CHAPTER 40

River Dreams

Lewis Carroll concluded Through the Looking Glass (1871), a narrative in part inspired by his journeys upon the Thames at Oxford, with the refrain:

Ever drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—

Life, what is it but a dream?

The Thames inspires dreams, or what we may also call reflections. Theodore Hook, at Thames Ditton in the early nineteenth century, wrote verses in celebration of “the placid waking dream” he experienced by the riverside. Gaston Bachelard, in L’Eau et Les Rêves (1993), wrote that “I cannot sit down beside a river without falling into a profound reverie, without looking back over my happiness.”

There is an anonymous poem, also, of the water “under wistful willows wending”:

Why so swift to grasp the dream,

Mad to learn the story’s ending?

In The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) William Morris recounted his own dream by the river at Kelmscot:

And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,

The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

So the river does not only create dreams; it appears within them. It is an ancient presence. In the Aboriginal art of Australia—in Walbiri circle line designs—the image of concentric circles is an emblem of water or of a water-hole, from which dreamings emerge or into which they enter. The water and the dream are of the same element. That is why, in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Sonning is an area of the Thames “in which to dream of bygone days, and vanished forms and faces, and things that might have been.” By the river Turner dreamed of classical and mythological pasts, and some of his sketches are a form of painterly day-dreaming with evanescent shapes of things that are and are not. Dido and Aeneas are to be found at Richmond, saying eternal farewell; Portia laments the departure of Brutus at Isleworth. There are triremes on the water, and elaborate palaces beside its banks. These are dreams of majesty.

And who can tell dreams from visions? Wordsworth understood the power of the river very well, in some “Lines” (1790) written by Richmond-upon-Thames:

Glide gently, thus for ever glide,

O Thames! that other bards may see

As lovely visions by thy side

As now, fair river! come to me.

The prospect of the river running down to the ocean has prompted many visionary conceptions; the light upon the water, the bridges across the river (the bridges of contentment), have been the agents of the imagination. The river obscures conscious thought and erases memory; the sound and movement of water lay to rest the powers of observation, like some watery narcotic. It may be the source of visions. That is why it has been commonly associated with the twentieth-century notion of the subconscious. It is water itself that dreams.

Reflect upon the nature of reflections. They throw a curious light upon the boundary between shadow and substance. When the swan floats upon the water it seems as if it were to float double, swan and shadow of some other swan. At the still hour of the evening—often about half an hour before sunset—every riverside object may be perfectly reflected from the surface of the water, and the reflection or shadow is often seen more distinctly than the object to which it owes its existence. In that state reality seems to depart from the actual and impart its power to the unreal; in the process the most familiar objects become unfamiliar and novel. It is like observing some new world. Water does not in that sense become a mirror. It is gentler, more capacious, and more inviting, than a mirror. It naturalises, and idealises, the other within the depths of itself. It makes the reflected world profound—more profound, perhaps, than the actual world above the water. The reflection is in that sense more real than the reality. Yet this may induce bewilderment, and a form of vertigo; when you gaze at the inverted landscape, you may be half-afraid of becoming lost within it—of being swallowed up by the profound below.

Thomas Traherne, the poet and mystic, was rector of St. Mary’s at Teddington and dwelled close to the river there. In a poem, “Shadows in the Water,” perhaps composed in the early 1670s, he meditates upon the nature of its reflections:

By walking Men’s reversed Feet

I chanc’d another World to meet;

Tho it did not to View exceed

A Phantom, ’tis a World indeed,

Where Skies beneath us shine,

And Earth by Art divine

Another face presents below,

Where People’s feet against Ours go.

The river is filled with such strange reversals and pairings. The river encourages doubling. It can also represent the “world turned upside down,” that ancient phrase representing the libertarian and egalitarian power of misrule. We will discover that the river is the setting of liberty in all of its aspects.

There is a significant feature of the ancient cursus at Lechlade. The smaller cursus site here is paralleled by a larger cursus complex on the other side of the river at Buscot Wick. There seems to have been some attempt at pairing, therefore, with the Thames acting as a natural boundary between the two monuments. This phenomenon is to be found elsewhere along the Thames, as, for example, at the adjacent cursus sites of Dorchester, and it acts as a curious harbinger for the emergence of “twin towns” linked by the river—Streatley and Goring, Pangbourne and Whitchurch, Reading and Caversham, Putney and Fulham. Is it possible that the pairing of towns has some prehistoric origin in the siting of monuments? Is it part of some atavistic impulse when humankind contemplates the river? There is some vision of doubleness, connected to the nature of reflecting water itself.

There are more fanciful examples. The echo under the bridge arch as you walk along the tow-path at Maidenhead is well known for its strength. There used to be an inn-sign on the tow-path at Twickenham, for the Barmy Arms, showing the angry Duchess from Alice in Wonderland painted upside down. Since Alice in Wonderland is itself set in a reverse world inspired by Carroll’s sojourns on the river, the sign may be hailed as a true Thames vision. There have been many ghosts observed along the banks of the Thames, but perhaps they have the reality and the nature of reflections in the water. To the poem of Traherne we may add the poetry of Pope, from Windsor Forest, on the reflective Thames:

Oft in her glass the musing shepherd spies

The headlong mountains and the downward skies,

The watry landskip of the pendant woods,

And absent trees that tremble in the floods;

In the clear azure gleam the flocks are seen,

And floating forests paint the waves with green.