“Beauty, beauty, beauty,” a Save the Dam Falls founder quoted Mary Louise Curtis Bok during a presentation on April 30, 2025, at Camden Public Library. The presenter claimed this was Mrs. Bok’s reaction to the reconstructed dam at the head of Megunticook River in 1930. (When questioned, the presenter admitted not knowing the source of the quotation.) Alas, this interpretation is, as are so many made by dam-maddened river restoration opponents, a falsehood. 

In fact, Mrs. Bok’s purported words are not original to her; she was quoting from a work by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hopkins, a 19th Century English poet and Jesuit priest, is lauded for his innovative prosody and praise of God through vivid imagery and use of nature. The passage quoted is from a piece Hopkins completed in 1882, “The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo.” 

The poem takes the form of a conversation between two maidens, the Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. The poem begins with the Leaden Echo’s lament for the ephemerality of beauty, seeking a way to keep “beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away.” After mourning the corruption of beauty caused by the ravages of time, the Leaden Echo despairs that there is nothing left to do but succumb to the inevitability of decay and death in our world. 

Thankfully, Hopkins does not leave the reader at the doorway of despair, as the Leaden Echo’s dirge is interrupted by the Golden Echo. Earthly beauty, she explains, is treacherous and perilous as an end unto itself. The Golden Echo knows that everything in this life is a lavish gift from God and she leads the Leaden Echo (and the reader) to see that earthly beauty must be returned to God in gratitude: “Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.” 

It would require a literary contortionist to explain how Mrs. Bok’s quotation from Hopkins’ poetic account of Christian hope applies to an industrial catch basin and spillway. Like the Olmsted Brothers she retained to create her visionary parks and landscapes, Mrs. Bok revered nature: she was a Golden Echo. Would she have adored a gracefully cascading river? Most likely! Would she lament the loss of a granite and concrete impoundment, corrupted by the passage of time, decaying and destroying a site of natural beauty? Not so much. 

Don’t be a Leaden Echo. Vote YES on Article 7. 

Jennifer Gromada lives in Camden