The River’s Complaint
It is a common poetic trope to imagine rivers not only as physical waterways but also as expressive agents whose murmuring flow seems to voice the conditions of the landscapes they traverse and the histories they carry, a feature present from classical pastoral poetry to our contemporary poetry. In The Complaint of Thames4, Pulter participates from this literary tradition by personifying the River Thames and granting it a female voice that articulates the sorrows of the nation. Personified, lamenting rivers occupy a generically rich intersection of pastoral poetry, river poetry, and the tradition of the lyric complaint. The fusion of landscape, lament, and poetic voice in this tradition makes the river, its flow and its sounds, a potent metaphor for both personal and political grief. In classical pastoral poetry, poets frequently position themselves beside a body of water, typically a river, spring, or fountain, not merely as a scenic convention, but as a site of poetic inspiration. This motif draws on the classical belief that the Muses resided in or were associated with bodies of water, particularly sacred springs such as the Castalian Spring at Delphi, long regarded as a source of divine poetic insight and that was one of the central features of Greek and Roman pastoral poetry, These motives were reworked during the early modern period, and continue to resonate in the presence of rivers in contemporary poetry, situating Pulter’s The Complaint of Thames4 within a broader literary tradition of complaining rivers, which this curation seeks to explore.
Within the pastoral tradition, laments for the dead are a recurring motif. These elegiac pastorals often intertwine mourning with depictions of the natural world, employing elements of nature—trees, rivers, birds—as agents or mirrors of grief. A notable example appears in the work of the Greek bucolic poet Moschus (C2nd BCE), whose lament for the death of his fellow poet Bion exemplifies this convention. In the poem, a withering nature mourns: trees lose their fruit, rivers are transformed into tears, and swans sing dirges upon the water. The rivers’ grief is often symbolically expressed through their estuaries, where fresh waters that are lost in the sea serve as images of dissolution and sorrow.
Cry woe, you glades and you Dorian waters; you rivers, weep for lovely Bion. Lament now, you plants that grow; moan now, you groves; you flowers, breathe your last, your clusters withered; you roses and anemones, bloom red now in mourning; you hyacinth, make your letters speak and take on your leaves more cries of woe: the fine singer is dead.
Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin your grieving song.
You nightingales that lament among the dense foliage, bear news to the Sicilian streams of Arethusa that Bion the oxherd is dead; that with him song too has died, and Dorian minstrelsy has perished.
Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin your grieving song.
You swans of Strymon, cry woe beside your waters; with your lamenting voices sing a dirge such as old age produces from your throats.
(...)
[I]n the woods nymphs of the spring lamented, and their water was turned to tears. Echo laments among the rocks because she is silent and can imitate the sounds from your lips no more. To honor your death, the trees have dropped their fruit and every flower has withered; fair milk has ceased to flow from the flocks, and honey from the hives; it perished for grief in the comb: there is no more need to gather it, now that your honey has died away.
(...)
This is a second grief, a fresh grief for you, Meles, most musical of rivers. It is not long since the death of your poet Homer, sweet mouthpiece of Calliope; they say that from your lamenting waters you made moan for your fine son, and the whole sea was filled with the sound of your voice. Now you weep again for another son and dissolve with fresh grief.
Motifs of withering and mourning nature also recur in Pulter’s poems. For her, water is a powerful element through which to embody grief. Tears recur in her poems as capsules of lament—watery forms produced by the human body that, within an intimate register, mirror a broader geography of sorrow that she perceives in rivers. In several of her poems, such as The Invitation into the Country2, The Complaint of Thames4, Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle15, and Somnus, Why Art Thou Still to Me Unkind?120, rivers carry both national and personal laments, tied to the deposition of Charles I, the loss of friends during the Civil War, and Pulter’s own reflections on her life.
The classical pastoral tradition enjoyed popular reception during the English Renaissance. Poets frequently deployed this genre to express grief, paradigmatically in response to the death of Sir Philip Sidney, which inspired a number of elegiac pastorals featuring river motifs. One such example appears in Edmund Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), in the interpolated poem “The Mourning Muse of Thestylis” by the Irish poet Lodowick Bryskett. In this lament, the poet imagines his tears of grief mixing with those of the nymphs, flowing into the sounds and waters of the River Liffey. This river is joined by other European rivers, including the Thames, in a collective act of mourning for the loss of the poet and courtly hero.
