The poetic waters run deep in Jane Clark Scharl’s Ponds

In early 2023, Jane Clark Scharl debuted her verse drama Sonnez Les Matines to appreciative audiences in New York City. The ability to sustain a successful drama in verse—and good verse, at that—was a worthy testament to Scharl’s poetic skill. However, the recent release of her collection of forty-nine poems, Ponds, establishes beyond all doubt the range and capacities of this most capable author.

I have reviewed Ponds for The European Conservative, but this review both takes a historial and Christocentric angle appropriate to this venue and examines a portion of the work which deserved more attention than the constraints of my initial review could permit. As I noted in that earlier review, a close reading of all of the poems included in Scharl’s collection is beyond the scope of any review. Consequently, this review will focus on the longest, and titular, poem in the collection: “Ponds,” subtitled “The last words of Theoderic the Ostrogoth to his magister, Cassiodorus.”

The poem is an imagined reflection grounded in historical events, for which a few preliminary details are necessary. Born in the mid-fifth century, Theoderic (454–526) eventually became Western Roman Emperor in all but name, as King of the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and Italy, whilst also serving as a Patrician of the Eastern Roman Empire. The fifth century had begun inauspiciously for the overextended and besieged Western Roman Empire, as seen in events such as the Sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in 410. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, last of the Western Roman Emperors, and named himself King of Italy. Then, in 493, Odoacer was himself besieged at Ravenna by the invading Theoderic (a successor of Alaric). When Ravenna fell, Theoderic invited Odoacer to a reconciliation banquet—then murdered him.

Theoderic sought to re-establish the order of the Western Roman Empire that had collapsed so ignominiously in the century of his birth, and his rule did indeed yield a period of relative peace and prosperity, although it did so at the point of a very bloody sword. For if he is at all remembered to-day, it is as the king who ordered the imprisonment, torture, and execution of St. Boethius, on trumped-up charges, in 524. It was whilst thus imprisoned that Boethius wrote his masterpiece, De consolatione philosophiae. His book survived; Theoderic’s kingdom did not. After appointing Cassiodorus to replace Boethius, Theoderic died of dysentery in 526, probably preventing a persecution of orthodox Christians that would likely have been motivated by his increasingly fervent Arian beliefs. Cassiodorus, who kept extensive records of public affairs, never mentioned the fall of his predecessor.

In “Ponds,” as in Sonnez Les Matines, Scharl takes these historical details and spins them into the poetical yarn with which she weaves her finely-crafted narrative. Although the dialogue of the poem is pure contrivance, her attention to historical detail is meticulous, even from the opening lines:

So, Cassiodorus, it is you.
And just how long have you been standing there
in the shadows, cloaked in your dark habit
of silence? You wear it so easily,
even after all these years—but then
you have always wielded silence as a weapon
against me […]

Here, the metaphor of obscurity progresses in order of increasing intentionality from “shadows” to “cloaked” and then to “dark habit,” where the enjambment punctuates the conclusion to Theoderic’s question (for which, appropriately, there is no response): “silence.” Cassiodorus’ silence—about Boethius, and undoubtedly more besides, given that Boethius was executed for not being silent about corruption—is not just inadvertent elision. Perhaps it is even more than circumspection, as Theoderic bitterly supposes when he adds that “you have always wielded silence as a weapon / against me.” Here, Scharl has conceived from the historical record these believable details of Cassiodorus’ conjectured personality: particularly, a strain of observant taciturnity that is part political timing, part self-preservation, part discretion. That would be literary achievement enough, but she then imagines this personality as perceived through the narrowed, suspicious eyes of Theoderic, with his sword all-too-often at the ready, and none too particular about whether its target is a friend or a foe.

Theoderic’s self-affirming justifications evoke the historical battles that he fought over geography and theology alike. His murder of Odoacer, “my rival for the throne,” is just the first blood, “sprinkled” like seasoning on “the meat of the feast.” Noting Cassiodorus’ look of “disdain,” Theoderic is quick to offer the high-handed and dismissive, “But you never were a king,” pivoting to his own emotional trauma about the fall of Roman towers, and the blazing, order-giving light of Roman law:

You never wept as you heard the crash
when Roman towers shattered like glass,
nor saw the showers of soul-sparks rise
when the hammer of God struck the anvil of the pride
of men outside the gates of Byzantium.
You did not mark where your arrows fell
on the very doorstep of the pit of Hell,
nor did you, wading through the blood of tribes,
take and wield, for the last time,
the Roman law as a burning brand
against the monstrous night.

