Sherry Chandler

Springs

In antiquity, natural springs and constructed fountains constituted and commemorated sacred spots: water breaking out of the ground in some divine manifestation, or as a mythological representation of eloquence. There remains even in our ordinary language an association of firstness, origination, and authority with natural springs (consider the use to which English puts its adaptation of the French word la source, for example). Large basined fountains in towns and cities were contrived for communal access to water for drinking and washing. But other architectural, decorative fountains, seducing natural or conducted emissions of water into elaborate and joyful play before subsiding, in a final basin, into a solemn, working pool have remained figurative of poetry in ways that long outlast Apollonian mythologies. It is as if the water, playing in the air and falling back along intricate carved surfaces—sometimes in gross mimesis as it is spewed from human and animal orifices, sometimes more metaphorically caressing, and leading sunlight to caress, bodies and other voluptuous forms—were fictional, instead of literal, useful, workaday, water: water at play, like language at play in poetry. Modern poets thinking of the ways in which long, periodic sentences flow down—in many of Horace’s odes, for example—through a sequence of fixed, short strophic basins, overflowing each only to proceed down to the next, have felt such poems fountain-like.

—from John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 270)

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