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Where Hudson’s Wave

A Hudson Highlands ballad

by George Pope Morris

1853 · 3 stanzas

Where Hudson’s wave o’er silvery sands
Winds through the hills afar,
Old Cronest like a monarch stands,
Crowned with a single star!
And there, amid the billowy swells
Of rock-ribbed, cloud-capped earth,
My fair and gentle Ida dwells,
A nymph of mountain-birth.

The snow-flake that the cliff receives,
The diamonds of the showers,
Spring’s tender blossoms, buds, and leaves,
The sisterhood of flowers,
Morn’s early beam, eve’s balmy breeze,
Her purity define;
Yet Ida’s dearer far than these
To this fond breast of mine.

My heart is on the hills. The shades
Of night are on my brow;
Ye pleasant haunts and quiet glades,
My soul is with you now!
I bless the star-crowned highlands where
My Ida’s footsteps roam:
O for a falcon’s wing to bear
Me onward to my home!

The Real Ida

Despite its dreamy invocation of Ida as “a nymph of mountain-birth,” this is not a love poem in the romantic sense. Ida was Morris’s daughter — one of his three children with Mary Worthington Hopkins (the others were William H. and Georgianna). The poem is the work of a father longing to return home to his child after a stretch in the New York City newspaper trenches.

Morris’s home was Undercliff, on the Hudson at Cold Spring, NY — a stately villa built in the early 1830s by John Hamilton (son of Alexander Hamilton), sold to Morris before completion. From the front porch he could see Storm King Mountain — called by him and his contemporaries “Old Cronest” or “Crow Nest” — rising directly across the river. The “single star” that crowns it in the poem refers to a literal evening star that often appears above the mountain’s peak at twilight.

Undercliff stood until 1926, when it was demolished. Today the street where it stood is called Morris Avenue in his honor.

“A Glorious Burst of Poetry”

Among the dozens of poems and songs Morris published, “Where Hudson’s Wave” was widely considered his finest pure lyric. It received unusually warm critical reception in his own time, often quoted in tandem with his “Croton Ode” as evidence of his range — the official civic poet writing the celebration ode for the City of New York could also write a private domestic lyric of pristine intimacy.

“‘Where Hudson’s Wave’ is a glorious burst of poetry, modulated into refinement by the hand of a master. Where will you find a nautical song, seemingly more spontaneous in its genial outbreak, really more careful in its construction…” — Critical preface to Poems by George Pope Morris (1853)

“I come now to my favorite, ‘Where Hudson’s wave;’ a poem which I never read but that it glows upon my lip and heart, and leaves the air of my thoughts tremulous with musical vibrations. What a delicious gush of parental feeling! How daintily and delicately move the ‘fitly chose words,’ tripping along like silver sandaled fairies.” — Contemporary critic, quoted in the 1853 edition

Morris and Cold Spring were inseparable in the public mind. Tourist guidebooks of the 1850s pointed out Undercliff to passengers steaming up the Hudson; the painter W. H. Bartlett made an 1839 print — Undercliff, near Cold Spring (the Seat of General George P. Morris) — that became one of the most reproduced images of the Hudson Highlands.

Why It Belongs in the Croton Archive

This poem isn’t about Croton-on-Hudson directly. Storm King Mountain (“Old Cronest”) stands roughly 25 miles north of Croton, near West Point. But it belongs in the Croton archive for two reasons:

1. Same author, same Hudson sensibility. Morris is the only poet who wrote both an official municipal ode for the Croton Aqueduct (1842) and a private lyric celebrating the upriver landscape that the aqueduct’s engineers were just then mapping. The two poems show a single mind moving between civic duty and personal feeling along the same river.

2. The naming irony. “Old Cronest” sounds related to “Croton,” but the etymologies are unrelated — “Cronest” is from “Crow’s Nest” (the mountain’s shape resembled one); “Croton” is from Kenoten, a Kitchawank sachem. Morris’s readers in 1853 would have seen them as part of the same Hudson Valley world — one shaped by the same river that fed the new aqueduct delivering water to their kitchen taps.

About George Pope Morris (1802–1864)

One of the most popular American poets of his era. Co-founded the New-York Mirror in 1823 and the Home Journal in 1846 (which continues today as Town & Country). Wrote the official Croton Ode for the October 14, 1842 aqueduct celebration, set to music adapted from Rossini’s opera Armida by Sidney Pearson and performed at the Park Fountain by the New York Sacred Music Society. His song “Woodman, Spare That Tree!” (1837), set to music by Henry Russell, was among the most widely sung popular songs of the antebellum period.

Morris’s papers are held at the New York State Library in Albany.

Source

Published in Poems by George Pope Morris (1853). Text from Project Gutenberg eBook 2558: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2558. Critical commentary quoted from the 1853 edition’s preface.