mP Book Reviews
Patricia Ann Doneson, Songs of Silence: The Journey
Campbell-Smith Publishing, ©1998
$19.95 / 95 pages
ISBN- 1-57914-021-1
Book Cover

December 1, 2008
Reviewer: Stephanie Pope
Bio

Songs of Silence: The Journey
Poetic Memory & Memorable Poetry

The metaphor of the memory box—with no little emphasis since it graces the back
cover of Songs of Silence: The Journey by Patricia Ann Doneson, suggests that soul’s journey remains under the tutelage of the mother of muses, Mnemosyne or Memory. Therefore, one understands at the onset, poetic language is shaped to uphold a major task.

There is in fact an ancient Orphic belief in a poetic basis to the steadfast nature of the journey belonging to the well of Mnemosyne as is there a spiritually important soul retrieval which happens here. My feeling for the poetic language in whose harbor these poems in this poetry volume come to anchor is toward how they remain to me a remembrance in much of the ancient wisdom —an awareness whose power it is to tap into the wellspring resident, life-giving pool of memory via journey—more specifically, a journey that is down going and often…well, a plain hell!

Today – I hurt

Tomorrow – I
will uncover
the wound – see

what damage
has been done…   Broken Promises, p4

and

        If
All you can find
In your silence is pain,

   Then sing…        The Journey, (see inset)

The journey itself is recorded in Pausanias, a traveler, writer and geographer from Greece in the second century A.D.. 1  And not unlike the poet’s bio-geographic, poetic account in traversing psyche’s landscape, Pausanias’ record affirms the old way to consort with Nous, the knower within is to find the cold waters in whose personified notion rests Mnemosyne. The journey belongs to the province of memory and thus it is memory’s task to free psychic images from material fetters and return them to an interior life’s anterior memory in being of heaven alone. 

The poetic or radiant experience of imaginal being recovered, upon return, instructs the down-goer in the dream-like journey to dedicate in written form all they have seen and heard. So I am thinking of Doneson’s poetry as recording and preserving a story in this manner when I read lines like

Yellow Bird
sing your song
for me.

Sing,
as if my very
life depended
on it.

And – it does.    Courage, p50

In cathedos Pausanias suggests one is to drink from the waters of forgetfulness or Lethe to leave behind all one has lived i.e. one’s materialisms. When one comes again to the rightful chthonic waters of the cold, dark deep and true perennial wisdom one is to ask Memory to let one taste of this water and asking, drink of this water. Drink...as if your life depends upon it—and it does in this moment! For Memory guides a child born of Earth and of Starry Heaven, both. The child both forgets and remembers all kinds of things. But soul remembers the child’s race is of Heaven (alone) and says so. From here on, what has been neglected is what must be re membered.

Where do you go
for these words?

into dark places
you would not care to enter,

Nor, would you care to see.

…When I have gathered,
without judgment, all
that I can hold.

Then,
and only then,
am I released

To set my pen to paper.     Poetry, p38

In recollection soul-making sees what has been known all along that is deeply true; having sought out this origin in the divine pool of Nous (mind), soul-tending will have asked one to drink once more from the cold depths of images refreshed in resemblances from the pool of Mnemosyne. