Under The Waterfall

Dear Diary...

Not so long ago I got to visit my favorite waterfall with my Mum and my Nana...

It was a beautiful day! we hiked down a nice little path...

that lead us all the way to a look out point, where we snapped some quick photos...

and looking up at Bridal Veil Falls reminded me of a poem that I heard once... I remember it because after I heard it... I realized how much I liked it... because places that you find yourself in your life become a part of you... and even for the silliest or smallest reasons you can end up loving a place just because you're with someone who is special to you...

                     Under The Waterfall by Thomas Hardy

                                      'Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
                                          In a basin of water, I never miss
                                   The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day
                             Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.

Hence the only prime
And real love-rhyme
That I know by heart,
And that leaves no smart,
Is the purl of a little valley fall
About three spans wide and two spans tall
Over a table of solid rock,
And into a scoop of the self-same block;
The purl of a runlet that never ceases
In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;
With a hollow boiling voice it speaks
And has spoken since hills were turf less peaks.'

'And why gives this the only prime
Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?
And why does plunging your arm in a bowl
Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?'

'Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,
Though precisely where none ever has known,
Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,
And by now with its smoothness opalized,
Is a drinking glass:

For, down that pass
My lover and I
Walked under a sky
Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green,
In the burn of August, to paint the scene,
And we placed our basket of fruit and wine
By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;

And when we had drunk from the glass together,
Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,
I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,
Where it slipped, and it sank, and was past recall,
Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss
With long bared arms. There the glass still is.
And, as said, if I thrust my arm below
Cold water in a basin or bowl, a throe
From the past awakens a sense of that time,
And the glass we used, and the cascade's rhyme.

The basin seems the pool, and its edge
The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,
And the leafy pattern of china-ware
The hanging plants that were bathing there.

'By night, by day, when it shines or lours,
There lies intact that chalice of ours,
And its presence adds to the rhyme of love
Persistently sung by the fall above.
No lip has touched it since his and mine
In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine.'