Classic Poem

For unnumbered ages the green water has poured over the limestone cliff,
The pallid spray has risen in wavering columns,
Where, at full moon, has hovered the ghostly circle of evanescent colors,
Caught in winter in diamond-hued petals of hoarfrost
Bending the swaying boughs of the murmuring spruces.

The eternal cycle has been repeated a thousand times;
The rain and the melting snow have swelled the level of the lake;
The cold green water has swept irresistibly onward;
Down with a desperate plunge it has dashed into the abyss;
Then after whirling as if bewildered in glaucous depths,
Feeling the gravitating urge, it swept on in its new swift course
Amid innumerable islands, over boulders and rapids,
Onward and ever onward till it met the salt kiss of the ocean.
Then after myriad adventures — frozen in icebergs for ages,
Reflecting the weird lights of the Aurora under the Arctic circle,
At last snapt off in some mighty frost-convulsion and driven southward,
Skirting the Tropic atolls, where rooted in coral tall palms bend their feathery fronds,
And once more lifted up to the skies and changed into rain-laden clouds —
Began the cycle anew in the wide blue plain of the Lakes.

Never once in these ages has the stream of the water failed;
Billions on billions of tons have plunged from heights into depths,
Viewed only by the solitary eagle who watched from his seat on the pine
To spy the stunned fish rise and float on the swirling wave,
Or with dumb wonder by the passing Algonqum,
Who well might worship the Great Spirit dwelling in the mist-column
Presiding over the roar and the might and the marvel.

Now what a change!
Shall Poesy unreconciled shed tears of chagrin,
Seeing this beautiful, this awe-compelling spectacle,
This divine manifestation of Nature's august majesty,
Made into a slave by the wealth-craving hordes of Commercialism,
Shorn of its splendor, compelled to labor like an Arabian Afrit?
Are Science and Poesy here at odds?
Must Poesy recognize the inevitable
And see in the marvellous, far-reaching results
The glory of power translated into accomplishment?
Is beauty for beauty's sake a fiction of barbarous ages?
The scales of Science have measured the " wasted " power.
Every drop of the plunging river is counted and reckoned in dynams:
Led into steel-lined tubes the waters dash into turbines
Top-like poised and whirling with inconceivable swiftness;
Weight is converted to might; the energy stored
Leaps at a chance of escape and flies on metal conductors.
Here it is caught once more and made to work like a slave,
Grinding to pulp the light white spruce
Which only the day before
Sighed in the summer wind on the banks of its river beloved.
The pulp, bleached and prest and dried, is made, into paper,
Ponderous rolls upon rolls, which in turn,
Lifted on waiting cars, are rushed by the same enslaved Jinn to the city.

The enormous rolls come to the commodious well-lighted pressroom
And are swiftly hoisted into place ready for the word.