“Clear and Gentle Stream” Introduction

• In "Clear and Gentle Stream," the English poet Robert Bridges (1844-1930) unfolds a nostalgic picture of a countryside childhood. The poem's speaker revisits the "clear and gentle stream" where he used to wander as a boy and finds it just the same as it ever was: still beautiful, still green, still peaceful. Surrounded by familiar sights and sounds, the speaker feels as if his boyhood self is still the same as he ever was, too. In this poem, a beloved place holds memories so intense that they transcend the passage of time. Bridges first published this poem in his 1873 collection Poems.

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“Clear and Gentle Stream” Summary

• Clear, calm little river! I have known you and loved you for such a long time: you heard me singing and daydreaming back in the days when I was a boy. As I wander down your banks again, I'm still singing out the same old sad songs and daydreams, oh clear, calm little river.

  I sit again where I used to sit, in a place where the tree branches form a translucent ceiling over the water and the grass. Here, little whirlpools form in the river's current and sink fallen leaves, as if pretending they were ships. The noble swans wander here, floating past over the sun-dappled stream. The fish choose cool pools to rest in.

  On many summer afternoons, I used to lie here daydreaming. I know just when the church bells will lazily ring; I know that soon after, the evening will send her shadows creeping over this little clearing in the trees, bringing with her the belated gift of the moon, glowing brighter and brighter.

  Oh, clear, calm little river! Before I again go away to a place where you don't run, it seems fitting that you should once again hear me singing the song I sang as a boy—the familiar old melody that I haven't sung in such a long time. I hope that you, like me, will be satisfied to hear my old sad songs and my old daydreams, you clear, calm little river.

“Clear and Gentle Stream” Themes

• 

  Nostalgia, Time, and Place

  In "Clear and Gentle Stream," a speaker revisits the riverside where he used to wander in his "boyish day," his childhood. Coming back here, the speaker feels as if his childhood self lives on: this little stream holds so many memories for him that, when he returns, it's as if he's still a boy. Well-loved places, in this poem, can preserve nostalgic memories and seem to turn the clock back, defeating time itself.

  Returning to the beloved "clear and gentle stream" of his childhood, the poem's speaker finds that it hasn't changed one bit. As he sits in his "old seat" (his favorite old spot to sit), he observes that the trees, the waters, the swans, and the fish are all just as he remembers them. All these familiar sights make the speaker feel that he himself hasn't aged a day. Just as he did in his "boyish day," he sings the same "old lament" (a sad song) to the "selfsame strain" (the same melody) and turns over the same "idle dream." Though these songs and these dreams have been "silent now so long" in his adulthood, they all come rushing back to him when he visits this spot.

  The stream, then, preserves the speaker's happy childhood, capturing a particular time in a particular place. Because the speaker has so very many happy memories in this special spot, he can relive lost days every time he comes back here.

  The poem makes this idea especially clear through its image of the "deep bell" that rings from the church tower nearby to mark the hour when evening starts creeping in. The speaker recognizes the sound of this bell as just another part of the peaceful, changeless landscape and even imagines it ringing "idly," without any real purpose. Though time clearly passes in this place as it does anywhere else—the speaker has grown up and left, after all—the image of the idle bell suggests that time ultimately doesn't matter that much here. The childhood memories preserved in this beautiful place transcend the passage of time.

  • See where this theme is active in the poem.
• 

  The Timeless Beauty of Nature

  When this poem's speaker returns to his favorite "old seat" by the side of a "clear and gentle stream"—a place where he spent "many an afternoon" in his childhood—he finds that all the lovely natural sights and sounds he remembers are still just the same. Nature, this poem suggests, is a consoling friend to humanity, both because it's so beautiful and because its beauty is constant and eternal.

  The speaker hails the poem's stream with a warm-hearted apostrophe: "Clear and gentle stream!" he cries, as if greeting an old friend. And the stream and its environs really do feel friendly, sweet, and protective. The current "play[s]" with fallen leaves like a small child. The waters generously provide a "cool," pleasant spot for fish to rest in. And the tree branches overhead weave together to form a "translucent eaves"—a roof of green leaves that's both beautiful and sheltering, making a safe haven for the speaker.

