The first four poems ("The Sound of Water", "Jack Frost", "Tree River", and "Heaven's Sea") represent both a seasonal cycle of water (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer) and a cycle of spiritual growth. 

The Sound of Water

I wrote a first draft of The Sound of Water around 1983 one evening in my room in a boarding house in New York City.  I remember I just read Spenser’s famous marriage poem, Epithalamion, and was feeling the wonder of its gentle, lyrical refrain: “Sweet Thames, run softly ‘til I end my song.”  I was felt wistful about the line, thinking it was the most beautiful line one could write about the sound of water and it had already been written.  Then the line “the murmuring stream runs along the shore” came to me.  I thought, “hmm, that’s beautiful – wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could write a poem with that line in it.”  The Sound of Water is the product of that reflection and my subsequent efforts. 

This poem has taught me the wisdom of hanging on to poems before sharing them with others.  It was not until last year that I made the poem’s final revision – of the first line.  I had tried various words in the blank space of “The sound of water is a ________ dream” (e.g., “rippling” or “living”) and never felt comfortable with the line.  Who am I, anyways, to say what the sound of water is?  Finally, over 25 years later, I realized that there could truly be only one first line to this poem: “In the sound of water, a living dream:”. 

Jack Frost

I vividly recall thinking after I had finished my first version of Jack Frost, “Gee, that took four years to write.”  Its genesis was in a classroom in a small Austrian village, Faistenau-bei-Salzburg, in the Austrian Alps in which I taught at a small American school, Sea Pines Abroad.  I remember talking about changes people experience and suggested to my students that certain changes in man’s life might be compared to those of snowflakes – of dust and water created, falling into the world and then slowly losing track of the purity from which they came as they settled into their place in the world, etc., etc.  Then a student piped up, “Oh, Mr. D. is a poet.”  And, of course, the comment struck and stayed with me – and for years thereafter I wondered if I could put the concept into a poem.  When I actually wrote the poem, I can’t recall – except that I was about twenty-four and living in New York City in a boarding house on East 88^th Street. 

After my first draft, I wrote many different versions of the poem, essentially all the same but with various changes.  For instance, the poem used to read “worms” instead of “words” and “exhausted by intrusion” rather than “frightened by exclusion.”  But I’ve given up trying to understand why anyone is able to change from conceiving oneself in, and holding onto, a definite identity unto recognizing oneself in the larger identity of all humanity.  So, I think, the words I have settled on suffice as well as any others I might think of. 

Tree River

I believe Tree River is one of the more beautiful sonnets I have written.  Oddly enough, its creation was almost mechanical.  I had become aware that distinct sonnet patterns lend themselves to distinct kinds of subjects (an Elizabethan sonnet with 3 quatrains and a couplet – Shakespeare’s choice for his sonnets – sets up a wonderful vehicle for examining an idea/concept/issue from 3 different perspectives and then springing an epiphany with the ending couplet; likewise, the Petrarchan sonnet is ideal for presenting a dilemma with its preliminary box in a box pattern of abbaabba and then shifting gradually into a way out of the mind-dilemma in the sestet).  I had, in other words, become conscious how a sonnet’s rhyme scheme could enhance the meaning of the poem if there were a correspondence in subject matter between the rhyming lines.

So, after writing many Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnets, I began experimenting with a number of novel sonnet rhyme schemes, all of which turned out awkward or unworkable.  But I began to hope that a more lyrical rhyme scheme and perhaps a subtler one than the traditional ones was discoverable.  Eventually, I thought about having the initial rhyming line (an A line) reappear further and further away from itself and then having the second and third rhyming lines patterned around the first rhyming lines.  I managed to get a partial scheme devised with three sets of rhyming lines ending in 10 lines (rather than the traditional 8 of an octet or 14 of a full sonnet).  Then I realized that I had room for 2 couplets at the end instead of one – which could produce a kind of a turbo epiphany effect.  Wouldn’t it be great if I could write such a poem that merged precisely with such a pattern? 

So, in my little room the New York City boarding house, sometime in the 1980s, I began to think about having the first rhyming lines be about a tree, the second ones about a poet and the tree, and the third about a river flowing by occupying the poets’ thoughts.  I started devising lines to fit the patterns – and eventually look what emerged!  

Heaven’s Sea

This is a sonnet written with a rhyme scheme employed by Edmund Spenser.  Spenser’s rhyme scheme (ababbcbccdcdee) has similarities to both the Elizabethan, with its concluding couplet, and the Petrachan, with the use of two sets of four rhyming lines.  Because these two sets are framed by two sets of two rhyming lines at the beginning of the poem and at the end before the couplet, I conceived of the structure as framing nicely a meditation on the sea and its tides: the first set of two rhyming lines constitute the shore from which the tide moves; the first set of four rhyming lines constitutes the tide moving out; the second set, the tide moving in; the second set of two rhyming lines reflect the shore to which the tide moves back; the couplet would constitute some lesson, an epiphany, one could draw from the reality portrayed.  That was the idea.  The product is before you.  It was the first sonnet I wrote with the Spenserian rhyme scheme.  Spenser himself, however, did not write his sonnets with this synchronicity and arranged their contents like a traditional English sonnet.  I wrote it in the early ‘80s in New York City while recalling the view from Truro Light on Cape Cod.