The poem “The Pond” by former poet laureate Louise Glück consists of three free verse paragraphs. The first verse paragraph displays five lines, while the second verse paragraph has eight lines, and the third holds six lines. No rime interferes with any of the line groups, yet the reader could make an argument for several instances of accidental rimes: “small” in line three and “metal” in line five of the first verse paragraph could arguably be called rime, and if they were encountered in an otherwise rime-schemed poem, they would be called “slant” rimes.
More Accidental Rimes
In the second verse paragraph, lines 4-7 feature a rime that while it is without pattern and thus cannot be labeled a “rime scheme,” the rime is undeniable: “gray,” “graze,” “wait,” and “breastplates.”
A good case could reasonably be made for claiming “wing” in the first line of the first verse paragraph as a rime mate to “seeing” in the next to last line in the third verse paragraph.
It may be, however, unseemly to argue for rimes that appear so far apart; nevertheless, some brave soul might feel equipped to do so.
First Verse Paragraph: “Night covers the pond with its wing”
In the first verse paragraph, the speaker begins by metaphorically transfiguring “Night” into a bird. This bird called “Night” is “cover[ing] the pond with its wing. The bird has only one wing over the pond, and the speaker never divulges where the other wing is, or even where the bird is standing as its solitary wing drapes itself over the pond. At this point the reader might begin a suspicion that the pond is, perhaps, not really a pond, but something else entirely, but said reader must put off such suspicions until such time as the speaker will make her claims clear.
As the speaker continues, she reveals that she is, in fact, addressing another person, who is “swimming among minnows and the small / echoing stars.” She sees this person “under the ringed moon,” that is, she “can make out / [the other person’s] face swimming,” in the pond. Then the speaker says that the “surface of the pond is metal.” The reader readily understands this as metaphor, and then thinks back to that bird’s wing that is covering the pond, and remembers that suspicion that the pond might not be a pond but perhaps something else entirely, and thinks that maybe the pond is the hood of an automobile.
The hood of an automobile would be smaller and more amenable to a bird’s wing’s cover, but then the reader realizes there is no real evidence for this: still there is only one wing, and still no place where the bird could stand. Perhaps it is better to leave this as a mixed metaphor and move on.
Second Verse Paragraph: “Within, your eyes are open. They contain”
Then the speaker makes a fabulous claim: “Within, your eyes are open. They contain / a memory I recognize, as though / we had been children together.” That the speaker could have actually seen this other person, whom she is addressing, swimming among minnows is positively amazing, and it is night-time also, which limits vision. But now the reader understands her powers of sight, because she is seeing right through this person. She sees right through to his/her memory, and the person is thinking about when they were “children together.”
This sight reminds the speaker that they both had ponies that “grazed on the hill, they were gray / with white markings.” But the ponies are dead now with everyone else who is dead, but they “wait like children under their granite breastplates, / lucid and helpless.” The speaker is reminded of the nightmares that terrified her, when she was a child, and she begins to suspect that she might have been a rape victim or a victim of incest: “children under their granite breastplates.”
Third Verse Paragraph: “The hills are far away. They rise up”
The speaker then, inexplicably, changes the subject saying, “The hills are far away. They rise up / blacker than childhood.” The redundancy of “rise up” (has anything ever risen “down”?) indicates a suddenness of the speaker’s flash back to a troubled childhood. And then she poses a question to the other person, whom she has been addressing, presumably, all along; although, at times her musing seems to wander off from the addressee to perhaps her own self-mocking. She asks him/her: “What do you think of, lying so quietly / by the water?”
The question would sound innocent enough, but then she shocks the reader with what can only be interpreted as the reason for her nightmares: “When you look that way I want / to touch you, but do not, seeing / as in another life we were of the same blood.” She realizes that her urge is unholy, a taboo, and she drops off her narrative, without ever clearing up the problem of the other wing of the bird and where he stood as his one wing covered the pond.
Other articles on poets laureate:
- Donald Hall on Ambition: Poet Laureate on Poetry
- Rita Dove's Poetry: Accessible and Engaging
- American Life in Poetry: Ted Kooser’s Project
