The peoetry of Australian bush poet/balladeer Henry Clarence Kendall was used on many occasions in the early 2000s when I had depression. Despite being a trainwreck himself and prone to fits of deep melancholy, Kendall wrote with a startling clarity and depth of word of great metrical march and beat, describing scenes in his imagination as if he was there. This poem of "The Waterfall" is so well described as you can picture the scene in the mind and go as far as to frame it! This, along with many others, has me forming mental images of events in places I've been and putting his verse to various scenes. Sometimes I have been profoundly moved by many of this other works. So the link between verse and photography can be very potent indeed, but it also requires a vivid imagination to put verse to time and place with corresponding emotive impact. Describing a waterfall like Kendall has in the context ois a masterstroke of writing, carefully entwining love and despair in a dramatic scene. Lots of Kendall's writing can work well carried to photography as a series of images illustrating mood e.g. high-key monochrome or cross-processed colour. I tried this myself in 2003 I think with an entirely different poem of uplifting rhythm and rhyme, "Bell Birds".
The song of the Water,
Doomed ever to roam;
A beautiful Exile,
Afar from its home...
The cliffs on the mountain,
The grand and the grey,
They took the bright creature
And hurled it away!
I heard the wild downfall,
And knew it must spill
A passionate heart out
All over the hill.
Oh! was it a daughter
Of sorrow and sin,
That they threw it so madly
Down into the lynn?
And listen, my Sister,
For this is the song
The Waterfall taught me
The ridges among:
Oh where are the shadows
So cool and so sweet
And the rocks, saith the water,
With the moss on their feet?
Oh where are my playmates
The wind and the flowers
The golden and purple
Of honey-sweet bowers,
Mine eyes have been blinded
Because of the sun;
And moaning and moaning
I listlessly run!
These hills are so flinty!
Ah! tell me, dark Earth,
What valley leads back to
The place of my birth?
What valley leads up to
The haunts where a child
Of caverns I sported,
The free and the wild?
There lift me,it crieth,
I faint from the heat;
With a sob for the shadows
So cool and so sweet.
Ye rocks, that look over
With never a tear,
I yearn for one half of
The wasted love here!
My sister so wistful
You know I believe
Like a child, for the mountains
This water doth grieve.
Ah, you with the blue eyes
And golden-brown hair,
Come closer and closer
And truly declare:
Supposing a darling
Once happened to sin,
In a passionate space,
Would you carry her in;
If your fathers and mothers,
The grand and the grey,
Had taken the weak one
And hurled her away?
.