In these memorable lines, the Theoderic of Scharl’s verse romanticizes the historical Roman order, mirroring the historical Theoderic’s attempts to remake the Western Roman Empire in terms which fused its geographic reach and administrative structure to barbarian vitality and force of arms. But the literary Theoderic slips in an awareness or an anxiety (note that ominous “for the last time”) that, rather than revive the Roman world, he has only created an ephemeral barbarian amalgamation—one that is all the weaker for its Roman connexions, particularly where religion is concerned. The transient nature of what he has created is further affirmed when he says, “I know / what comforts your kind brings / to the deathbed of a failed king,” explicitly recognising the failure of his rule to endure, before once again reminding us of both of Cassiodorus’ laconic disapprobation: “your silence is doubtless the gentlest thing.”

Arianism—the belief that God the Son did not always exist, but was created before time by (and was therefore not coeternal with) God the Father—had been condemned as a heresy by Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea in 325. The decree did little to deter Theoderic, whose early attitude towards religion seems to have been rather disinterested. By the end of his reign—probably in response to a crackdown on Arians in the East, where he was himself widely considered a heretic—he had become more characteristically antagonistic. Threatening to begin his own wave of reprisals, he sent Pope John I to negotiate with the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justin I. In this, the primate proved almost completely successful; yet, upon his return, Theoderic charged John with conspiring with the Emperor and imprisoned him until he died of neglect on 18 May 526, just a few months before he himself died on 30 August.

Given Theoderic’s readiness to settle disputes with violence and his early disinterest in religion, Scharl offers a very plausible reading of his character. Probably motivated by injuries to his pride (those Eastern clerics who kept calling him a heretic) and by injuries to those who shared his beliefs (Justin’s crackdown on Arians), her Theoderic freely admits that his conduct is not wholly grounded in theologically sophisticated reasoning:

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
his was a greater mystery than being made?
How could I hope to plumb the secret
space that hangs between sound and silence,
the two voices of God? And yet
to rightness in all this will I be held,
in this life and in the one to come.

After being so willing to offer justifications for his military conquests, Theoderic casts aside unequivocal rationalisations. The knowledge of the Almighty cannot be gained through force of arms, “and yet,” Theoderic adds, almost ruefully, “to rightness in all this,” he expects to be judged. In this, the literary king denies readers any certainty that could take them beyond the historical narrative: it is not possible to know what really motivated Theoderic, what the balance was in his heart, so Scharl leaves open the possibility that, at some level, sincere Christian belief—heretical in its time and ours but nevertheless striving for Christian truth—may have played a part in driving the policy even of this blood-soaked barbarian king.

Confronted with the ineffable nature of divinity, resistant to all efforts of force or thought, Theoderic turns from creative enormity to creative miniscule: the little fish-ponds that Cassiodorus built and in which Theoderic was happy to see fish swimming:

Yes, the happiest of fish they were,
and, seeing them, I the happiest of men.
What a strange thing is life. Look: the clouds
hang low, and soon we will have rain.
But whether it will churn up or wash away
the mud, I cannot say.

As the poem approaches its conclusion, it seems to look forward to the naturalistic explanations of the creative and divine orders attributed to barbarians in the works of later writers, such as St. Bede the Venerable. The simplicity of these analogies is what makes them so compelling, especially amongst people who find themselves “unable to plumb the secret space” where the truth of God might be discerned—a quality that makes them especially appealing in our own highly secularised age. Theoderic sees in the fish the freedom of smallness: of not having always to have a hand on the sword, and still being able to live under God’s sky all the same. But then the spell is broken, and Theoderic moves away from the fish to consider the rain in terms connected to his legacy and to man’s created order.

Yet the reader cannot help but linger: for Theoderic, the rain is the cause or solution to the woes of men—whether it will clean away the filth of history, or deepen the mire. Not so for the fish; in the freedom of their smallness, they neither welcome nor fear the rain, even as they live in every drop thereof. Here, as through her work, Scharl never fails to leave us with something more to ponder.

Ponds
By J.C. Scharl,
Cascade Books, 2024
Paperback, vii+73pp.