Alfred Lord Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Ulysses” has for nearly two centuries served as the great cri de coeur of all young men whose lives of mediocrity and utility leave them restless and unsatisfied. Ulysses himself proclaims, in its early lines,
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
To have known both great joy and great suffering, to have earned immortal glory for one’s name, these are the stirrings in every ambitious soul with a hunger for action, are they not? Tennyson’s protagonist never wavers in his certainty, and so concludes with a vow to live according to a command expressed not by imperatives but by four infinitive verbs: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Only one objection can be made to this rousing vision of life as limitless adventure: Ulysses has returned home; he has reclaimed throne, long-suffering wife, and faithful son. Should he not honor these things?
Tennyson’s poem had for its first audience the young Englishmen who studied in the strict and challenging public schools in preparation for the foreign service, as well as the new class of businessmen who were transforming the English landscape with their factories and smoke stacks. Officers and industrialists alike were serving the far-flung British Empire, even though their daily occupations were more conspicuous for discipline and deskwork than the heroic drama of great joy and suffering. Tennyson helped them to dress up their labors, to give glorious form to the formlessness of everyday life. His poem helped those factory managers bent over their account books to view themselves not as dull and middling Gradgrinds but, in a phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle the year after Tennyson’s poem was published, as “captains of industry.”
One can envision most contemporary poets responding to Tennyson’s ardor with an effort to demythologize it. It has become almost a cliché among more recent poets and novelists, for instance, to retell classical myths or classic tales from a critical, “feminist” perspective. J.C. Scharl, for her part, does no such thing. In “Penelope,” one of the later but defining poems in her first collection, Ponds, she dramatizes Ulysses’ wife in the days after this late, unlooked for abandonment:
Again the house is quiet, as in the early
days when he first left, before the suitors
came. Again, the mid-day moves as gently
as the early morning. His vast oars
have beat the waves one final time. The chill
wind is still. The house, the docks below,
the scepter and the isle—are all still
here. Only he is not.
The first thing to be observed about these lines is that Scharl has mastered Tennyson’s style: musical, elegiac, and high even when it lacks, as it usually does, Tennyson’s silver-veined fluency of meter. The second is that Penelope’s voice does to the quiet of the house what Ulysses does to the dangers of the high seas: She helps us to see it as a place of mortal and moral drama. Scharl could have simply followed the worn path of other poets and critiqued Ulysses’ ambition and ingratitude; she could have ridiculed the past according to the more enlightened standard of the present. Instead, she has Penelope acknowledge it. Penelope accepts the Victorian understanding of the man as the one who must risk his life for the good of work, even as Penelope also vindicates her own role as matron of the domestic sphere:
For I, Penelope, have not changed.
That is my virtue, isn’t it? To be
Exactly what I am. Always to range
The hills and valleys of myself and not
To strive to seek to find what is beyond.
Scharl’s “Penelope” appears very near the end of the volume, but once one encounters it, one sees that the whole book has organized itself around Penelope’s voice and, more importantly, her vocation. Scharl’s Ponds is a book about wives and mothers, how they organize the world by their loving and nurturing, and also by their deaths. We see this in the brief, almost epigrammatic “Salt”:
Don’t salt your food before you taste it,
my mother used to say.
It might insult the cook—
my mother, keen-eyed little chef
forever serving up those heaping dishes
of her own life, and I,
unthinking, tasteless, salting.
We hear in these lines the remembered small instruction, of modest importance like every rule of good manners, and yet one that haunts the protagonist in two ways. She failed as most children do to abide the rule, at least at first. But, further, she regrets the failure to receive the seasoning of her mother’s wisdom—a regret made more poignant as we look back to the loose sonnet of a few pages before, “After the Funeral,” and realize it is a mother’s death being commemorated.
Scharl’s poems call out to one another and compose a vision of domestic and family life that speaks from a mother’s point of view and which keeps motherhood and its costs in mind. “The New House” is exemplary in this regard. “First rain in the new house,” the protagonist begins, and we presume her anxiety is that of any new homeowner risking the future, not at sea, like Ulysses, but as rain lashes roof, walls, and foundations of a place purchased for no other reason than the comfort and security it serves to provide. That anxiety, which looks downward to the basement, couples with another that looks upward:
What’s happening
downstairs? Do I want
to know? In the old house
my mother lay upstairs
on the old flower couch
dying—that was a storm,
bricks battered, cracked,
shingles torn and flung,
foundation stones scatteredand returned to earth.
