Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
popular piece. The musical depiction of the river's course across Bohemia flows through
forests and meadows, past ruined castles and a peasant wedding, before sweeping majestic-
ally through Prague to join the River Elbe. The evocative piece cemented Smetana's pos-
ition as one of the founders of the Czech nationalist movement and 'Vltava' is considered
by many to be the unofficial national anthem of the Czech Republic.
The Mississippi is another river with a very strong musical tradition, particularly along its
lower reaches where the river flows through that region of the USA known as the Deep
South, a culturally cohesive farming area dominated by cotton plantations during the 19th
and much of the 20th century. The various styles of music that originated along this part of
the Mississippi have been enjoyed all over North America and beyond. The blues were cre-
ated on the Mississippi Delta, the alluvial floodplains that stretch between the Mississippi
and Yazoo Rivers, while further downstream the city of New Orleans gave rise to boogie-
woogie and jazz. The blues became fused with gospel music to spawn rhythm and blues,
rock 'n' roll, and soul music. Louis Armstrong, B. B. King, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Elvis Presley, and Aretha Franklin are among the internationally renowned musicians of
the 20th century born and raised on the banks of the Mississippi.
Rivers in literature
Authors and poets have used rivers in numerous ways. A river can serve not only as a geo-
graphical feature but as a literary device, its constant movement and direction giving im-
petus to a narrative. The river journey is one of the most common river metaphors, linking
the past to the present, doubling as the journey through life, presenting insights into the ex-
perience of growing up. As a setting in fiction, the river bank offers a sense of destiny and
hints at the possibility of self-discovery.
An assessment of the various ways rivers are used as poetic devices in Roman literature
highlights how this vigorous and variable element of the landscape interacts with the dy-
namics of poetry. The river can be a mediator between poetry and poet, the flow of the river
can become part of the narrative and may form part of a narrative structure. Not least in the
epic
Aeneid
(19 BC) of Virgil, where the river serves as a symbol for directional progress,
the journey being simultaneously spatial, temporal, and literary. The River Tiber is where
Aeneas begins his travels in Italy and also provides a course for the narrative.
Another example of a river driving a poetic narrative is found in Alfred Lord Tennyson's
poem
The Lady of Shalott
(1833). Everything in the poem follows the movement of the
