Three Maple Trees (part two)

Whittier portrayed this Pleasant Valley as a land with “Broad fields of corn and meadows green, / And fruit-bent orchards,” but that’s not the picture any longer. There’s an upscale development of sumptuous houses instead of orchards, and manicured lawns rather than fields of corn or meadows green. Yet in some ways the essence of this valley still remains despite the disappearance of those fertile farms.

Maybe it’s the fact that on one side of the main road running along this valley, a margin still remains undeveloped. River grass, high reeds, a few majestic white birches, a single cedar, and a Huckleberry-look border a wide blue current on this side, looking across towards a rough landscape of mountain laurel and tall white pines, which make up Maudslay State Park, on the other. It’s a wild river scene with no sign of human habitation.

Whittier writes of the view from that other side of the river 140 years ago in a poem called “Our River”, the first four stanzas of which I reprint here:

Once more on yonder laurelled height
The summer flowers have budded;
Once more with summer's golden light
The vales of home are flooded;
And once more, by the grace of Him
Of every good the Giver,
We sing upon its wooded rim
The praises of our river,

Its pines above, its waves below,
The west-wind down it blowing,
As fair as when the young Brissot
Beheld it seaward flowing,--
And bore its memory o'er the deep,
To soothe a martyr's sadness,
And fresco, hi his troubled sleep,
His prison-walls with gladness.

We know the world is rich with streams
Renowned in song and story,
Whose music murmurs through our dreams
Of human love and glory
We know that Arno's banks are fair,
And Rhine has castled shadows,
And, poet-tuned, the Doon and Ayr
Go singing down their meadows.

But while, unpictured and unsung
By painter or by poet,
Our river waits the tuneful tongue
And cunning hand to show it,--
We only know the fond skies lean
Above it, warm with blessing,
And the sweet soul of our Undine
Awakes to our caressing.


I wrote a poem back in November describing it then in this painterly way:


November River View #9

This river view (its shores and flow) is not
the stuff of most contemporary art.
Water sedge --the color apricot--
and plum reflections in the flood impart
a measure deeper than the current sounds,
keener than eastern pines on higher grounds

of countryside across the stream from me.
There isn't any irony, despair,
or unresolved surreal obscurity
in what the river means to laissez-faire
economies of cultures old or new.
For in the end, it’s just a point of view.


Whittier’s point of view was that of a 19th century New England Quaker. Mine is that of a twenty-first century New England agnostic, living in a brick apartment building at the very western edge of the valley, writing 4 months before the disappearance of those three great maple trees discussed in Part One. In other ways though the essence of the valley changed with the disappearance of those trees. And that seems to make a difference now, and one I will need to explore in Part Three.