Undine Rising From The Waters and Lyonia

Undine Rising From The Waters

It’s said she needs a man, to marry,
To have a soul, but what a load
Of crap – she’s an element   a water
Spirit which means soul in fact
She is soul
++++When she rises a man
Will sculpt her in wet sheets
How else to show a woman made
Of water   even her name means
Little wave   of the wave
++++A man can’t even see
Her   imagines all she needs
Is him
++++When she has the whole
Ocean and still he writes and carves
Her breathless for his kiss.

 

Lyonia

Larry is painting eleven apples this morning
In the woods lyonia is blooming white bells
Facing down   in the late afternoon the air
Is full of cloves as if all the bells breathe
Out together   a sign of spring   the bees
Climb inside the bells  suck nectar
With their mouth straws and sometimes
Our honey tastes of cloves
I left a voice message but instead
Of saying goodbye I said amen
I’m constantly praying in my head
++++It’s called scrupulosity
And it spilled over into the spoken
World  I was so embarrassed I think
I am the only person to end a phone
Call with amen except a priest minister
Nun but even they would probably
Say farewell unless they were talking
To God which would be unlikely on
The telephone though amen
Means so be it so maybe I will just
Start saying that.

 



Click here to read Kelle Groom on the origin of the poems.

Image by James Gaither on flickr.com, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Kelle Groom:

I’ve long been drawn to writing ekphrastic poems. “Undine Rising from the Waters,” (1880) is a stunning marble statue by Chauncey Bradley Ives based on a medieval myth than an undine must marry a mortal man to have a soul. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus named four elemental beings, with undines corresponding to water and appearing in A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits.

This story of Undine needing to marry a man to have a soul was also told in a nineteenth-century novel, Undine, by Baron Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué. As an added twist, if the man is unfaithful to Undine, she is forced to kill him. Ive’s statue depicts the moment of Undine rising like a fountain to kill her husband.

Usually in an ekphrastic poem, the piece of art and any narrative (if that exists) is a starting point for me. Something accepted and then explored. However, in “Undine,” I found the myth so ridiculously patriarchal – a water spirit requires the love of a man to have a soul – that this is where the poem begins.
 
 
 
“Lyonia” takes place over the course of a day. A friend is painting in the morning; the speaker takes a walk in the woods and sees the first signs of Spring, and later makes a phone call. The dailiness was important, as a boundary gets crossed between her internal and external worlds.

When the internal world spills over, it’s clear that it’s parallel to the outside world of painting and walking and telephone calls. In my own life, these anxious, desperate prayers began in childhood, when my father went to war. They were propelled by the need to keep him safe.

This kind of frantic prayer increases in times of great suffering in the world, and in my own life. When in the poem, the prayer is so intense it can’t be hidden, it’s a moment of searing embarrassment. But I wondered if instead of hiding this overwhelming need to pray, I could have compassion for it.

Kelle Groom
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