- Come forth, you nymphs, come forth, forsake your watery bowers,
- Forsake your mossy caves, and help me to lament:
- Help me to tune my doleful notes to the gurgling sound
- Of Liffey’s tumbling streams. Come let salt tears of ours,
- Mix with his waters fresh. O come let one consent
- Join us to mourn with wailful plaints the deadly wound
- Which fatal clap hath made; decreed by higher powers.
- The dreary day in which they have from us rent
- The noblest plant that might from East to West be found.
- Mourn, mourn great Philip’s fall, mourn we his woeful end,
- Whom spiteful death hath plucked untimely from the tree,
- While yet his years in flower did promise worthy fruit.
- (...)
- The Thames was heard to roar, the Rhine and eke the Meuse,
- The Scheldt, the Danube itself, this great mischance did rue,
- With torment and with grief; their fountains pure and clear
- Were troubled, and with swelling floods declared their woes.
- The Muses comfortless, the Nymphs with paled hue,
- The Sylvan Gods likewise came running far and near,
- And all with tears bedewed, and eyes cast up on high,
- O help, O help, ye Gods, they ghastly began to cry.
River motifs extended beyond the bounds of elegiac poetry and found resonance in the Renaissance complaint tradition. The poetic form of the complaint, often embedded within sonnet sequences, typically featured a female speaker lamenting the betrayal or loss of a lover. This tradition is modeled on Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of elegiac epistles in which mythological women address absent or unfaithful lovers. In the English literary tradition, examples include Samuel Daniel’s “Complaint of Rosamund” in Delia (1592), Thomas Lodge’s “Complaint of Elstred” in Phillis (1593), Richard Barnfield’s “Cassandra” in Cynthia (1595), and William Shakespeare’s “A Lover’s Complaint,” in his Sonnets (1609). In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s poem, a young woman is situated beside a riverbank, casting letters and love tokens into the water. Observed from a distance by a male onlooker, she recounts the narrative of her seduction and abandonment:
- A thousand favours from a maund she drew
- Of amber crystal and of beaded jet,
- Which one by one she in a river threw,
- Upon whose weeping margent she was set,
- Like usury applying wet to wet,
- Or monarch’s hands that let not bounty fall
- Where want cries some; but where excess begs all.
- Of folded schedules had she many a one,
- Which she perused, sigh’d, tore, and gave the flood;
- Crack’d many a ring of posied gold and bone
- Bidding them find their sepulchres in mud,
- Found yet more letters sadly penn’d in blood,
- With sleided silk feat and affectedly
- Enswathed, and seal’d to curious secrecy.
- These often bathed she in her fluxive eyes,
- And often kiss’d, and often gave to tear,
- Cried O false blood thou register of lies,
- What unapproved witness dost thou bear!
- Ink would have seem’d more black and damned here!
- This said, in top of rage the lines she rents,
- Big discontent, so breaking their contents.
- A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh,
- Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew
- Of court of city and had let go by
- The swiftest hours observed as they flew,
- Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew:
- And privileged by age desires to know
- In brief the grounds and motives of her woe.
- So slides he down upon his grained bat;
- And comely distant sits he by her side,
- When he again desires her, being sat,
- Her grievance with his hearing to divide:
- If that from him there may be aught applied
- Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage,
- ’Tis promised in the charity of age:
- Father, she says, though in me you behold
- The injury of many a blasting hour,
- Let it not tell your judgment I am old,
- Not age, but sorrow, over me hath power;
- I might as yet have been a spreading flower
- Fresh to myself, if I had self-applied
- Love to myself and to no love beside.
- But, woe is me, too early I attended
- A youthful suit it was to gain my grace;
- O one by nature’s outwards so commended,
- That maidens’ eyes stuck over all his face,
- Love lack’d a dwelling, and made him her place.
- And when in his fair parts she did abide,
- She was new lodged and newly deified.
