So already, sometimes we know what we know and have always known. Sometimes, we suddenly know again what we once knew. And sometimes, we know what we didn't know in the past and still may not know. Our recollected experiences of knowing, not knowing, and yearning to know may compel us return to the places, moments, and people we associate with those experiences.
In her collection of poems To the Springhouse, Joyce Wilson
returns to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, and encounters
again the landmarks, events, and phenomena that both held fast and set free
her younger self, significantly shaping her adult self.
The poems are not arranged chronologically, although clusters of them are. As readers, we encounter a two-part array in which renderings of the poet's/speaker's experiences as a daughter and sister growing from childhood to young womanhood intertwine with her observant, imaginative immersion in the abundant natural world that surrounds her. Repeatedly, nature and language work together to illuminate.
Three poems, including the collection's final one, recount visits to a springhouse close to the speaker's childhood home. Clearly, springhouses, built above springs to protect them from plants, animals, and other potential contaminants, matter. But why and how? I wondered this as I set off with the poet on her pilgrimage, sometimes guided by her, sometimes left to wander on my own, and often provided with the glimpses of the developing sensibilities of the future poet and current editor of the online
literary magazine Poetry Porch.
I knew I wanted to make the journey as soon as I read the collection's first poem. In "Field Trip," the speaker--from now on, I will refer to the "I" in most of these poems as the speaker, though it may well always be Wilson--returns to a remembered farm and creek, the waters of which are "like the rivers in my dreams." Clearly, she has been returning to this place long before her actual return visit to it (11), for reasons not yet disclosed or even suggested.
Once actually there, she carries with her the guidebook her parents used to nurture her budding naturalist self. In truth, she's been so well guided by it and them that she doesn't need the book to identify the Bluecurls** she comes upon.
But there's more going on here than just classification of the natural world, as rich as it is: a humble pilgrim "bending close" to examine the flower she's plucked, the speaker becomes swept up in "Imagined waves" (11). Of water? of emotion? And has she surrendered to the power of the waves with resignation? relief? joy?
She expresses gratitude to her parents in the next-to-last stanza: ". . . through them I had learned/ To see and sound, identify and name,/ Forgotten till today when I returned"--and in part because of their naturalist legacy, Wilson regularly and imaginatively explores the names of natural things in her poems*** (12).
But her thankfulness is tempered in the final stanza. The lines "The lessons that they fostered festered in/My memory," both delight and trouble us: at the same moment that we relish the playful juxtaposition of the similarly sounding "fostered" and "festered," we confront the negative connotation of "festered." There's something toxic in at least some of what the speaker has learned from her parents (12). Her own home hasn't been fully effective as a springhouse: it hasn't completely protected the clear, pure waters of her early life from everything that might fester in them. But probably no childhood home ever does.
Whatever the balance of time and toxicity that renders her parents' lessons "as good as dispossessed," I as her reader am now forewarned: during her Chadds Ford visit, she may well come upon other phenomena that resurrect what has been "Forgotten till today." Thanks to the poem's terse suggestiveness, I am prepared for what the speaker and I might encounter.
• In "Egret," a seemingly displaced yet regal waterbird--a suitable symbol for the speaker, though she casts herself as the observer in this poem--"Found its catch while no one looked/ Beneath the surface of the brook (13)." The lesson: careful looking is a prerequisite for seeing, seeking, and finding, and the answers may be under water.
• In "To the Springhouse," an authoritative museum guide wrongfully explains to the speaker's adult self that the primary function of springhouses is and always has been
to refrigerate the items stored in them. The speaker dismisses his pronounced knowledge:
But what did he know? Such a pragmatic mind
Might never pause to comprehend the source
Of mystery, where springs will come and go. (14)
The lesson: poor guides are everywhere and must be exposed, and mystery may be trustworthy.
• In "Changing Surfaces," the speaker, watching stones arrange and rearrange themselves at the tidal water's edge, explains, "I seek treasures, origins, what I first/ / Thought, or what I
thought I might have meant." A stone "glimmers" momentarily until a wave sweeps it out of view. The lesson: water reveals, but also mirrors and distorts, and treasures that suddenly shine bright may just as suddenly disappear. Meanwhile, when the speaker muses, "How close the words: treasure and erasure," the reader recognizes the speaker's love of language and her sense of its power (15).
The heroes of epic poems learn the hard way, and perhaps pilgrims do too as they walk the path to enlightenment and transformation. The road may be even more fraught for female heroes and pilgrims, whose learning may be discouraged, especially if it refuses to bow to male authority. "The Mushroom Barn" blends scenes of home with encounters with nature in the context of rumor and legend. As such, it presents a dilemma for smart girls like the speaker and her sister: though they "feared what we did not know, " they dared not act to remedy the situation because of the story they'd heard about "the local girl/ who walked through fields at night, . . . ,/ . . . because she had learned too much" (21).