  Best of all, these pleasures remain just the same as they were when the speaker was a boy. Left to its own devices, nature just doesn't change that much. As a ringing church bell reminds the speaker, there's no escaping time: time passes, things change, and people (like the speaker) have to grow up and eventually die. But here beside the "clear and gentle stream," new fish, new leaves, new swans, and new children come around year after year, and their beauty remains timeless and changeless.

  Natural beauty, in this vision, is self-evidently soothing and delightful. It's also consolingly timeless. Nature is eternal, and it offers the speaker a peace and pleasure that he can always rely on.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Clear and Gentle Stream”

• Lines 1-12

  Clear and gentle stream!
  Known and loved so long,
  That has heard the song
  And the idle dream
  Of my boyish day;
  While I once again
  Down thy margin stray,
  In the selfsame strain
  Still my voice is spent,
  With my old lament
  And my idle dream,
  Clear and gentle stream!

  The poem begins with a fond apostrophe. "Clear and gentle stream!" the speaker cries, greeting a little river as if it were an old friend. And this, indeed, is what it seems to be. The speaker has returned to a riverbank that he has "known and loved" since his "boyish day," his childhood. He truly seems to feel that this river is a friend: he personifies it, reminiscing with it over how it used to listen to his "song" and his "idle dream" when he was a lad.

  Clearly, though, he has been parted from this old friend for some time. He has returned to the stream after an absence, coming back "once again" to wander down its "margin," its banks.

  It may have been a while since the speaker was here, but in many ways, he doesn't feel he's changed one bit. Repetitions in this first stanza's language make that much clear:

  Clear and gentle stream!
  [...]
  That has heard the song
  And the idle dream
  Of my boyish day;
  [...]

  In the selfsame strain,
  Still my voice is spent,
  With my old lament
  And my idle dream,
  Clear and gentle stream!

  These echoes suggest that the speaker's "idle dream" (his daydream) seems just the same as it was when he was a boy. ("Idle" doesn't have a negative connotation here: in this context, it means "pleasantly drifting and wandering," not "lazy.") He's singing the same old melodies he used to as well—the "selfsame strain." (Even as a boy, he seems to have been a melancholy type: he used to sing an "old lament," a sad song. The word "lament" adds a wistful note to this daydreamy scene.)

  The river itself, meanwhile, is just as "clear and gentle" as ever it was. That imagery might suggest that the speaker sees a symbolic (and perhaps sentimental) reflection of his childhood self in these waters, which are as "clear" and pure as childhood innocence and "gentle" as a sweet little boy.

  This will become a poem about the comforting persistence of nature—and the way that a particular place can keep hold of nostalgic memories. Revisiting this clear and gentle stream, the speaker will also feel as if he's revisiting his boyhood itself.

  Robert Bridges gives his verse a fittingly stream-like shape on the page. This long, narrow poem is written in four stanzas of twelve short lines apiece. Copious enjambments mean that long sentences often flow right over line breaks, like water over a stone:

  That has heard the song
  And the idle dream
  Of my boyish day;

  While the language and the imagery of this poem stay "clear and gentle," the meter is a little more forceful. The poem is written in trochaic trimeter: lines of three trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm. Bridges also cuts the closing unstressed syllable off the lines. Here's how this all sounds in the poem's refrain:

  Clear and | gentle | stream!

  This powerful meter, which opens and closes each line on a strong stressed syllable, lends some passion to the speaker's voice as he sings the praises of his beloved old haunts.

• Lines 13-19

  Where my old seat was
  Here again I sit,
  Where the long boughs knit
  Over stream and grass
  A translucent eaves:
  Where back eddies play
  Shipwreck with the leaves,

  

  

  

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• Lines 20-24

  And the proud swans stray,
  Sailing one by one
  Out of stream and sun,
  And the fish lie cool
  In their chosen pool.

  

  

  

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• Lines 25-31

  Many an afternoon
  Of the summer day
  Dreaming here I lay;
  And I know how soon,
  Idly at its hour,
  First the deep bell hums
  From the minster tower,

  

  

  

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• Lines 32-36

  And then evening comes,
  Creeping up the glade,
  With her lengthening shade,
  And the tardy boon
  Of her brightening moon.

