Is there a great poem about the Mississippi River?

Right here in April, celebrated yearly as Nationwide Poetry Month, I’ve been questioning: Is there a really nice poem concerning the Mississippi River?

The query first got here to thoughts final December when a replica of “River Poems,” a stupendous, pocket-sized assortment of poems about rivers world wide, landed in my mailbox.

Editor Henry Hughes, who compiled the gathering and affords an introduction, doesn’t appear stunned that rivers usually find yourself as the topic of poems. “Rivers,” he tells readers, “teem with symbolic significance: they’ve lengthy been ritual websites for funerals and baptisms, for deaths and rebirths; they slake our thirst, nourish our crops, and supply us with meals, transportation, and energy.”

True sufficient, and I’d additionally add that rivers, with their sophisticated currents and frequent twists, are very very similar to poems, which frequently work on many ranges and take stunning turns.

Carl Sandburg makes the same level in “Languages,” one of many poems within the anthology. He compares human speech to rivers, which appear secure however are all the time altering, “crossing borders and mixing.”

Clearly, rivers have lengthy been an inspiration for poets. There’s ample proof of that in “River Poems,” which incorporates poems concerning the Nile and the Thames, the Danube and the Niagra, the Wabash and the Shenandoah. As a baby of Louisiana, I naturally wished to see how our mighty Mississippi is represented.

Hughes contains, maybe inevitably, the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River,” the ballad written by Oscar Hammerstein for the Broadway musical “Showboat.” The outdated man of the tune is the Mississippi, quietly persistent amid the human pageant of injustice and struggling. As Hammerstein succinctly places it, the river “simply retains rollin’ alongside.”

Additionally included is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the basic Langston Hughes poem that references Louisiana: “I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe / Lincoln went all the way down to New Orleans, and I’ve / seen its muddy bosom flip all golden within the / sundown.”