I was always afraid of Somes's Pond:
Not the little pond, by which the willow stands,
Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands
In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond.
There, where the frost makes all the birches burn
Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines
Like a polished shell between black spruce and pines,
Some strange thing tracks us, turning where we turn.
You'll say I dreamed it, being the true daughter
Of those who in old times endured this dread.
Look! Where the lily-stems are showing red
A silent paddle moves below the water,
A sliding shape has stirred them like a breath;
Tall plumes surmount a painted mask of death.
Notes
An alewife is a fish (Alosa pseudoharengus) that is closely related to the herring.
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Comments
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The poet has captured the way some pools can be happy exciting places and others dark and forbidding though in reality they are both caches of water with the same life and death struggle of aquatic creatures beneath their surface. Or as she puts it some have "Tall plumes surmount a painted mask of death."
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Excellent
Oh, this is such a marvelous and eeire sonnet! Such a splendid gem form Wylie. -
Vivid piece, I like the reading of this piece the enjambments and the rhymes used worked well because as I read this piece it read as if I were reading a short-story or something that was written in prose.
I like that, and if I didn't even understand the piece, or even if I felt the piece lacked in some way, I feel just that would be enough for me to speak good things on it.
There's the 'dark' tone of the piece, and I am not just relaying about the ending, it's quite evident it's dark at the end, but even in the beginning it seemed to hold that straight on for me.
A good piece that Wylie has written here, it read story-like and I like that.
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