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?
