The Appreciation Corner: "Spring Pools," for the season in-between + Stories

SPRING POOLS
I always think that Robert Frost must have been somehow remembering—in some vague, inchoate way—Philip Freneau’s “The Wild Honey-Suckle” when he wrote “Spring Pools.” The form is very close: Freneau ends a six-line tetrameter stanza with a couplet; Frost begins a six-line pentameter stanza with a couplet. Freneau and Frost turn to weak rhymes, expressive of the shivery frailties of flowers, and both poets rhyme flower with power or powers. Freneau closes “The Wild Honey-Suckle" with this: From morning suns and evening dews / At first thy little being came: / If nothing once, you nothing lose, / For when you die you are the same; / The space between, is but an hour, / The frail duration of a flower."

In both poems, the flower is tied to the brevity of life. Powers are opposed to the flower: in one, autumn and the seeing death of nature; in the other, a more surprising move—the onrushing sweep of life. There will be more life, but the flowers and pools will be lost in its great pour:

SPRING POOLS

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods--
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

The pools and flowers belong to that tenuous time when the Snow Queen’s grip on the land has loosened and the first brave flowers bloom. The simplicity—the tendency toward monosyllables, the parallelism (“And like the flowers beside them”/“Will like the flowers beside them”, “To darken”/“To blot”) the almost “total” lack of flowery ornament—save for the very appropriate use of antimetabole to describe a mirrored scene: “These flowery waters and these watery flowers.” The use of the antimetabole, the repetition of words in transposed order, means that all ends “in balance,” though it is a balance that will soon be gone. The last line reinforces that balance by returning to a regular metrical line.

This is no allegory, and yet we sense our parallels to these small shining pools and tiny flowers and are capable are feeling grief for their passage in a reading of the poem. The unthinking trees whose branches lend “defect” to the reflected sky loom above in dark patterns, their pent-up life about to break from the bough. Their powers will make a fantastic Black Forest of the land; they will annihilate and suck away the delicate life of pool and blossom. The force is over-bearing; they do not merely “blot out” but “blot out and drink up and sweep away.” Any one of these would do, but the heaping up stresses the utter blank and dark to come.

Instead of joining with the greater life of streams, the pools will be strained through roots and not transformed into darkness but lost there. The snows that melted yesterday have assisted the rule of winter, and the forest likewise is a great power. Flower and pool are but ephemeral: “frail duration.” Already ruffled by chill breezes, they will yield to the dark forces of death and destruction, their own lives taken that there might be more life.

"Spring Pools" came to mind last week. During a sunny day, the snow melted from the two flower beds next to the warm southern wall of the house. Underneath proved to be many yellow flowers, tightly closed, of aconite. Then it rained and mist rose up from the heaped banks of snow, and melting snow and rain puddled in the flower beds. And then I thought of Robert Frost’s “flowery waters” and “watery flowers.”

Addendum, March 26, 2:00 a.m.: Without thinking, I posted something about Frost yesterday--and here today it is his birthday.

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UPDATE ON STORIES

Last night I sent off some stories, and this morning I woke up to find them accepted. I always find that sort of thing pleasing. Enthusiam is always dear. New forthcoming stories: "The Red King's Sleep" (continuing the Carroll motif of the last post) and "The Horse Angel" in Postcripts (U.K.) The "Sleep" takes that old chestnut "then I woke up and it was all a dream" and turns it inside-out and sideways. "The Horse Angel" began with an elderly neighbor here in Cooperstown, and I make use of her character, her house and handed-down possessions, and her marriage of 63 contented years. There are a lot of stories in the pipeline labeled forthcoming, and that is good because I have been devoting myself to poetry lately. Another forthcoming story (from the same editor as the two last, so I just found out about this one as well) is "Static," scheduled to come out this year in Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology, ed. Nick Gevers (U.K./U.S.: Solaris Books). Never had my innocent little mind turned to the thought of writing a steampunk story, but I had a splendid romp in the writing. Lots of steam as well as peculiar characters, an imprisoned young woman, perilous lightning, and some enlivening combustion.

MEMES

I know. Haven't done them. Will do, honest. At least one or two. Soon.

Photograph credit: The "spring shot of Llantisilio churchyard with snowdrops" is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and "Plutarch" or Sandi Baker of "Chester, Cheshire, U. K." It's not in the woods, and it has no spring pools. But it has spring flowers and bare branches and more than a hint of time's passage.

Falling toward Easter

CARROLL AT EASTER

As it is a busy week in the snowdrifts of upstate New York, I shall just wish friends and passers-by a happy and blessed Easter-to-be.

And if you are in need of some writing advice while I am out-of-the-palace, please take this: "'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"

That is, of course, from the immortal nib of a pen held by Lewis Carroll or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the kaleidoscopic, the myriad-talented, and the Reverend. Ah, to be born under the tilted grin of a Cheshire moon, caught in the branches of the Daresbury parsonage tree!

I am glad of his tenderness for little girls because he gave me a gift at an early age that has served me all my life and given me much joy.

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HOMOMONOJOT

Here's an on-line poem of mine that just popped up today: "Homomonojot" at The Round Table Review (U. K.) If you're wondering where the name came from, it is a portmanteau word (thank you again, Lewis Carroll) that puts together bits of "homonym" + "monometer" + "jot." Does that sound a little smart-alecky? Blame it on the one-stress lines. Thanks to Jon Stone for suggesting that I submit to The Great Monometer Challenge.

