Since we’ll be celebrating the nymphaia down by the river (and I have a strong connection to him) I was asked to come up with some verse in honor of the most holy Willamette. And, well, I thought it’d be nice to share it with the rest of you as well.
First, however, here’s a picture of him.
Damn, that is one sexy river.
Now on to the hymn …
Hymn to the Willamette
With a glad heart I praise thee
fertile lord of the verdant valley,
mighty one who cannot be constrained,
fairest child of Okeanos,
our dear, all-holy Willamette!
Swollen with the heavenly flood
you rush through the heart of our country,
bringing nourishment to the barren fields,
making the orchards ripe with fruit,
providing hungry men with a feast of fishes.
The nymphs gather upon your shore,
dancing in the moonlight,
laughing at the sporting geese,
splashing with their tender feet
as they wade out to be nearer to you.
For your beauty enraptures them like Selenê
who fell under the spell of slumbering Endymion;
they long to stroke the green hair from your silver face,
to ride upon your bull-broad back as you weave snake-like here and there,
to feel the frenzy of your waves,
the force of your crashing against their tender maiden’s flesh.
So hail to you, most potent of rivers!
May you continue to bless this land and make its people prosperous!
I’d never thought of rivers as being sexy…but I think you are right on about the Willamette…though the name does have a feminine ending…still sexy. And I love river songs which your hymn definitely is. All Hail!
About the feminine ending… while it appears to be so, since it looks like French, it actually comes from a native Kalapuya word more accurately transliterated as Whilamut (pronounced “wheel-a-moot”) which means “where the river ripples and runs fast”.
I admit I used to tend to see rivers as female, but perhaps my years of immersion in Hellenism has influenced me, as I now see how they could very much be male.
It’s interesting, some others here have felt Willamette as a feminine river … and for myself, although he’s definitely masculine it’s not the same sort of masculinity that the Greeks tended to attribute to their own rivers. (Which are always ultra-butch, shaggy-bearded, and sometimes horned or with a part-human part-bovine form.) It’s more a soft, sensual masculinity … youthful, almost androgynous but definitely sexy. Sort of like Jaye Davidson or 90s era Anthony Kiedis. I guess in that respect he’s more like the Egyptian Nile-god Hapi, who was male but had female breasts and addressed with a mixture of masculine and feminine terms.
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I have to agree – I’ll go take a photo of the South Platte – I think it’s an old but memorable river.
I’d love to see that!
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