Willow Pollen

In Short

This collection of lyric poetry serves as a meditation on the intimacy of grief and the persistence of the natural world after a profound personal loss. Through evocative imagery of gardens, lakes, and changing seasons, the poet navigates the landscape of memory, searching for solace in the silence of nature and the enduring presence of a mother’s spirit. It has lasted because of its unflinching honesty regarding the loneliness of mourning and its ability to weave human sorrow into the fabric of the broader, cyclical beauty of the world.

The Story

The arc of the collection begins with an intimate "Proem," a tribute to a mother whose presence was defined by a quiet, healing grace. The poet establishes this figure not as a distant memory, but as a living element of the natural world: her silence is the wind, her eyes are the blue gentians of dawn, and her spirit is the shadow upon the sundial. This establishes the central tension of the book—the struggle to reconcile the permanence of absence with the sudden, overwhelming sensation that the departed is "everywhere."

As the poems progress, the narrative voice moves through the landscape of Fleur de Lys on Lake Champlain. The speaker observes the rhythm of a garden—the "big bee" of the sun, the blooming of larkspur and poppy, and the slow turn of the seasons into autumn. This is not merely a description of flora; it is a desperate attempt to ground the self in something cyclical and reliable. The speaker, however, is haunted. The joy of the world—the wild grape vine, the sea gulls, and the thrush—is constantly underscored by an internal loneliness. The speaker addresses a "Belovèd" throughout, sometimes an absent lover, sometimes the memory of the mother, blurring the lines between different types of devotion and the grief that follows them.

In the middle sections, the poet grapples with the indignities of life: poverty, the "hunger of old women," the "wailing of man’s breath," and the feeling of being "obscure." These poems do not shy away from the harshness of the physical world, yet they contrast this grit with a spiritual longing. The "Green Golden Door" is a recurring motif, representing a threshold between the painful reality of human existence and a realm where dreams remain intact.

As the collection approaches its final movement, the tone shifts from searching to acceptance. The speaker confronts the idea of death directly, wondering if it, too, will have "white hair" or if it will be as gentle as "warm rain." The final poems—"Last Dawn" and "Even as Here"—reject the traditional rituals of mourning, such as the "brutal stone" or "mumbled words miscalled of God." Instead, the poet expresses a desire to be returned to the elements—to be burned on cedar or scattered on the water. The book ends not with a resolution of the grief, but with an invitation to cycle through time. In "Again?", the speaker asks if she will return to the lake, and the response from the rushes is a whisper: "Bye and bye." It is a quiet, rhythmic surrender to the inevitable.

How It Unfolds

The invocation of memory The poet begins by setting the stage of her loss, explicitly connecting her mother’s physical presence to the rhythms of the natural world. This establishes the emotional stakes: everything the speaker sees is filtered through the lens of what she has lost.

The garden as a mirror The speaker turns to the cycle of the seasons in her garden to find structure for her chaotic emotions. By personifying the sun as a "big bee," she imposes a playful yet intense order on the passage of time, though the underlying sorrow remains constant.

The encounter with struggle The narrative shifts toward a more social and existential awareness, observing the suffering of others and the limitations of wealth and status. This grounds the internal grief in a wider, often harsher, world, forcing the poet to reconcile her personal pain with broader human struggle.

The final surrender The closing poems move away from the garden and toward the horizon of mortality. The speaker contemplates her own end, rejecting the finality of the grave in favor of a transformative return to the wind, the sea, and the elements, finding a sense of peace in the prospect of becoming part of the landscape.

The People

The Mother is the gravitational center of the work. Though she is gone, she is constructed through the speaker's memories as a figure of profound compassion and silence. She represents the "nest" to which the speaker’s thoughts return.

The Speaker is a wanderer in her own life, defined by her capacity for love and her deep-seated, persistent grief. She wants to find a way to honor her dead without losing her own sense of self, and she struggles with the feeling that she is "obscure" or "poor" in a world that values commerce.

The Belovèd exists as a spectral figure throughout the poems—sometimes a mother, sometimes a lover, sometimes a lost aspect of the speaker's own youth. This figure represents the object of all longing; the "empty vow" that the speaker clings to, even as she knows that time will eventually erase the memory of their shared grief.

In Its Own Voice

There was none of whom she did not think well.

The poet describes the enduring grace of her mother in the opening tribute.

I say the sun is a bee, a big bee, a burning bee, / And bears the whole world’s wealth upon his back.

The speaker finds a defiant sense of wonder while describing the patterns of her garden.

I shall find you when the tide comes in,-- / A shell, a sound, a flash of light.

The poet articulates a hope that death will not be a permanent separation, but a return to the natural world.

What It's Really About

This book is a sustained inquiry into the nature of absence. It asks whether grief is a wall that isolates the mourner or a bridge that connects them more deeply to the world. The poet argues that to love deeply is to accept a form of "star-sown" sorrow, and that our lives are meaningful precisely because they are fragile and temporary. Beneath the plot of individual loss lies the question of how to exist in a world that is constantly dying and being reborn. It is a work about the labor of living—the "work" of maintaining love, the "work" of mourning, and the ultimate, natural rest that the earth provides to all things.

Why Read It Today

Readers who appreciate the nature poetry of the early twentieth century—those who find solace in the connection between internal states of mind and the external, physical environment—will find much to admire here. The language is precise, rhythmic, and deeply rooted in the imagery of the North American landscape.

However, the modern reader should be prepared for the intensity of the sentiment. The book does not attempt to be "cool" or detached; it is unabashedly vulnerable. Its focus on grief can feel heavy at times, and the period-specific language—with its "thee" and "thou" and its occasionally archaic flow—requires a reader willing to slow down and listen to the cadences of another era. The poems are short, making this an ideal companion for quiet moments of reflection. You do not read this book for a fast-moving narrative, but for the feeling of sitting with a thoughtful, mourning friend who knows how to name the wind, the shadow, and the silence. It stays with you because it validates the quiet, solitary work of remembering those who have slipped out of reach.