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ILLUSTRATION CREDIT

The contemporary Alice falling into a marvelous rabbit hole can be found on DeviantArt; it is by "Tahra" or Kyoung Hwan Kim of South Korea. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The Youmans - Spitzer connection

Poet William Harmon gets the grandest kind of a prize for being the very first person to drop me a note about my young music-minded cousin who has just hit the big time under her professional name of "Kristen": "In 2006, Ms. Dupré changed her legal name, according to records in Monmouth County Superior Court, from Ashley R. Youmans to Ashley Rae Maika DiPietro, taking her stepfather’s surname since she regarded him as 'the only father I have known.' But in . . . interview, she referred to herself as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, which is how she is known on MySpace" (The New York Times March 13, 2008). The just and jolly reward for dropping me a line on this important political matter of forbidden fruit will be an immediate name change from "William Harmon" to "Billy Rae Taylor D'Anunnzio," with alternate monikers of "Jonesie" and "Brandyn."

Billy Rae has expressed the thought that life is a lot more lively in New York than back home in the Carolinas. The North Carolina governor is downright boring "except for 30 mins. a year when he drives around a NASCAR track." Perhaps we can fax him Eliot Spitzer, who is terribly available this morning. Client-9. Kristin. Let's hope they can stand the excitement of their lives. Maybe even hope for a smidge of redemption and a scrap of good sense. As a dyed-in-the-cotton Southerner raised to be riddled with guilt, I have a hard time smacking anybody. Besides, Randall Jarrell told us all, "You know what I was, / You see what I am: change me, change me!" (“The Woman at the Washington Zoo.”) Of course, the context was a bit different.

Is "Kristin" of "Kristin and Client-9" related to me? I suppose so, since it's said that people in the U. S. who bear the name of Yeoman(s) or Youman(s) are all descended from four brothers who sailed to New York before the Revolution. Three (including my direct ancestor) skedaddled to Georgia, but one dug in where he landed. Evidently his branch was doing very well in the nineteenth century, but perhaps some of them have come on hard times since. By the Depression, most of mine had had their skinny Georgia butts vigorously kicked by history.

My husband, having read the Times and The Drudge Report over breakfast, suggested that I tart up a good nom de plume. I'm working on it, now that I've finished laboring over Billy Rae's reward. And Mike reminded me about all the mightly hordes of people who will be googling the young was-Youmans and discovering their passion for poetry and novels . . .

Now ain't that a thought?

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Photograph credit: I've wrested this piece of forbidden fruit from the pictorial tree by permission of http://www.sxc.hu/ and J. G. or "LittleMan" of Belgium. Seems as though we all have at least two names today . . .

Darconville's Cat, Ugga-Bugga, etc.

What bookish bloggers say when they have nothing to say

I am going to tell you what I am reading, as I do from time to time when I refuse to write a proper blog post (whatever that might be) because I do not feel like writing a proper blog post. So now I will undertake to write an improper blog post, born like a slatternly, slovenly Venus from a sea of laziness.

What I'm rereading or reading on this very day

Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

W. B. Yeats, The Poems of W. B. Yeats (Feeling queasy? Want a bit of basalt in a world that's boggy and squelchy underfoot? Remember that I will be reading Yeats.)

Romans 8

Wislawa Symborska, Poems New and Collected

Paul Celan, Speech-Grille and Selected Poems, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems 1917-1952

What I wrote today

I wrote a poem having to do with Celan (yes, that sounds evasive--my rule is "don't talk about new things!") in the wee hours of the morning and fiddled with it again in the afternoon. I didn't mean to; the thing just seeped in, all those Celanese stones and the man himself, his terrible losses and death.

Rereading

While I may have been a rather different person when I last read Darconville's Cat, I am pleased to announce that Darconville's Cat is the same book that it was before. This is a valuable piece of news and not always what comes of rereading a book. I have read many a book that turned out to be another book entirely on rereading. Darconville's Cat appears to be a book that can be relied upon--in contra-indication to those mutable books that refuse to be the same thing twice.

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Later the same day: What I meant by the above is that they are still "good books" twice. As happens with a lazy post, I now have to add an explanation. Here it is:

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More on rereading; or, what comes of a lazy post; or, a note to Lucy

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All books are different when reread. That's obvious. But some books shouldn't be tried again--one could only read them at a certain age, it seems. As Heraclitus keeps on saying, even after all these years, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

It's sad when you try to greet an old-friend book and find it is a stranger with little to interest or hold the attention. What I like is meeting a beloved book once more and finding that it still has something to say--often something very different from what it said before.

Overheard in Cooperstown, also this very day

On the general decline in vocabulary: "In another generation, people will just be saying 'Ugga-Bugga, Ugga-Bugga.'"

Suggestion for reversing tendencies toward Ugga-Buggadom

You know those horrid let-everybody-read-the-same-dratted-book programs? (Of course, if everybody was assigned one of my books, I'd have to change my mind about the "horrid" part.) Let's make everybody read Darconville's Cat. In that way, Alexander Theroux can take a long sabbatical from the Augean Stables of teaching because he will be so Lydian-Croesus rich from everybody on the planet reading Darconville's Cat. I suspect that the mass reading of Darconville's Cat will cause an important shift in human history and increase the sale of dictionaries. Have I mentioned the title often enough? That's Darconville's Cat. You might read it. Theroux has a new novel as well: Laura Warholic. I'll have to get around to that later.