J.C. Scharl, Ponds. Cascade Books, 2024.
Review by Steve Knepper
New Verse Review opens for submissions on July 1
J.C. Scharl’s dramatic monologue “Ponds” made an impression on me when it was first published in the fantastic Lamp Magazine. (And not only because Lamp editor Matthew Walther had published a poem written after The Waste Land.) “Ponds” is about the death of Theoderic—the Ostrogoth king who wrenched control of Rome from another barbarian ruler, Odoacer, whom Theoderic ultimately cleaved in two at a banquet that was supposed to cement a truce between them. Theoderic is perhaps most famous today for sentencing his one-time advisor Boethius to death. In Scharl’s poem, Theoderic speaks from his own deathbed to Boethius’s successor Cassiodorus. In short, this is a poem where a barbarian king addresses his Roman advisor during the long decline of the Western empire.
Like his predecessor Boethius, Cassiodorus is a proponent of Greek and Latin learning and Christian wisdom. He will eventually become an important patron of monasticism. His writings are conciliatory toward the conquering Goths (unsurprising, given his role), but Scharl’s Theoderic suspects Cassiodorus’s disapproval. The dying king claims, “you have always wielded silence as a weapon / against me.” (Perhaps Boethius, who is not directly mentioned in the poem, is part of this “silence.”)
Theoderic’s monologue is something between a justification and a confession. He first defends his actions, including the aforementioned surprise cleaving of his rival Odoacer, via no-nonsense realism: “I knew, my boy, what you did not: / that there is a noble living to be made / in the brutal defense of something good / that you have not lived by, or even understood.” The poem is punctuated by occasional rhyme or near rhyme. (Rhyme fittingly becomes more consistent when Theoderic recalls his epic travails and exploits.) Here, the rhyme of “good” and “understood” not only underscores Theoderic’s point in the quoted passage but also one of the poem’s main concerns—the possibility that neither Theoderic nor Cassiodorus really understands the “goods” of the other.
The last line of the quoted passage segues into Theoderic’s second defense. Like most Goths, Theoderic was an Arian Christian, deemed heretical by the Romans. Here the king pleads ignorance:
What do I truly know of wisdom? What tools did I have to divine the nature of the Incarnation, whether Christ was made man or whether he was a greater mystery than being made?
Theoderic indulges in self-pity at times. “Today it is not permitted to be / simply a barbarian lord,” he says at one point. But this is not just bellyaching about the good old days when a barbarian chieftain could chop his rival in two without having to administer a crumbling empire afterward. Theoderic’s monologue is aimed at Cassiodorus, for sure, but the king is also clearly trying to take stock of his life and figure out what his legacy might be in these chaotic times.
The poem ends in a kind of exasperated warmth toward Cassiodorus and seeming acceptance of impending death: “Go, boy. Go / to your ponds. I know you are longing / to. Go. Yes, what a little thing / is life, and littlest of all its passing, / a raindrop’s ripple on the water / stirring up reflections of clouds…” The ponds that Cassiodorus digs become emblems of the kinds of fragile, civilized goods that Theoderic claims to have defended without understanding. They also represent surfaces and depths, reflected images (including self-images), moments of serenity, and the fleeting “ripple” of life. Theoderic’s urging of Cassiodorus to “Go, boy” may portend the advisor’s later turn from politics to religion. It is worth noting, though, that while this is a poem full of allusion, Scharl inserts enough exposition to orient readers who know next to nothing about the history. They will still be struck by the modulations in Theoderic’s voice and the layers of motive. He is no “simple” barbarian.
“Ponds” is the penultimate poem in Scharl's debut collection of the same name. In a way, it is the title poem, but ponds actually recur throughout the collection. Here, for instance, are some evocative lines from “Spring Stillness”:
Even the breeze is its own calm. The unending ripples on the pond become, by repetition, a calm beyond stillness.
The title thus reaches beyond Scharl’s poem of Theoderic and Cassiodorus.
A dramatic monologue spoken by Theoderic is my kind of thing. A few years ago, I wrote my own deathbed monologue in the voice of the emperor Justin I, uncle of the (in)famous Justinian. Scharl’s collection contains three other excellent extended monologues. One, in loose blank verse, is spoken by the wife (now widowed) at the wedding feast of Cana in St. John’s Gospel. Another, written in subtle rhyme and near rhyme, allows Penelope, the “aged wife” of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” to tell her side of things. “The Newlywed” is spoken by Persephone and written in cross-rhyming quatrains. Given my proclivities, these four poems—along with the intricate sequence “Candles,” with its octave for each of the fourteen extinguished Tenebrae candles—are highlights of the collection.
But Ponds is wide-ranging, with many moving poems of religious reflection, of motherhood, and of the illness and passing of Scharl’s own mother. There are also lyrics of observation and experience. Here are the first eight lines of the sonnet “Resurrection After a Headache”:
To be no longer tempted to succumb to mindless panic that this is the one that will not end, that this numb agony means at last I am done with the simple thing called Health, that ballast state in which no part disrupts the quiet whole, for that is how we love our lancing flesh the best: by dwelling not on it.
A good headache poem should give you a vicarious wince. This one succeeds.
I recommend you pick up a copy of the collection for yourself. It is part of the Poiema Poetry Series published by Wipf and Stock’s Cascade Books imprint and edited by D.S. Martin. It has a striking cover image of a moon rising over a pond, and Cascade offers the paperback for a very reasonable $11.
If you’d like to sample some of the poems in Scharl’s collection, here are links to four in their original publication venues:
“Penelope” in The Hopkins Review
“Resurrection After a Headache” in Mezzo Cammin
“In the Sandbox” in The North American Anglican
“After the Funeral” in First Things