This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
One of the greatest American writers that you have probably never heard of is Yvor Winters (1900-1968). A poet and critic unfashionable in his day for his understanding of literature according to the rational lights of St. Thomas Aquinas, he nonetheless nurtured the growth of two generations of American poets, many of whom would go on to shape our literary culture for the better. One of his most gifted students was Helen Pinkerton.
Born in 1927 in the mountains of Montana, Pinkerton came to study journalism at Stanford University when most young men were away fighting World War II. On her first day of classes, she heard Winters lecture on the art of poetry, and it changed her ambitions utterly. Within a few years, she was writing austere and profound lyric poems that, on the surface, vividly captured the terrain of the American West and, in the depths, explored the relationship of wayward human beings to their Creator.
A limited view
“The Pool” is typical of her best work. We are given a precise description of the lithe “flex and spin” of a fish as it leaps to catch and consume a dragonfly, which hums just above the surface of a mountain pool. This pool is the fish’s world, whose horizon expands and shrinks with the seasons; it is always in a state of “change” but, to the fish’s perceptions, seems essentially stable. The fish has no reason to think beyond the limits of its confined, watery world except for during those occasional leaps beyond to devour dragonflies. And yet, the pool does reflect a world beyond — mountains, pines and granite mirrored on the water’s surface.
The fish, as Pinkerton depicts it, remains concerned only with food, with leaping out of the water for sustenance and falling once “again / Into the rippled morass of confusion.” And here we begin to sense the fish is a symbol of human beings, likewise so consumed with our worldly appetites and concerns. And yet, “One day,” the fish will leap not for a dragonfly, but for “the brittle fly,” a fishing lure, which will draw the fish forever “beyond … the pool.” To think only of our lives in this world is all too easy for us. The prospect of death, as our ancestors knew, is an inducement to think of what lies beyond this world here and now, to think of God and eternity.
The food that transforms
I knew Pinkerton well during the last decade of her life. Her family had been fallen-away Catholics. She had long since returned to the Church with beautiful and eloquent conviction. Studying poetry with Winters had taught her to see life as a serious business and death as an impetus to live well now by fixing our eyes on the last things. When, in 2017, she was drawn at last from the pool of this world, she knew well that she had not squandered her years feasting only on the goods of this world, but in feasting on the Eucharist, which turns us, little by little, to creatures meant for everlasting communion with God.
The Pool
By Helen Pinkerton
Rise to the surface, flex and spin and dart
Out of the water, in again, your leap
For the dragonfly that hums above defeated;
If it is caught, you fall with it again
Into the rippled morass of confusion,
Your perfect aim not to be so sustained,
For you are quick or slow beyond control.
Mirroring mountains, dark facsimile
Of yellow pine and blue-scarred granite face,
Your pool suddenly rises with spring rains
And surface melt from ancient snow deposits
Beneath the drift of seasons; or it drops,
In autumn, seeping down through stony gulches
That dry and shine amid the lifting willows.
Within this change you move, minutely felt
By air and water; and the dragonflies
Are real, are food reducible to fish;
And no leap takes you from these waters until
One day the brittle fly is cast and you,
Leaping and drawn at once, are pulled beyond
The flexions and reprisals of the pool.
