To be read at the author's funeral
The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disasterIts 12 lines reject false comfort and offer something more useful in its place: a measure of clarity about the human situation.
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
For two of its three stanzas, this reads like a nature poem. And like most nature poems, it understands the natural world both as a series of phenomena and as a storehouse of symbols.
Insects, birds and trees just are what they are. But people can’t seem to look at anything in nature without trying to read it. Which is, inevitably, to misread, to write our own thoughts onto the universe’s inscrutable page.
She turns errors of perception into a kind of conceptual mischief, a charming game in which unease plays tag with reassurance. You can call the ripple on the water a “wound,” which turns its disappearance into healing.
The fly that caused that brief disturbance buzzes off to become prey for the swallows, but any potential violence in that image is dissolved as the insect is reclassified as food. We arrange the world as we translate it into language.
Sometimes we realize our mistakes. Kenyon’s second stanza emphasizes the fallibility of human perspective, and makes gentle comedy of our habit of inventing causes for alarm.
Is that a cloud of poison gas hovering over the orchard? Exhaust from an alien spaceship?
Did the barn catch fire?
It’s only the trees. Everything is fine.
And then it isn’t. As soon as we think the premonition of doom has been dispelled, the hammer drops. Sometimes — the worst times, as often as not — things are exactly as they seem to be. Lulled by the fading light over the water, we awaken to find ourselves at a funeral.
What happened? Whose funeral? The final stanza is blunt — spelling matters out plainly rather than playing with ambiguous images — but also enigmatic.
And death, the conclusion to every story, isn’t without its comic aspect, the slapstick of the pallbearers grappling with their burden. The brusque last line might be taken as a punchline. (...)
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel. (...)
In “The Pond at Dusk” she sees a lot, and conveys it in very few words.
Just 73 of them, arranged into four sentences of increasing complexity.
This is free verse, which means that the music happens not through meter or rhyme but in the line breaks.
Those breaks are also subtle cliff-hangers. The eye, looking for continuity, finds white space. The voice pauses, creating a breath’s worth of suspense. What are the swallows dropping toward?
What is it that looks like smoke? Like disaster?
There is nothing mysterious in this poem. A bug skims the water. A flock of swallows scatters. Trees are in leaf and in blossom. Someone has died. And yet the poem itself swells with mystery, an intimation of deep waters running under the placid surface.
[ed. Wish I understood and could appreciate poetry more... another dimension of human experience, art, and expression mysterious to me.]