  

  

  

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• Lines 37-48

  Clear and gentle stream!
  Ere again I go
  Where thou dost not flow,
  Well does it beseem
  Thee to hear again
  Once my youthful song,
  That familiar strain
  Silent now so long:
  Be as I content
  With my old lament
  And my idle dream,
  Clear and gentle stream.

  

  

  

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“Clear and Gentle Stream” Symbols

• 

  The Stream

  The poem's stream holds a wealth of symbolic meaning:

  • As a "clear and gentle" stream, it symbolizes the speaker's boyhood self in his innocent youth.
    • The stream's purity and gentleness reflect the speaker's sweet younger self, who used to sing to himself and dream his days away here on the riverbank.
    • In its eternal clear gentleness, the stream suggests that the speaker's child self in some sense remains alive.
  • The poem also uses the stream as a traditional symbol of time.
    • There's something paradoxical about this stream: while it's always flowing and always changing, it also stays the same.
    • Time works in just the same way. It flows past constantly and brings perpetual change.
    • Revisiting the stream, then, the speaker gets some insight into the way time works. Time passes, but it's also eternal—just as the flowing stream strikes the speaker as changeless, the same now as it was when he was a boy.
  • See where this symbol appears in the poem.
• 

  The Bells and the Evening

  The tolling church bells and the tiptoeing evening both symbolize time—and thus change and mortality.

  When he was a boy, the poem's speaker remembers, he used to hear the "deep bell" ringing from the "minster tower," the tower of a nearby church. This sound marked the passing of time, letting him know when the evening would come "creeping" in.

  Both of these images reflect what the speaker knows to be true: time just keeps on passing. Though he didn't recognize all that the bells and the evening meant when he was a boy, the speaker now knows that every one of those bells and every one of those evenings carried him closer to the day that he'd grow up and leave this beloved landscape behind.

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“Clear and Gentle Stream” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Repetition

  Bridges peppers "Clear and Gentle Stream" with repetitions—a choice that makes a lot of sense in a poem about nostalgia. The poem revisits lines and words just as the speaker revisits the riverbank.

  Perhaps the most prominent repetition here is the speaker's enthusiastic apostrophe to the river: "Clear and gentle stream!" This refrain opens and closes the poem's first and last stanzas—and thus opens and closes the poem as a whole. The poem, then, keeps coming back to the stream. Besides suiting the speaker's nostalgic perspective, this repetition helps to support the idea that the stream is a constant in the speaker's changing life. He may have to get older and move on, but the same "clear and gentle stream" is always there.

  The speaker also returns repeatedly to lines describing his "idle dream"—that is, his wandering daydreams—and his "old lament," the sad old song he used to sing. (Similarly, the speaker sings the "selfsame strain" and an old "familiar strain" in the first and last stanzas, respectively.) Again, these repetitions suggest constancy in the midst of change. The "idle dream" of the speaker's childhood comes right back to him as he returns to the river, and the echoing language hints his dreams are pretty much the same as they ever were. The returning "lament" also introduces just a touch of wistfulness to the poem's tone. Even as a child, the speaker seems to have had a melancholy temperament; perhaps he was always going to grow up to be a nostalgic man.

  The speaker's songs and dreams—and the speaker himself—are also in tune with the world around them. The words "idle" and "stray" both appear repeatedly here, sometimes describing the speaker, sometimes describing the riverside. The speaker and the swans alike, for instance, "stray" (or wander) here, and the nearby church bell rings as "idly" as the speaker dreams. This is a whole world of slow, meandering, peaceful dreaming.

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• Anaphora

  

  

  

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• Imagery

  

  

  

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• Enjambment

  

  

  

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• Apostrophe

  

  

  

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“Clear and Gentle Stream” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Idle
• Margin
• Stray
• In the selfsame strain
• Spent
• Lament
• Seat
• Boughs
• Translucent eaves
• Back eddies
• Glade
• Tardy
• Boon
• Ere
• Thou dost not
• Beseem

• Wandering, aimless.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Clear and Gentle Stream”

• Form

  When he first published this poem, Bridges entitled it "Elegy." These days, people most often use the term "elegy" to mean "a poem honoring someone who has died." But an elegy can also simply be a serious, reflective poem.

