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Ruper Chawner Brooke’s Niagara Falls
Writer: Ruper Chawner Brooke (1887-1915)
Summarize the essay ‘Niagara Falls’ written by Rupert Brooke.
The present essay ‘Niagara Falls’ is written by Rupert Brooke. He was born in 1887 in Warwickshire. He is best known for his idealistic ear sonnet written during the First World War.
The whole essay is about ‘Niagara Falls’. Niagara means nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything. It throws no light on the effects of protection, nor on the facility for divorce in America, nor on corruption in public life, nor on Canadian character nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs.
Niagara is the central home and breeding place for all the touts of earth. Tout is a person who buys tickets for concerts, sports events, etc. and then sells them to other people at a higher price. There are different kinds of touts around Niagara falls. There are touts insinuating and touts raucous, greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly, take-you-by-the-arm-touts, touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle, professionals, amateurs, and dilettanti, male and female, touts who would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and pair, touts who would see you picture post-cards, moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly to tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the falls. He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the Canadian and the American.
Canadian falls are deep and of a saucer shape. So, it may be possible to fill this up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water for the powerhouses. The real secret of the beauty and terror of the falls is not their height or width, but the feeling of vast power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the plunge of that vast body of water. But the American falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the Canadian. It is because they are less in volume, and because the water does not fall so much into one place. By comparison their beauty is almost delicate and fragile. The colour of the water is the ever-altering wonder with both falls.
The source of Niagara is like a birth. Its beautiful falls turning and twisting are like our beautiful life. It is because our life is also like a river. Finally, the human has to die and the nation which is running for power and war will be destroyed. It will fall like Niagara into the white and blue foam of the river. At last, the flow of Niagara floats like a river and disappears in to the deep verge which is like the death.
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