This spring I’m teaching a course for Thales College on Greek mythology, and we’re right now reading Pindar, that sunniest of lyric poets. If you had the money, and your son had just basked in the bright light of glory, having won the boys’ wrestling competition at Olympia, you might hire Pindar to compose an ode to celebrate your son, your family, your native town, your heroes from of old, and the gods. What’s the best thing those old Greek gods had to give? A moment of shining glory, when you seem to step out of the changing world, and you feel more alive than ever, even though you know you are mortal; but you get to stand in the sunlight, cheered by fellow Greeks from Sicily to Ionia. It’s all the more poignant, because it is so short.
And yet that Mediterranean world, especially in the milder European lands, was ideal, I think, for a poetry as bright and brilliant song. I’ve seen a photograph of the shores of Lake Como, with palm trees. Lake Como is north of Milan, and Milan is about 100 miles farther to the north than where I’m sitting here in New Hampshire, and I’m north of where the author of our Poem of the Week, Robert Frost (whom I’ve written about here), lived and farmed and tried to get something alive out of the flinty New England soil. In fact, it snowed a little bit a few days ago, and I’ll bet there’s still snow here and there on the ground in the woods on the nearby mountain. You’d think that such a state of things would turn Frost toward gloomy thoughts, and he sure did not seem to require much encouragement that way. Yet in “Spring Pools,” he gives us a glance at beauty that most people would overlook — it isn’t the beauty of a young victor at the games, or the sun glancing off the waves of the sea a few miles away from Olympia, or the rugged hills, deep green with wild olive trees and evergreen oaks.
It’s the beauty of “spring pools,” which I too saw and loved when I was a boy growing up in the hills and mountains of northeast Pennsylvania. The pools come from snow-melt and spring rains that don’t have the time yet to vanish. The pools are shallow, and they show up reliably, year after year, in the same damp places, and Frost says, with his usual eye for careful observation, that even when they’re in the middle of the woods they reflect the great blue sky above. It’s as if that glance at heaven was theirs, for a time. These pools, Frost says, aren’t drained by any creek or brook. Nor does the sun dry them up. They don’t last long enough into the summer for that. Instead, he says, they are drawn up by the roots of trees around them. That will turn the delicate light gold or green of bud and baby-leaf into the dark green of the full leaf.
At the same time, you get the earliest wild flowers. Crocuses and daffodils are coming up in our yard now, even while the grass is still greening up. But you’ll see bloodroot, and bluets, and ground ivy, each with its own mildly sweet or spicy scent, and some of these you’ll have only for a couple of weeks. They’re transient, just like the pools and the muddy leaf-sodden ground nearby. They aren’t big and gaudy. They aren’t even the fine blossoms on wild apple and cherry. They don’t grace the shores of lakes where people will go swimming when the weather is warm. They are just small unnamed wild flowers beside pools that have no name, pools rising up from muddy earth that would squelch if you walked on it — not that you’d have any reason to do that. But the poet’s heart, unsentimental as he is, is with the pools and the flowers. Let the powerful in this world think twice before they sweep away “these flowery waters and these watery flowers.” For life is in the small as in the great.
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.
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