'Nothing Given Us to Keep Is Lost'

Howard Nemerov reminded me not of Walden Pond in Concord but of a smaller, less storied pond at the opposite end of Massachusetts, near Lee in the Berkshires. I was there to interview Paul Metcalf (1917-99) and his wife Nancy for my newspaper in the summer of 1988. Paul was a writer best known for his novel Genoa (1965) and was the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His mother was the executor of the Melville literary estate, and the manuscript of Billy Budd was found by the scholar Raymond Weaver in her home in 1921. 

Paul was seventy and I was half his age. After lunch and hours of talk, he suggested we go for a swim. I was wearing work clothes – dress shirt, tie, wingtips – and the day was becoming uncomfortably hot. Across the unpaved road from his old farm house was a nameless pond about twenty feet across, at the bottom of a bowl densely covered with wild thyme. The pond  was so shallow the water was warm like a bath. The scent of thyme, combined with the tepid water was soporific. We wallowed awhile, talking about Charles Ives. We sat on the bank to dry off and that’s when I realized I smelled of thyme. Even after toweling off and getting dressed I could smell it, and I smelled of it in my car and back in the office and even at home that evening. To this day, when I smell thyme – an irresistible pun -- I think of Paul.

 

Nemerov published “The Pond” in The New Yorker in 1954 and collected it the following year in The Salt Garden. It’s a meditative and mournful poem, recounting the pond’s history through the passage of the seasons. A boy falls through the ice and drowns while skating, and the pond takes his name – Christopher Pond. The death is an “accidental consecration.” Nemerov concludes his poem:

 

“. . . I saw with a new eye

How nothing given us to keep is lost

Till we are lost, and immortality

Is ours until we have no use for it

And live anonymous in nature’s name

Though named in human memory and art.

No consolation, Christopher, though rain

Fill up the pond again and keep your name

Bright as the glittering water in the spring;

Not consolation, but our acquiescence.

And I made this song for a memorial

Of yourself, boy, and the dragonfly together.”