Marilyn Bowering’s Poem Cove And My Note On It

Cove

Marilyn Bowering

You, age, you are not cheerful,

Though we don’t know how to avoid you.

—Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn 

The cove of my heart

where the swans swam,

the sun glassed

and alive on the waves.

A boat scraped ashore,

and friends now distant,

stepped onto an island.

Seated under the tree-roofed sky,

the hills to uphold me,

the mist for company,

and a dog on watch,

what could be better?

Traffic sullies the quiet,

the trees empty of birdlife:

I will not say more about age,

but why take everything

by force,

and leave us blind

to the Milky Way?

Comment mine:

A cove is a small sheltered bay. So the poet speaks of a cove of her heart, a place about which she feels intimately  reminiscent. She speaks of it within the context of the saying heading the poem, about the inexorable advance of not-to-be-cheered aging.

Note the shifting verb tenses through the poem from past to present.

The poet reminisces fondly about scenes from that cove. But then, after the first sentence, she recalls hearing a boat scraping the shore of an island, I presume a different place from the cove, which introduces a discordant note. And so nostalgic reminiscence gives way to her remembered sad sense of distant friends who stepped onto “an island,” “island” suggesting distance and estrangement and leading to the poet now being alone. 

Now, reminiscing gives way to present description: the poet is sheltered by trees; supported by the hills; the mist, sadly, is her company; her dog watches. What, she asks, could be better, a question tinged with both present contentment and lonely sadness. What could be better, the answer may be, what once was. 

Still, even if nothing is better, her moment of contentment gives way to the sadness of aging in the midst of modern development altering her heart’s cove. The poet notes the traffic sullying, that is to say, befouling, “the quiet” and “the trees empty of bird life.” So, no longer, it seems, do swans swim in the cove. No longer does the poet feel the sun “glassed and alive on the waves.” One would have to feel more alive oneself to feel and perceive that.

But, she says, she will speak no longer of aging. Rather, she confronts the violence, “force,” of endings taking all away and leaving us insensate within and to our galaxy. 

Not for nothing does the poet refer to it as the “Milky Way,” which metaphor, after all, is humans making localizing poetry out of our surrounding galactic vastness, as if the galaxy was a bucolic path somewhere pleasantly nearby . This poetry making, and all else, will be taken away from us. 

So the poem ends, does it not, with a final, piercing question of lament, a final, brief cri de couer?