I Want This Jane Kenyon Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral

You can hear a reading of this poem at the bottom of the page.

“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.

Jane Kenyon in 1992.

William Abranowicz/Art + Commerce

In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.

Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.

This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.

Listen to A.O. Scott read the poem.

THE POND AT DUSK by Jane Kenyon

The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon 

A fly wounds the water but the wound 

soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter 

overhead, dropping now and then toward 

the outward–radiating evidence of food. 

The green haze on the trees changes 

into leaves, and what looks like smoke 

floating over the neighbor’s barn 

is only apple blossoms. 

But sometimes what looks like disaster 

is disaster: the day comes at last, 

and the men struggle with the casket 

just clearing the pews.