Down The River’s Dim Expanse

I’m flooded in.

I haven’t been posting on my blog or doing much work lately because I’ve a) been on holidays and b) have been very distracted by an unfolding natural disaster over the last few days. Where I live in Australia is suffering the worst flooding in many years. I’m safe but all the roads into my town are cut by floodwater. And yesterday things became so much worse with flash flooding (see above) and drownings further south. Brisbane is due to be seriously flooded tomorrow and Thursday.

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The disaster is huge in scale and heartbreaking for so many.

Today, however, there was a more quiet, sad moment. We went down to the water’s edge where the flood is very slowly receding. There an ambulance crew were delivering the body of someone who had died, handing over the maroon-wrapped bundle to the SES emergency workers. They put the body in a small boat and ferried it across the huge, brown, swollen river, presumably to the morgue.

The death was of natural causes, as far as I know. Even in major emergencies, life – and death – goes on.

The scene had echoes of the tale of the River Styx and the robed ferryman awaiting his toll. But I also found myself thinking of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, The Lady of Shallott. And reading that romantic piece of writing, I felt moved to post it here. I don’t have prayers to offer people caught up in the floods but I do want to say I’m thinking of them. And a beautiful piece of writing is always better than a prayer.

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining.
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot;
Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
And around about the prow she wrote
The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river’s dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance —
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right —
The leaves upon her falling light —
Thro’ the noises of the night,
She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turn’d to tower’d Camelot.
For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and Burgher, Lord and Dame,
And around the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.

Who is this? And what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they crossed themselves for fear,
All the Knights at Camelot;
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”