Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1815), in which he invoked the immediate landscape of the upper Thames:

  The meeting boughs and implicated leaves

  Wove twilight o’er the poet’s path…

  In it, too, he compares the true pilgrimage of a poet to a journey upriver; the voyage into the past, the voyage into the recesses of the imagination, is a river voyage. The river itself becomes a tremulous deity. “Rivers are not like roads,” he wrote to Peacock, “the work of the hands of man; they imitate mind, which wanders at will over pathless deserts, and flows through nature’s loveliest recesses.” The being of a man was “like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards.” For Shelley, then, the river was an image of human consciousness. It represented in particular the flow of being that was one of the poet’s principal characteristics. That is why William Hazlitt wrote of him that “his bending, flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but slides from it like a river.” It is the clearest possible description of the consonance between man and river, and one man in particular who always desired to be near the river which represented part of his being. Shelley was at peace on the Thames.

  Three years later after his river pilgrimage with Peacock, Shelley rented a house at Great Marlow, on the river in Buckinghamshire, where he wrote The Revolt of Islam (1818). From this vantage he made many excursions to his favoured places of the river, to Bisham and to Medmenham, to Henley and to Maidenhead. He wrote much of The Revolt of Islam in Bisham Woods, or while floating under the beech groves of Bisham-on-the-Thames in a boat called Vaga. The images of that poem are directly associated with the river, and there are lines that call up the immediate setting of its composition:

  Waterfalls leap among the wild islands green,

  Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat

  Of moss-grown trees and weeds…

  This is the landscape of the Thames, which Mary Shelley believed to be “distinguished for singular beauty.”

  In one of
his letters Shelley remarks upon the tyranny of places; he complains that, though you think you have left them, you still inhabit them. In their absence you still frequent them. This seems to have been his deep response to the regions of the Thames, and in the cadence of his poetry it is still possible to trace the movement of the river. Yeats wrote of him that “a single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river…there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture, that is the image of his secret life.” And of course Shelley died in the open sea, in the watery element to which he had dedicated his life.

  William Morris was born at Walthamstow, on the edges of the northern marshes of the Thames, and some of his most famous designs were given the names of the tributaries of the river, such as “Evenlode” and “Kennet,” “Wandle” and “Wey.” But for most of his life he inhabited Kelmscott Manor, lying a few yards from the river near Oxford, and Kelmscott House beside the river at Hammersmith. He would journey by boat between the two houses, like some medieval wherryman. The journey itself, at a slow pace, took some six days; it took him between two worlds which he commemorated in some introductory verses to the “June” stories of The Earthly Paradise (1865–70):