Interestingly, right after "The Mushroom Barn," we accompany the speaker to the realm of the dead. In "Our Father's Death," as its title suggests, she recollects the death of her father, the knowledge of which "came abstractly/ like a concept without color or odor" (22). In "Aftermath," the following poem, she laments that "Only our father would have known"--her father who is "now so thoroughly gone"--how to respond to her mother's angry, unanticipated questions about a favorite play (23). Like the archetypal epic hero, the speaker is now thoroughly and sadly on her own.
And then, things somehow move forward, although almost imperceptibly, as they often do when people, including pilgrims and heroes, wander in confusion, pain, and grief. In "The Brook," the first poem in the second part of the collection, the speaker**** asks directly for knowledge of the natural world--
I asked the brook to show its knowledge of the world;
it raised the image of my face
but never said a word. (35)
-- and receives a silent but useful answer that elevates her as a source of knowledge in the world--which doesn't mean she no longer needs guidance. When "My heart took flight," she again "lost my way," but only "until I saw the brook emerge/ and lead me on again" (35). She has both the brook and herself to guide her.
That disappearing but reappearing brook again brings to mind the springhouse that is so central to Wilson's collection. Like the land in "The Brook," springhouses temporarily conceal from view the life-giving waters that run beneath them. As such, they are both impediments and godsends.
In "The Springhouse," the second of the collection's three springhouse poems, recounts a visit to the springhouse***** by the speaker and her sister. Though "Our father" has warned them not to enter it so as not to dislodge the settled, accumulated particles that might pollute the water flowing beneath it, he leaves it unlocked, more evidence of the contradictory world the two sisters inhabit. Initially, the sisters do no more than peer in fearfully. But eventually, summoning their shared developing emotional and intellectual independence, they venture inside to "look into the nature of our dreams" and to grow in understanding of their deepest selves. Daring to disobey, they risk with some confidence that "what the stillness kept/ Would tolerate the echoes of our screams," trust that their liberating screams will not loose destruction and corruption upon the world (39).
"The Springhouse in Winter," the collection's final poem, is one of my favorites. Elegiac, optimistic, and deeply musical, it provides the reconciliation, liberation, and peace that I had hoped for when I began walking the path with the speaker. The rhythmic and sonic regularity of its four quatrains, each composed of lines written in iambic pentameter with alternating rhyme, propels the reader forward with a sense that harmony has been restored, that all is at least well enough. The speaker speaks for a "we" that I think is her sister and herself, though it might also denote her own reconciled adult and childhood selves. A combination of "healing solar forces" and "centuries of rain" creates the perpetual water, and the sisters' "rages dissipate inside this house" (60): history has not changed, but the sisters' perspectives have, making "The Springhouse in Winter" a poem of forgiveness and gratitude that does not erase the complex memories explored elsewhere in the collection. The poem ends with a beautiful offering that I leave you to discover when you read the poem. I want you to have the experience of coming upon it as I did.
I love this brave, beautiful book, admire the many layers of each of its poems. In fact, reading the poems reminds me of looking through water******: various ones of them reveal, conceal, magnify, reflect, clarify, and distort. But together, they become an enlightening if always shifting mosaic, a reminder of the power of poetry--the act of writing it, the act of reading it--to make life more comprehensible, bearable, and meaningful. If you wish to purchase To the Springhouse, please visit the home page of The Poetry Porch; there you will find a link that will enable you to contact the magazine to buy a copy.
Addendum on December 2: A friend who read this blog left the following comment about it on my Facebook page, and it really got me thinking:
Thank
you for sharing this! The poems sounded so thoughtful and had so many
layers even from just the small samples in your blog. Each layer just
pulled me in a little more until I felt as though I would totally
submerge if I read the whole poem. It would be a pleasant submersion, I think.
Her experience of the poems' layers made me realize that for me, reading Wilson's poems was an experience of being in the stream not because its waters were covering me, but because I was walking in it on stepping stones, each of the poems being one of them. Some of the stones were slippery, some wiggled under my feet, and sometimes my feet got wet, but the great thing was that I could always look straight down into the water.
* Wilson, J. (2022). To the springhouse: Poems by Joyce Wilson. Massachusetts: The Poetry Porch.
** Image of Trichostema dichotomum L. from Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center: https://www.wildflower.org/gallery/result.php?id_image=88498
*** Wilson's poem "The Etymology of Spruce," published in Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems, is a great example of a poem that reveals the power of named natural things to inspire Wilson's poetic imagination. **** Photograph of the photograph of the poet by John Goldie on the back cover of To the Springhouse. I love how the poet is reflected in the window through which she looks.
***** Screen shot of photo on the Maguire Farm web site: https://www.maguirefarm.com/s/springhouse.htm
******"Flume" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/96303927162
