Five Poems from Kaaterskill Clove, by Joseph Stanton

Kaaterskill Clove
Joseph Stanton
Shanti Arts, 2025
https://shantiarts.co/uploads/files/stu/STANTON_KAATERSKILL.html

or, on Amazon:
​https://www.amazon.com/-/fr/Joseph-Stanton/dp/1962082768

he Titan's Goblet, by Thomas Cole (USA) 1833

Thomas Cole’s The Titan’s Goblet, 1833
 
Thomas Cole’s cup runneth over,
as a landscape within a landscape,
a dream within a dream.
In an immense goblet lives a world,
a Roman palace on one side,
a ruined remnant of aqueduct on the other.     
 
The rim of the cup
and the rim of the cup’s base 
are trimmed with forests,
the stem of the goblet
is the trunk  
of a gargantuan tree.
 
This absurdity 
is calmly accepted
by those who sail the ships
and those who live,
within the buildings
perched on the rim
 
of the goblet 
and those 
who occupy 
the tiny city
that lurks below 
the falls of water,
 
the odd, unavoidable
spillages.
All seems natural
within this stilled life
semblance
of a garden ornament
                                                                                                                        
set within 
an exquisitely finished landscape
that features                                                                                                    
the Hudson River flowing
in the background,
enormous and inevitable.

View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, by Thomas Cole (USA) 1837

Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1838
 
Cole loved this hillside overlooking a creek,
a picnic spot, a short walk from his home. 
He shows us his wife and child at play.
Maria has left her bonnet on the grass
 
and has picked some flowers that she carries
towards the baby, who laughs
and opens his arms to receive them.
In the distance we see the mountains 
 
that edge the Hudson River.
Approach within a few inches
of the canvas and you can spy
the smokestacks of the growing village
 
that crowds the far side of the river.
By the time Cole painted it,
this view could no longer be seen
because a railroad had cut through it;
 
hundreds of trees beloved by Cole
had been chopped down to clear the path.
But in this picture Cole has tucked himself,
happily, into a recently lost world.
 
You can glimpse him stepping through
a broken fence, wearing his familiar garb--
tan hat, red shirt, and blue coat.
He has a rifle on his left arm,
 
but he carries no game. He has, perhaps,
just been out on one of his long walks.
He gazes tenderly towards his wife and child,
his face breaking into the brightest of smiles.  

The Icebergs, by Frederic Edwin Church (USA) 1861

Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs, 1861
 
In 1859, Frederic Church 
chartered a ship for risky passage up 
“Iceberg Alley,”
from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland 
to Labrador then back to Halifax.
 
He sketched angelic wonders of white light,
boulders profoundly cold, complacent,
moving massives,
deathly, deadly, 
in an absurdly austere North.
 
This other sort of wilderness
offered no green leaves, 
no exotic birds, no mountain trails,
no volcanoes exploding fire and ash.
These spectral mountains of crystal, 
 
rub and crash against each other, 
and against unwise boatmen
who may, of a sudden, find their ships
entrapped and unmoving
or broken and sinking.
 
This is Church’s 
most peculiar masterwork, 
and, despite its frozen grandeur, 
it seemed, to early critics, 
to lack moral force.
 
For us today, we can see
Church’s islands of ice
as memento mori,
understanding them, as we now must, 
as more endangered than endangering.
 

Cotopaxi, by Frederic Edwin Church (USA) 1862

Frederic Edwin Church’s Cotopaxi, 1862
 
Church imagines the volcano 
as a mouth of God, 
speaking His earth,
fiery and neverending,
 
but Church also grasped 
from Humboldt and the rest
that the majestic fires
need also be geologic. 
 
For Church, Cotopaxi was ideal:
Ecuadorian, resplendent,
and plausible to science.
The allegory, too, suited the times,
 
troubled as they were by War.
Despite the perfect form 
of Cotopaxi’s divine cone,
a dire darkness spews forth 
 
and drifts in front of the rising sun,
an eye of God that sees through 
the smokey dark and casts a cross of light 
on the waters of the lake.
 
We must also note that the light, 
lovely blue of the sky to the left 
speaks of reborn day,
and that the waterfall’s 
 
shimmering
red reflection of fire
is overwhelmed
by a vividly transcendent, 
 
surrounding flow 
of blue, blue, blue.

A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, by Sanford Gifford (USA) 1862

Sanford Gifford’s A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, 1862
 
Gifford gives us a cluster of birches
on a precipitous ledge at far left.
The birches and the ledge are vivid,
sharp-edged in detail in the gleam
of the late-afternoon light of a sun
that shines center-cut directly at us.
 
Below the ledge a hunter and his dog
struggle upward towards this amazing
view of a vast ravine, bright
and golden, dazzled by delicate
mists rising from lakes and ponds
and creeks and the dimly visible
 
line of white that is, we know,
the tumbling falls of Kaaterskill.
Along the bottom of the ravine
and up the mountainous steeps
on all sides hazed autumnal trees
glow golden and green.
 
We cannot quite make out the disk
that is the sun, it’s a near-white,
a pure, unrelenting intensity.
A clearing in the deep distance
holds a small house, tiny 
from where we stand.
 
Smoke rises from its stack,
speaking of a fireplace,
where a stew is cooking, 
for the belated hunter, 
whose return is,
perhaps patiently, awaited.
 
Joseph Stanton

"Thomas Cole's The Titan's Goblet, 1833", "Thomas Cole's View on the Catskill, Early Autumn, 1837", "Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs, 1861",  "Frederic Edwin Church's Cotopaxi, 1862", "Sanford Gifford's A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove, 1862" appeared in Kaaterskill Clove, copyright © Joseph Stanton 2025, and used with permission of Shanti Arts Publishing [www.shantiarts.com].

Joseph Stanton’s ninth book of poems, Kaaterskill Clove, a sequence of poems inspired by the Hudson River School, has just been published by Shanti Arts. His previous book, Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, was also published by Shanti Arts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.