Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Tuesday, August 3rd.

Today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Eleanor Wiley.

Eleanor Wiley was born in 1885 and she lived until 1928.

And she was an American poet and novelist who was quite popular in her own day in the 1920s and 1930s

when modernist poem capital M modern was quite popular. And today's poem is called atavism,

and this is how it goes. I always was afraid of Soam's pond, not the little pond by which the willow stands,

where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands and brown bright shallows, but the one beyond.

There, when the frost makes all the birches burn yellow as cow lilies and the pale sky shines like a polished shell between black spruce and pines.

Some strange thing tracks us, turning where we turn. You'll say I dream it, being the true daughter of those who in old times endured this dread.

Look, where the lily stems are showing red.

A silent paddle moves below the water.

A sliding shape has stirred them like a breath.

Tall plumes surmounts a painted mask of death.

Like I've said before on the show, I'm crazy about fishing poems.

I know that's really random, but there's something very compelling to me about the image

and the feeling of a mysterious presence lurking in the deep beneath the waters.

And this poem captures that really, really well.

The poet describes a specific place, Soames Pond.

And she gives us very vivid description of it, the pale sky, the polished shell, the black spruce and pines.

And yet, of course, this pond is more than just a specific

pond. It's also a representation of mystery, right? And fear, there's something going on in this

pond that's beyond intervention of civilization. The other pond, of course, is a place where these laughing boys go fishing. It's fun. It's this summer experience. And yet this other pond, this hidden pond, has these mysterious lurking presences that are described by the poet that lurk beneath the waters.

...