Personal anthology: Poems about wells
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a favorite poem, hasn’t it? Let’s rectify that.
Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
I heard Heaney read this poem once, and he explained that he was thinking both of Mount Helicon, the mountain where the nine Muses liked to hang out, and the Hippocrene, the sacred spring that was supposed to supply poetic inspiration to anyone who drank from it. Oddly, the "poet looks into the well" topos has been done before, by Robert Frost:
For Once, Then, Something
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
My myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths — and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Both Frost and Heaney dare us to think of them as narcissists, fascinated with their own reflections as opposed to the murky depths below, or the uncertain flash of truth — or possibly "a pebble of quartz"; Frost isn’t going to tell us either way — at the bottom of the well. But one can’t really say that about either of them. Frost is interested in how difficult it is to see what isn’t somehow oneself, and how "uncertain" these perceptions are. Heaney’s speaker’s younger self, big-eyed or bug-eyed Narcissus though he is, moves from being unable to see ("So deep you saw no reflection in it") to seeing "a white face" (not exactly his?) and finally to his own reflection distorted by the splashing rat. Somehow adulthood means finding ways to "see" himself in echoes, in sound, rather than by sight — which, I think, is why the enjoyably "rich crash" of the bucket in the second stanza gives way to the echoing well that "gave back your own call / With a clean new music in it": the voice, changed and returned to the speaker.
I remember how someone brought the Frost poem to my favorite graduate seminar ever, a course on theories of poetry. For the first half of the class, we’d talk about the assigned critical readings (which, that evening, were Nancy Vickers’ "Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme" and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‘s rather infamous essay "A Poem is Being Written") and then for the second half, someone would circulate a poem or two that they wanted to discuss. I wish I could recall what we said, because my notes from that portion of the class include questions like "what do truth and a pebble have in common? is there any ground to stand on if there is?"
I miss that kind of conversation. It occurs to me that maybe I’m looking about for the non-university-affiliated equivalent. Then again, that’s why I’ve got comments enabled. Here’s a question for you, gentle readers: Are there any other poems about wells out there?
Seeking the well-spring
Amanda at Household Opera is looking for poems about wells. I can’t think of any, but am interested to see what emerges. Clear, clean, dripping, glistening, cold, clammy, murky or muddy….
A favourite well-related song:
The Greatest Friend
The greatest friend I have in life
Has brought me here to dwell
Awhile among your green green hills
All by the watery well
The water from that wondrous well
Has made my eyes to see
And loosed my tongue to sing with joy
That such a friend can be.
The greatest friend I have in life
Was hidden long from me
Above the mountains cold and wide
Beneath the sacred tree
That sacred tree whose bark I touched
Whose leaves did tell to me
The ancient tales that made me sure
My friend would come to me.
My greatest friend a song has given
To sing where I may go
To sing among the green green hills
And where the waters flow
The waters from that wondrous well
That made my eyes to see
And made my mind to ever show
My greatest friend to me.
Lyrics by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band
Album – Wee Tam and The Big Huge
Also, not a poem either, but from William Morris – ‘The Well at the World’s End’.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1892/wwend/index.htm
“Even so they did, and broke bread above the sea, and looked to their horses, and then went hand in hand about the goodly green bents betwixt the sea and the rough of the mountain; and it was the fairest and softest of summer evenings; and the deer of that place, both little and great, had no fear of man, but the hart and hind came to Ursula’s hand; and the thrushes perched upon her shoulder, and the hares gambolled together close to the feet of the twain; so that it seemed to them that they had come into the very Garden of God; and they forgat all the many miles of the waste and the mountain that lay before them, and they had no thought for the strife of foemen and the thwarting of kindred, that belike awaited them in their own land, but they thought of the love and happiness of the hour that was passing. So sweetly they wore through the last minutes of the day, and when it was as dark as it would be in that fair season, they lay down by the green knoll at the ending of the land, and were lulled to sleep by the bubbling of the Well at the World’s End.”
One of my favorites is In the Well by Andrew Hudgins, which can be found at
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
It’s poem # 41 on that website. Also The well of grief by David Whyte.