Under The Waterfall

"Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,     In a basin of water, I never miss     The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day     Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.         Hence the only prime         And real love-rhyme         That I know by heart,         And that leaves no smart,     Is the purl of a little valley fall     About three spans wide and two spans tall     Over a table of solid rock,     And into a scoop of the self-same block;     The purl of a runlet that never ceases     In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;     With a hollow boiling voice it speaks     And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks."     "And why gives this the only prime     Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?     And why does plunging your arm in a bowl     Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?     Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,     Though where precisely none ever has known,     Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,     And by now with its smoothness opalized,         Is a drinking-glass:         For, down that pass         My lover and I         Walked under a sky     Of blue with a leaf-woven awning of green,     In the burn of August, to paint the scene,     And we placed our basket of fruit and wine     By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;     And when we had drunk from the glass together,     Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,     I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,     Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall,     Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss     With long bared arms. There the glass still is.     And, as said, if I thrust my arm below     Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe     From the past awakens a sense of that time,     And the glass both used, and the cascade's rhyme.     The basin seems the pool, and its edge     The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,     And the leafy pattern of china-ware     The hanging plants that were bathing there.     By night, by day, when it shines or lours,     There lies intact that chalice of ours,     And its presence adds to the rhyme of love     Persistently sung by the fall above.     No lip has touched it since his and mine     In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine."