Most poems about mortality begin with a human mind looking at nature. Viereck's "Arethusa: The First Morning" reverses the arrangement: the speaker is a stream, and the thing that happens to her is the first flicker of consciousness. The title points to the myth of Arethusa, the nymph turned into a spring, though the poem never retells the story. It takes the idea of a woman who is also water and asks what it would feel like to wake up inside that body for the very first time.
The central idea arrives early and is stated plainly: "Life is one kind of death." The stream has always cycled through "Sea, fountain, stream, then waterfall to sea," but only now does she feel it, and feeling changes everything. Before waking she "felt no dying"; afterwards, "Alive, I die at every throb." Awareness and mortality turn out to be a single gift. The poem is a meditation on what it costs to be conscious, and on whether the cost is worth paying.
The second stanza supplies the emotional centre. A doe wades through the stream, and the water, which needs "no eyes," knows her through touch alone: "a tang of faltering and fear and fur." Viereck gives the moment a lovely paradox when he writes that "harmlessness has a touchable soul." The encounter is brief, tender and permanent in its loss: "Two sisters, cycles tangent never again." Two lives touch at a single point, like circles, and then curve away toward their separate graves. The brief meeting becomes the poem's definition of what living is for.
Sound and rhythm carry much of the argument. The verse is unrhymed and loosely iambic, with long, winding sentences that mimic a stream's meander, then abrupt halts. Questions pile up ("What is awakeness? / Is it a thing?"), and compound words such as "silver-sandy-gliding-cold" pack sensation into a single rush, the way a fast current packs pebbles and light. Repetition works as a structural spine: "We want to wait . . . because we want to wait" returns later as "I want to stop because I want to stop." Both lines are circular logic, wanting without a reason, and they sound like what a creature might say when it clings to a feeling it cannot justify. The echo also shows how little the stream's situation has changed, even as her awareness has grown.
The final movement is a waterfall, and Viereck makes it the poem's boldest piece of imagery. The falling water becomes "the graceful spray beneath the lace of sunlight," then "a river of air," and finally part of an upward migration in which dew creeps "up and stub[s] against the stars, / Up, up like centipedes on ladders of light." The comic, slightly odd simile is typical of the poem's tone, which keeps rapture and playfulness alongside grief. The stream cannot tell whether this exhilaration marks "the end, or the beginning," and the poem lets that doubt stand.
The last line is an elegant piece of compression: "I fall / To rise." Falling and rising are made one motion, matching the water cycle that was a prison in stanza three ("Slave-bound by back and forth") and becomes, at the edge of the cliff, a kind of promise. The closing wish is quieter and more human: "I think I'll find no hoofprints on the sky." She hopes that what she loved will not be absent from where she is going, or perhaps accepts that it will be, and rises anyway.
What makes the poem memorable is its refusal to settle into either comfort or despair. It treats the cycle of nature, so often a consoling image, as something more unsettling: a pattern that feels merciful from outside and terrifying from within. By giving that inside view to a stream, Viereck lets us see the ordinary human fact of mortality at a slight angle, fresh, as if for the first morning.