"Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond" by Sylvia Plath

Flute Notes
from a Reedy Pond

Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,

To our bower at the lily root.

Overhead the old umbrellas of summer

Wither like pithless hands. There is little shelter.

Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank

Dominion. The stars are no nearer.

Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink

The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink

Into a soft caul of forgetfulness.

The fugitive colors die.

Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,

The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like

             statues.

Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppet-

             master,

Wear masks of horn to bed.

This is not death, it is something safer.

The wingy myths won’t tug at us anymore:

The molts are tongueless that sang from above the

             water

Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,

And how a god flimsy as a baby’s finger

Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. 

Source of the text - Sylvia Plath, Colossus. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 80-81.

TJB: In simple-bold declarations, a pond—& the things you’d notice while flyfishing—begins to hibernate as the great god Pan arises insectlike.