  While this elegy doesn't deal with death per se, it does reflect bittersweetly on the passage of time. Finding all his boyhood memories intact here on the riverbank, this poem's speaker must also reckon with the fact that he is no longer a boy. Still, he finds comfort in the idea that passing time can't change some things. The riverbank preserves the speaker's memories perfectly, and its greenery and wildlife look just the same as they did when the speaker was a boy.

  "Clear and Gentle Stream" is written in a form of Bridges's own invention. The poem uses four 12-line stanzas, each written in short, powerful lines of trochaic trimeter—lines of three trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm. On the page, this long, narrow poem has a fittingly stream-like quality, and the stress-first trochaic lines press forward like the current.

• Meter

  "Clear and Gentle Stream" is written in trochaic trimeter. That means that each line uses three trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm. Bridges also trims the last unstressed syllable off the ends of the lines, so each line ends on a strong stress. Here's an example of how the meter sounds in the poem's first line:

  Clear and | gentle | stream!

  This meter stays pretty steady throughout the poem. But within that steadiness, there's an odd, halting quality. Because each line begins and ends on a strong stress, stressed words keep colliding—and when the lines are enjambed, as they often are, sometimes this effect introduces a surprising pause. Take lines 3-5, for instance:

  That has | heard the | song
  And the | idle | dream
  Of my | boyish | day;

  Here, stresses fall on unlikely words: "and" and "of" are words one wouldn't normally stress in these mid-sentence positions. The enjambments emphasize those stresses even more, introducing unlikely pauses: there's a strong silent beat at the end of each of these lines. The only way to read this meter naturalistically is to take some of the opening stresses lightly and quickly, gliding over them as the "clear and gentle stream" might glide over a stone.

  In order to do that, readers need to linger on the last word of each line, drawing it out through the silent beat the line break introduces. And many of those ending words are powerful ones. "Song" and "dream," in this instance, both carry a lot of emotional weight for the speaker.

  Bridges's curious meter here thus invites readers to linger on meaningful words, just as the speaker lingers over the lovely sights of his riverbank.

• Rhyme Scheme

  The first and last 12-line stanzas of the poem follow this rhyme scheme:

  ABBACDCDEEAA

  The returning A rhymes mark repeated words: stream and dream appear at the beginning and end of each of these stanzas. Those repetitions feel particularly fitting in a poem about a nostalgic return to a beloved place.

  The two middle stanzas, meanwhile, rhyme like this:

  ABBACDCDEEFF

  The pattern remains essentially the same. Bridges moves from an enfolding ABBA pattern to an alternating CDCD to a pair of couplets—only here, those couplets rhyme EE and FF, rather than returning to an AA as they do in the first and last stanzas.

  There's an appropriately river-like, meandering quality to these rhymes as they move from one pattern to the next—and a balanced steadiness in their predictable shape, which divides each stanza into three groups of four lines.

“Clear and Gentle Stream” Speaker

• The poem's speaker is a wistful, nostalgic man revisiting the riverside he knew as a boy. Very little seems to have changed since those years. He remembers every movement of sound and light over the landscape, from the toll of the nearby church bells to the way that evening shadows glide through the trees.

  Though the riverside remains the same, the speaker's life is different now. Since the day when he used to sit and sing here, he has ventured out into a wider world where this river "dost not flow"; in other words, he no longer lives in his hometown and no longer wanders these banks every day. Nonetheless, when he comes back to his "clear and gentle stream" for a visit, he feels like the same person he was when he was a child: his "old lament" and his "idle dream" alike come right back to him.

  The fact that the speaker used to sing a "lament" (a sad song) even as a child suggests that he's always had a melancholy turn of mind. His return now feels bittersweet. His vivid descriptions of the riverside show that he loves this beautiful spot, and he's happy to find it all just as he left it. But the very fact that the riverside stays just as it was while he changes might feel a little poignant. Consolingly, the speaker's memories are perfectly preserved here; revisiting the riverbank feels, to him, like revisiting his "boyish day."

