I suppose I shouldn’t be writing essays about Ethel Mortenson Davis’s poetry.  After all, she’s been my wife for close to 59 years now.  But what I’ve noticed over the years is that too many people, though obviously not everyone, sees a poem of hers and feels a certain spark of delight at the image it sparks in their head.

A short poem she just wrote (so many of her poems are short) brought that to the front of my thoughts:

Pollen-Sacs

A frenzied flock of thrushes,

thin and desperately looking for food,

left us worried and wondering.

A bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs

attached to his legs

struggles to fly homeward—your eyes flash.

Like so much of her poetry, you can read this poem, or better yet, listen to Ethel read it out loud, and you can see the two images:  The starving flock of thrushes and the bumble bee with huge pollen-sacs.  But the question is, what is in the poem beyond the images?

Years ago, even before we were first married in Grand Junction, Colorado, I learned to distrust my first reaction to both her poetry and her art.  What you see is inevitably there, but if you leave what’s there at that, you probably are reacting to what’s there rather than understanding the depth of what’s there and the meaning.

In this particular poem, it’s easy to read the first stanza, see that it is about thrushes frenzied in their desperate search for food, go to the second stanza and see the word “struggles” and assume that it is a poem about creatures that are struggling, maybe from the Canadian or western U.S. wildfires so prominent in the world today.

Certainly, there is a layer in the poem that suggest that global climate change might be affecting the thrushes who are in a state where they are desperately looking for food, but pollen sacs are larvae food, providing essential protein, fats, and vitamins that baby bees need to grow.  A bumble bee struggling to carry two of them attached to his legs is not struggling in the sense the frenzied flock of thrushes are.  The bee has collected abundance and are struggling to get what it has gathered of richness found inside flowers it has visited home.

Another element in the poem is that the pollen in the pollen sacs is essential to life on the planet earth since, as the bee flies from flower to flower, the pollen brushes off on the next flower, helping with the pollination process that is necessary to so much food production around the world as well as the diversity of plant-life that in turn feeds into the diversity of insects and animal-life that keep the entire natural world vibrant.

Therefore, the poem is constructed of a parallelism, one image juxtaposed with another.  This creates a complexity of meanings that, admittedly, demands some understanding of science but creates an even deeper level of poetic meaning, exploring all kinds of issues overwhelming our current world.

Therefore, the poem does contain an implied warning.  The thrushes desperate for food leave us wondering why they are desperate?  What has caused that in a world that flows from the bee as part of the chain of events that creates diversity and. even throughout so much of history, fecundity in the natural world?  Are they migrants from wildfire or severe drought or some other disaster?  The poem doesn’t give us a clue.  It just gives us the image of a fact.

But it also gives us a lesson about bees and the larger importance of diversity in a time when the idea of protecting diversity found in either the natural world or human populations is under attack. 

The bee with pollen sacs so heavy that it struggles to make it home causes your eyes to flash.  The bee is a symbol of hope.  It is flying home to feed the larvae that is going to propagate the hive into the next generation.

That hope is contrasted with the desperate flock of thrushes.

What looks like a simple image or even set of images is not always simple, especially in poetry and art, especially Ethel’s poetry and art.

The Chinese Tradition of Poetry

At the heart of what Ethel tries to do in so much of her poetry does flow from two major sources:  the major one is the traditional Chinese tradition of poetry where concrete images, juxtaposition, suggestion, and meaning are generated through the relationship between images.  There needs to be an intuitive leap by the reader to take the images, juxtaposition(s), and suggestions presented by the poem to discover the meaning of the poem. 

In this sense, the aesthetic convergence of a poem, or even a work of art, can be much more interesting, and an act of discovery, as direct influence.  In Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica”, he claimed that a poem should mean, not say, although that’s admittedly not the exact phrase from the poem. Poetry is not generally deductive science, making hypotheses and then testing those until hard truths are either proven or disproven.  It is the art of seeing the universe in a blade of grass, which comes out of Walt Whitman’s line, ““I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars…”

The Imagistic Tradition of Poetry

The second major continuity in Ethel’s body of work is the modern imagistic tradition starting with Ezra Pound.  Pound had several ideas about what a poem should be when he first started writing about imagism.  According to Pound, a poem should:

 Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

 Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

 As regarding rhythm: compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

In applying this sense of poetic construction, Pound defined an image, which should, at least in his view, be at the heart of modern poetry, as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  That means that an image in poetry is made up of:

 what we literally see;

 an emotional response;

 an intellectual recognition;

 associations that aren’t explicitly stated;

 relationships to other images.

In Ethel’s poem, “Pollen-Sacs,” the title leads us to notice that this is the central image.  The thrushes give us hunger, desperation, uncertainty and perhaps ecological disturbance.  The bumblebee gives us effort, abundance, fertility, reproduction and continuity.

But the poem doesn’t explain those things. It presents them.  The reader experiences the relationship between them.

The Value of Empty Space

I want to end this essay by talking briefly about Chinese art.  Traditional Chinese landscape painting often isn’t about reproducing a landscape photographically. It creates a relationship among elements—mountain, water, tree, mist, human figure, empty space—so that the viewer enters the painting and completes the experience.

Even in her abstract pastels and paintings, Ethel usually tries to do the same thing.  This is part of what relates her poetry to her art.

In her poetry she gives us the image (or thing in Pound’s formulation).  In the case of “Pollen-Sacs” we have the thrushes and the bumble bee.  Then she leaves a conceptual space between them.  This is designed to lead us into first a visual and emotional reaction, then to a question (why are the images so different from each other?), which leads, hopefully, to thinking about the poem’s meaning.

Conclusion

I suspect that this is what I have been learning from Ethel for nearly 59 years. I have learned not to rush to explain what I see in her poems or paintings either to myself or others. I have learned to stay with the image for a while, to look at what is there and then to pay attention to what is not there and to let others discover what they can find and understand for themselves.

The meaning is often in that space.

In “Pollen-Sacs,” the thrushes and the bumblebee never meet. Ethel doesn’t tell us what connects them. She doesn’t tell us whether the thrushes are victims of a changing world, whether the bee represents hope, or whether the two images are part of some larger warning about the fragile web of life. She gives us the images and leaves the space between them open.