Rivers of the Mind

Closely intertwined with our lives, rivers are a source of inspiration for storytellers in every age and form.

A happy confluence of Abraham Verghese’s latest novel, The Covenant of Water and the excellent movie, Only the River Flows, based on a story by Yu Hua, last weekend set me thinking about rivers as a source of inspiration. I listened to the first, hypnotically read by the author, and watched the second, with its mesmerising shots of rain and the river. Unlike the sea, which we dipped into here a few weeks ago, rivers in literature, music and film, have many guises.

They are our life blood, providers of water, food and gold, and remain in some parts of the world the principal means of transport, commerce and communication. Historically, they are the locus of major cities and hence the origin of civilisation. No wonder then that the world’s largest online retailer is named for its largest river.

  Musical rivers began to swirl through my head, from Mancini & Mercer’s ‘Moon River’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ballad, ‘The River’ , to Smetana’s ‘The Moldau’ one of the symphonic poems making up Ma Vlast. In their wake came the titles of films, Jean Renoir’s beautiful Le Fleuve based on a novel by Rumer Godden, and Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It, based on Norman MacLean’s autobiographical story.

Photo by Bear Lissimo on Unsplash

Many creation myths involve the rise and spread of rivers, four from Eden in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, twelve from the Scandinavian Niflheim, Homer deemed the river Oceanus the father of all things in ancient Greece, and in Celtic mythology the god Dagda mates with Morrigan by the river Unius and with Boann by the Boyne. Latin poets described five rivers in the Underworld, Lethe – forgetfulness, Acheron – pain, Cocytus – lamentation, Styx – hatred and Phlegethon – fire. The German epic, The Lost Gold of the Niebelungs, arises from Alberich’s theft of the Rhine maidens’ gold. With this he makes a ring that endows him with universal power, origin of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and inspiration for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

  Rivers are the source of many stories including the controversial novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (recently retold from Jim’s point of view, by Perceval Everett in James) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness basis for Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now which featured Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. Less contentious is George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss which she wrote after reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities. The moral and mortal crises in both novels happen on water, a lake in Goethe’s story, the river in Eliot’s. Yet it is in her later novel, Middlemarch, that Eliot articulates the true symbolic force of a river. Apologising for Dorothea Brooke’s somewhat disappointing marriage to Ladislaw, she assures us that her aptly named heroine continues in her vocational good works, albeit unobtrusively:

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts . . .

The river in question is the Euphrates, which the Persian leader Cyrus managed to divert in the sixth century BCE, thus enabling his soldiers to wade up the riverbed and under the gates of Babylon. There they freed the captive Jews who wept ‘by the rivers of Babylon’, according to Psalm 137, and Arthur Hamilton’s song.  

While rivers flow through and animate these narratives, the ‘roman-fleuve’, popular at the turn of the nineteenth century, refers to a sequence of novels that forms a sweeping portrait of a group of people.[1] Examples include Balzac’s Human Comedy (91 works in total!), Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in England, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Reacting against the scientific ‘naturalism’ of these writers, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner experimented with the ‘stream of consciousness’, the constant internal flow of thoughts, fantasies, dreams and desires.

As the ancient Greek, Heraclitus, said, we can’t step into the same river twice, because it’s not the same river and we’re not the same person. Cratylus, however, went one better, pointing out that we can’t step into the same river once because the water is constantly moving and changing. So too our consciousness is in a perpetual state of flux, shifting and recombining, occasionally yielding flashes of insight.

In Jez Butterworth’s play, The River (2012) the Man, one of the three characters, produces a copy of Ted Hughes’ collection, River (1983). Like Hughes, the Man is a keen fisherman, and in the play he catches, cleans and cooks a fish for each of the women he is playing like fish on a line. To one he reads from Hughes’ poem ‘After Moonless Midnight’ conjuring the mysterious life of the river and the legendary properties of salmon, which can make you wise:

I waded, deepening, and the fish

Listened for me. They watched my each move

Through their magical skins.  

The woman is not greatly impressed, preferring to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, perhaps longing, like Mrs. Ramsay, to reach a point of light and clarity, and also, like her, doomed to die before the play is done.  

  Hughes once said that the fascination of fishing isn’t the fish but the experience of standing in or at the river, waiting and watching. River is a collaboration with his fishing buddy and photographer, Peter Keen. The soft-focus photos are belied, however, by the spiritual force of the poems, invoking mythology, natural history, sex, grief and environmental damage, their cumulative effect being to reconnect the human figure with the wild energy of nature.

Join water, wade in underbeing  

  Let brain mist into moist earth

  Ghost loosen away downstream

   . . .

   (from ‘Go Fishing’)

    One of the poems here, ‘West Dart’, feeds straight into Alice Oswald’s rhapsodical long river poem, Dart (2002). Hughes’ closing lines show us:

Where the slag of the world crumbles cooling

In thunders and rainy portents.

And Oswald brings us to:

Dartmeet – a mob of waters

where East Dart smashes into West Dart


two wills snarling and recoiling

and finally knuckling into balance

Her muscular verbs recall Hughes’ style and when her river Dart speaks, wondering at itself: 

whose voice is this who’s talking in my larynx

who’s in my privacy under my stone tent

where I live slippershod in my indoor colours

it echoes Hughes’ ‘Wodwo’, a mysterious creature mentioned in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see ‘A Thoroughly Modern Knight’ 10 October 2023):

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over

Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge

I enter water.

The river becomes language, means of communication. Working from interviews conducted over two years, she incorporates the people who live by, and work along the river, foresters, fishermen, poachers, bailiffs, woollen mill and dairy workers, with the history, folklore and mythology of the area ‘linking their voices into a sound map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. . . .  .’

  Her method derives too from Hart Crane’s (1899-1932) ‘The River’, which opens on the railroad tracks behind his father’s cannery. Crane recalls the ‘hobo-trekkers’, who rode the rods and who, in their drifting, were moved by fate, akin to a river:

Down, down – born pioneers in time’s despite,

Grimed tributaries to an ancient flow –

They win no frontier by their wayward plight,

But drift in stillness, as from Jordan’s brow.

‘I love this concept of drift, meaning driven, deposited by a current of air or water.’ Thus the ‘stonewaller’ on the Dart selects perfect stones and rolls the river’s vocabulary on his tongue with palpable relish. We search for the right words as he looks for stones to build with. On the surface, ‘drift’ might appear to be the antithesis of ‘driven’, being directionless but the currents that drive us are as elusive as air and water.

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[1] French distinguishes between a river that flows into the sea, ‘fleuve’, and one that flows into another river or lake, ‘rivière’.

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Rivers are a boundless source of inspiration and I have barely broached the theme here. So please feel free to add or share any river tales you enjoy: