A waterfall is an odd place to find comfort, since everything in it seems to be going down. Henry Vaughan's speaker sits beside one and argues that the fall is not an ending at all. The water, he says, descends "Not to an end, / But quicken'd by this deep and rocky grave, / Rise to a longer course more bright and brave." The stream becomes a picture of death followed by resurrection, and the poem's task is to persuade us, and perhaps the speaker himself, that the picture holds.
The opening stanza copies the thing it describes. Long, steady pentameter lines ("With what deep murmurs through time's silent stealth") are cut by abrupt short ones: "Here flowing fall, / And chide, and call," then "Where, clear as glass, / All must descend." The lines tip over their own edges like water over rock. Everything rhymes in couplets, so each drop lands neatly on its partner: stealth with wealth, pass with glass, descend with end. That last pair is the poem's thesis in miniature. "End" is placed exactly where "descend" arrives, and the sentence then denies it.
The imagery is people in disguise. The drops are a "liquid, loose retinue" that lingers, "afraid" of the steep place, like attendants hesitating at a threshold. They are also hesitant mortals, and the "common pass" is a pun, since it is both a narrow route and the passing that happens to everyone. Vaughan then repeats a few words until they stop being separate images. "Deep" runs through the murmurs, the "rocky grave" and the "mystical deep streams." Variations of "quick," an old word for "alive," appear in "quicken'd," "quick store" and "quick'ning love," so the water is not merely moving but living.
In the second section the poem turns from description to argument, and the verse changes with it. The lines settle into even, eight-syllable couplets, and the speaker addresses the stream directly ("Dear stream! dear bank"). He asks two rhetorical questions built on one logic: if each drop "Runs thither whence it flow'd before," why should souls fear "a shade or night, / Who came, sure, from a sea of light?" The second question borrows the language of bookkeeping: the drops are "sent back / So sure to thee, that none doth lack." Nothing is lost, so why would "frail flesh" suspect that "what God takes, he'll not restore"?
The final movement is the most interesting, because Vaughan undercuts his own comparison. The water's "sacred wash and cleanser" and "first consigner" seem, judging by the language, to recall baptism, and "Fountains of life where the Lamb goes" and the Spirit that "first upon thy face did move, / And hatch'd all" echo biblical images of water and creation. But he admits that these "sublime truths" are closed to "dull man" unless that Spirit leads his mind. Nature does not explain itself. Then comes a darker note. The brook's rings spread until the water "restagnates," reach the bank, "and then / Are no more seen, just so pass men." That odd word suggests the movement dying into stillness, and the comparison no longer promises return. It describes disappearance.
The poem's last lines resolve this by leaving the waterfall behind. "O my invisible estate, / My glorious liberty, still late!" The speaker's true home cannot be seen, and its arrival is slow ("still late" suggests long delayed). "Thou art the channel my soul seeks, / Not this with cataracts and creeks." After forty lines of loving attention, the real stream is set aside as a mere sign.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. It is a nature poem that distrusts nature as an answer, and it has real doubt in it. The reassurance that the water returns to its source is made more convincing by the admission that human beings can also just fade from sight. Vaughan does not hide that tension. He builds the poem's form, from tumbling short lines to steady argument, to move through it.