The complaint tradition is a key influence on Pulter’s poem, but as we have seen up to this point, the river typically serves as a backdrop for lamenting the loss of a friend or the departure of a lover. By the 1610s, however, we begin to see a more focused poetic interest in rivers as subjects in their own right, a shift that Pulter will creatively rework in the 1640s within the new political context shaped by the Civil War. As well as the better known river poem Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton (1612), another notable poem foregrounding rivers and aquatic imagery is Britannia’s Pastorals by the English poet William Browne (1614).
In Britannia’s Pastorals, Browne situates a pastoral lament after a love rejection within a fluvial setting, where the Thames and Medway take on heightened metaphorical significance. These rivers embody overwhelming emotional forces, mirroring the shepherd’s grief over the lover’s rejection, his tears becoming floods that echo the rivers’ own power to inundate.
- The shepherd swain began to hate and curse
- That day unfortunate, which was the nurse
- Of all his sorrows. He has given breath
- And life to her which was his cause of death.
- O Aesop’s snake, that thirstest for his blood,
- From whom thyself received a certain good.
- Thus oftentimes unto himself alone
- Would he recount his grief, utter his moan;
- And after much debating, did resolve
- Rather than his grandame Earth should clean involve
- His pining body, ere he would make known
- To her, what tears love in his breast had sown.
- Yea, he would say when grief for speech hath cried,
- “’Tis better never ask than be denied,”
- But as the queen of rivers, fairest Thames,
- That for her buildings other floods enflames
- With greatest envy; or the Nymph of Kent,
- That stateliest ships to sea hath ever sent;
- Some baser groom, for lucre’s hellish course,
- Her channel having stopp’d, kept back her source,
- (Fill’d with disdain) doth swell above her mounds,
- And overfloweth all the neighb’ring grounds,
- Angry she yeats up all that stops her way,
- And with more violence runs to the sea:
- So the kind shepherd’s grief (which long up-pent
- Grew more in power, and longer in extent)
- Forth of his heart more violently burst,
- And all his vow’d intentions quickly burst.
Pulter adopts the complaint form but transforms it by allowing the river itself to speak, whereas in the traditional pastoral poems we have seen above, humans lament beside a stream, or mourning is figured through metaphors of flowing waters. Pulter transforms this genre by giving the river its own voice, reshaping motifs of the personal losses of friends or lovers into a political grievance: the loss of the King.
The motif of the river’s complaint persists beyond the early modern period. In his 2019 poem “Complaint of El Río Grande,” American poet Richard Blanco reimagines this tradition by giving voice to the Rio Grande. The river articulates a history that precedes human time and resists the imposition of national borders—specifically, the geopolitical line dividing the United States, where the river is denominated Rio Grande and Mexico, where it is called Río Bravo. Like Pulter’s poetic engagements with riverine voices, Blanco’s work mobilizes the figure of the speaking river to interrogate the entanglements of nature and nationhood. While their aims diverge, both poets employ the trope of the river’s lament to reflect on how human societies inhabit, transform, and inscribe meaning onto the natural world through sociopolitical structures.
- I was meant for all things to meet:
- to make the clouds pause in the mirror
- of my waters, to be home to fallen rain
- that finds its way to me, to turn eons
- of loveless rock into lovesick pebbles
- and carry them as humble gifts back
- to the sea which brings life back to me.
- I felt the sun flare, praised each star
- flocked about the moon long before
- you did. I’ve breathed air you’ll never
- breathe, listened to songbirds before
- you could speak their names, before
- you dug your oars in me, before you
- created the gods that created you.
- Then countries—your invention—maps
- jigsawing the world into colored shapes
- caged in bold lines to say: you’re here,
- not there, you’re this, not that, to say:
- yellow isn’t red, red isn’t black, black is
- not white, to say: mine, not ours, to say
- war, and believe life’s worth is relative.
- You named me big river, drew me—blue,
- thick to divide, to say: spic and Yankee,
- to say: wetback and gringo. You split me
- in two—half of me us, the rest them. But
- I wasn’t meant to drown children, hear
- mothers’ cries, never meant to be your
- geography: a line, a border, a murderer.
- I was meant for all things to meet:
- the mirrored clouds and sun’s tingle,
- birdsongs and the quiet moon, the wind
- and its dust, the rush of mountain rain—
- and us. Blood that runs in you is water
- flowing in me, both life, the truth we
- know we know: be one in one another.