The death of one mother shapes the life of another, of her daughter now become a young mother, and tinges the present with the knowledge that what is had today—a husband home from the war at last, the protective walls of a new home—can be taken away tomorrow. Grief, however, is not the only or even the chief consequence. Scharl’s poems portray a domestic world where anxiety and regret are overcome by attention, care, and the liturgical forms that structure human life in the domestic church.
Most readers will recall being befuddled in high school by Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” That poem’s emphasis, like that of the early cubist painters, is entirely on the perspectival—that is to say, the act of seeing things from different perspectives with no master-vision able to unite them. Scharl, in contrast, gives us a 14-part reflection on the Tenebrae service (held at night on Thursday of Holy Week), called “Candles.” Here, as each candle receives its brief meditation, while it is snuffed out so that the church may be sunk in near total darkness, light and darkness both take on their theological and metaphysical significance. Scharl gathers their sundry meanings so that they lead us deeper into the mystery of Christ’s suffering, which brought about our salvation. Just as Tennyson sought to show that immortal drama was still possible in a bourgeois age, so Scharl suggests (in the twelfth section of the poem) that a tongue of flame remains the symbol of true spiritual drama even as so much is degraded by the artificial and flattening light of our electronic age:
“I am the light of the world,” okay,
but please, not the fluorescent tube
of some cosmic office park. Christ,
The Lord of the world
marks and hallows His harrowed ones
not with filaments but with flames
and from stark-shattered hell heaves lady Eve
into the dappled light of day.
This movement from “fluorescent tube” to the divine light, and from the contemporary and colloquial lexicon of the “office park” to the golden rhetoric of “from stark-shattered hell heaves lady Eve,” Scharl nimbly executes again and again. She shows us that the quiet, contained, domestic life that Penelope guards is the very place where the drama and salvation of many is lived out and brought about.
Most often, Scharl accomplishes this by calling us to attention and vision, and leading us from surface to depth, as in “Reflection,” where the “Leaves this morning are young moons, / flashing with a glow that is not their own.” Their sensible light prompts us to reflect on that spiritual light that illuminates the heart, as if it were a place of “long still rooms / where things can rest.” Spaghetti cascades by mischance from an open box on the shelf, and the whole house grows luminous. We crack open a pomegranate, in a poem of that title, to find the blood red seeds and a “brown ooze” at the center. That imagistic lyric leads, in turn, to “The Newlywed,” where Persephone sets us right regarding the myth of her abduction by Hades.
Poems on liturgical, ecclesial, and scriptural subjects, such as “Saint January,” “Abraham Barters with God,” “Relics,” “Annunciation,” and “The Widow of Cana,” explore more directly the meaning of home as a domestic church, as the place where we discover the true and holy drama of our lives. These and other poems imply that a mother’s suffering contrasts elegantly with the suffering of which Ulysses brags. For Ulysses, suffering is a means to his own glory, but Scharl’s maternal and Christian vision of the world more perceptively acknowledges the way suffering is one of several labors by which we give life to others. The leaves on a fig tree shelter their fruit as does a mother’s arm when it “by instinct curls out” to embrace a child running past. Even the details in a poem about fishing with one’s father leads us in this direction. In “The Trout,” a daughter kills and cleans a newly caught fish:
Deep down
I’ll find the iridescent guts, tight-packed
with amber roe, and the fillets crowned
with the mud vein. But first: it’s got to die.
Scharl sees that in this flesh they will clean, cook, and eat lies the “amber roe,” the mass of eggs, out of which new life may come. The trout, like the Pelican of medieval lore, figures Christ, of course, but more humbly the little deaths of domestic life that nourish one’s children.
Scharl’s poems are various in subject and form but consistently help us to see how life is shaped, and generations are held together, by maternity and maternal sacrifice. “To My Unborn Child” gives us a new creation myth, one that envisions God’s creation of the world as if it took place within a womb. Some of her best poems, such as “The Circle,” “Icon of Elijah in the Wilderness,” and “Part,” bring together the hope we naturally find in the play of young children and the hope of the gospel, a hope no less strong for being qualified by the reminder of a mother’s death or a father’s daily departure for work.
A good book of poems always couples variety and surprise with a subtle but meaningful unity of theme. Scharl has accomplished this in her first, superb collection, where attention to detail and austerity of voice combine to remind us of the life-giving suffering of things.