“Clear and Gentle Stream” Setting

• The poem reveals its setting in its first line: the speaker wanders beside a "clear and gentle stream," strolling along a riverbank where he used to while away the hours as a child. This place is as beautiful now as it was then. Under a "translucent eaves" of branches—a green roof made of summer leaves and dappled sunlight—the speaker sits and watches peacefully while "eddies" (little whirlpools) spin in the current and the soft shadows of evening slowly come "creeping up the glade." Every living creature here seems to be enjoying itself: "proud swans" go unhurriedly "sailing" past, and fish seem deeply contented "in their chosen pool."

  The speaker is at home, too: this vision of natural beauty is also cozy and domestic. This is the countryside, not wild nature, and the speaker can't be too far from a fireside and a hot dinner. He can hear the familiar sound of bells of the "minster tower" (the church tower) from where he sits. Bridges grew up in Kent in southeast England—a particularly green and pleasant part of the world—and, reading the poem in an autobiographical light, readers might picture a specifically English countryside here.

  The speaker's fondness for this landscape comes through in his loving descriptions of his surroundings. But there's also a hint of sadness in his experiences here. Though this riverside is just as it always was, the speaker himself has had to move on from the happy boyhood days he remembers here. Visiting the riverside now, he can recover all his old memories of the times he spent here—but he also knows that he will have to leave again.

Literary and Historical Context of “Clear and Gentle Stream”

Literary Context

Robert Bridges (1844-1930) published "Clear and Gentle Stream" in Poems (1873), his first collection. His literary career would straddle the turn of the century; he had a foot in two quite different worlds. Born during the long and prosperous reign of Queen Victoria, Bridges would become Poet Laureate under her successor, Edward VII, in 1913. He first wrote in an England at the height of its imperial power—and became Poet Laureate in an England about to be traumatized and chastened by the horrors of World War I. (In this, he's a lot like his contemporary Thomas Hardy, whose work deals with some similar themes.)

This nostalgic poem is only one example of the way that Bridges's life and work were conservative with a small c: hearkening back to an earlier age, valuing tradition and memory. Bridges was an old-school classicist (a scholar of Greek and Roman literature) and a founding member of the Society for Pure English, a reforming organization dedicated to preserving the English language's heritage. (Like the Académie Française, the Society for Pure English also looked askance on what it saw as corrupting foreign influences on the language it sought to guard.)

Bridges (like many of his contemporaries) was also deeply influenced by an earlier generation of poets: the Romantics, who wrote around the turn of the 19th century. This poem's nostalgia for a rural childhood seems touched by the ideas of writers like William Wordsworth, who believed that the natural world (and children) had an innate wisdom.

For all that he could be old-fashioned, Bridges was also an innovative versifier, often experimenting with form and meter. He was a great champion of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins, an even more unconventional writer. (If Bridges hadn't collected and published Hopkins's work posthumously, the history of poetry would look and sound very different.) Hopkins's "sprung rhythm" (in which lines of verse are measured solely by number of stresses, rather than both number and pattern) has a clear influence on Bridges's work.

Historical Context

This poem's picture of rural beauty feels nostalgic, romantic, and perhaps a little sad. And it's not the only piece of Victorian poetry that looks on nature and childhood with a wistful eye. The natural world in which this poem's speaker takes such pleasure was (as Bridges's good friend Gerard Manley Hopkins lamented) under serious threat during Bridges's era.

Bridges wrote when the Industrial Revolution was transforming the English economy and the English way of life. As workers slowly began to leave traditional occupations in the countryside, English cities—London in particular—became crowded and filthy. (The famous "London fog" of the era was not actually fog, but a toxic haze of coal smoke.) The countryside, too, was changing: industrialization raised huge mills and factories in what used to be farmland.

Many writers of the time were deeply alarmed by these developments, worrying not only for the beauty of nature crushed under the heel of industry, but for the human soul in a world that seemed built for machines. This poem's nostalgia for a countryside childhood might be read as part of a wider cultural nostalgia for simpler, greener, less mechanized times.

More “Clear and Gentle Stream” Resources

• External Resources

  • A Short Biography — Learn more about Bridges's life and work.

  • Bridges as Laureate — Read more about Bridges's time as the Poet Laureate.

  • The Poem as a Song — Listen to a version of the poem set to music.

  • Portraits of Bridges — Admire some portraits of Bridges via London's National Portrait Gallery.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Bridges

  • London Snow