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Note on She Runs Through Running Water

The original was written when I was less than half my present age and my daughter Undine two years old.  She was born in Crawley, Sussex, where we lived for three years while I taught at Ifield Grammar School.  The three of us used to visit a little lake in the middle of a densely thicketed, off-road spot where other young families also picnicked.  Some of my writing then was flowing in the controlled, surreal form I exhibit here.  Purists of the surreal allow of no conscious patrol, but I never did believe in purist aesthetics of any kind.

This item suggests a carnal but amatory eroticism, I believe, in the way it feels freshly energetic and in love with the earth.  It is also a piece of myth-making.  Lise’s presence is in it.  The male character, like the faun in Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi, which I hadn’t read then but have since translated, feels a sharp tang of pleasure: sun on skin, petal scents, the sexuality of water.  His heat is in contrast to the cool, wet female spirit which runs through the warm rain, for I suppose that is what the ‘water ropes’ and the ‘sky’s liquid teeth’ are, though one is never sure with pieces like this.  The male is hot, anticipating and ‘undiscerning’: he can’t see straight.  Having run after her, he stands with her under a waterfall, no doubt breathing heavily.

Alan Marshfield

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