Post-Turtle-Pond Reflections
09.30.2004
When we were all sitting around the turtle pond, taking in the discussion we had just had, the readings for that day (if we had read them), and the nature of the campus around us in our own ways, I started off by taking a few pictures, but then decided to write a poem.
I haven’t been able to write a poem I’m proud of in over half a year, and so I suppose a bad poem is better than no poem at all. Below is the revised version of what I wrote at the pond. I ended up cutting out the entire first half of what I had written, which was mostly a description of and reflection on the nature around us, because I realized that I was actually writing to and about my sister.
Do you still miss the green?
for Jessi
Do you remember
how we used to rescue tadpoles
from the stream in the hill country
beside our house
as if they might be better off
with than without us?
Do you remember
when we walked around the lake
with Oma
and I counted how many
ladybugs
I saw on the trip
and later recorded that number
in my notebook
and drew some, with green grass
underneath them?
Do you remember
how no picture ever looked
completely right
without something green?
Or how I stepped
right into the water
because the ice on the lake’s edge
wasn’t as hard as it looked?
It didn’t matter, then,
that our lake was actually
a drainage ditch
that the fort was just
a circle of trees
with old boards as shelves
or that the stream
was just the water
that ran off from the streets
when it rained.
It seems so appropriate
that the disappearance
of that world
with most of its green
to be replaced by $300,000 houses
and a dusty gray street
coincided with the end of childhood,
though I understood this only in retrospect.
I always felt like I pulled you out
too early
because I was older
and didn’t want to play dolls
with you
anymore.
Besides, our fort in the woods was gone.
But do you remember me
crying
the night Papa told us
they were going to extend
the street?
The most amazing thing about this poem happened to me just now as I proofread it: I cried. I haven’t even really thought about most of those memories in such a long time, and yet they encompassed almost my entire life and world at one point. Usually we forget about it, but all of us at some point miss the innocence, imagination, and nature that were intertwined with our childhood.
I hate to shake off the sentimentality to make the obligatory link to Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis,” but in this case, that is actually quite appropriate. A similar yearning for a past connection to a place in nature, which in the case of my poem symbolizes childhood, can be seen in “Thyrsis.” In Arnold’s poem, “the signal-elm” (“Thyrsis” 2.4) takes on the symbolic significance which is my poem is represented by the hill country next to my house. The poem’s speaker laments that his visits to this area have grown “too rare, too rare” (“Thyrsis” 4.1), which can be paralleled to my own (or anyone’s) feeling that I have left my childhood behind and fail to return even to the state of childhood (since I cannot return literally) often enough.
According to Dougill, both of Arnold’s long poems “concern […] the sense of loss – of youth, of conviction, and of friendship” (Course Anthology 259). This is the same kind of feeling my own poem, thought not nearly as poignant and eloquent, manages to evoke in me (perhaps because I know exactly what my poem is trying to say). I think an important part of the reason those childhood memories made me cry is because I felt a sense of loss of not only my own childhood, but also the loss of my sister’s childhood, as well as a sense of loss of friendship with my sister. Of course we still get along very well, but we no longer share the same intense bond we had when we were children. I feel the same desolation that Arnold expresses in “Thyrsis”: “They all are gone, and thou art gone as well!” (“Thyrsis” 13.10).
Dougill characterizes the scholar-gipsy as “a seeker of truth who has forsaken rational knowledge for the inspiriting wisdom of nature” (Course Anthology 260). It seems to me that the scholar-gipsy is someone who has not given up the ideas of childhood, someone who is able to learn from experience and yet retain the same innocence and awe of nature that a child has. Like my sister and I did as children, the scholar-gipsy is able to almost constantly experience “heaven-sent moments” (“Scholar-Gipsy” 5.10). In fact, Arnold literally keeps the scholar-gipsy youthful, informing the reader that he has “not felt the lapse of hours” because his lives differently than do the “mortal men” (“Scholar-Gipsy” 15.1 – 15.2).
But these reflections are not intended to be entirely melancholy. A state of childhood can always, to some extent, be achieved again, especially when even partially submerged in nature, as we were at the turtle pond today. The promising note on which “Thyrsis” ends lends hope to the reader who himself is feeling the pangs of loss of innocence, childhood, and friendship: “The light we sought is shining still” while “our tree yet crowns the hill” (“Thyrsis” 24.8 – 24.9).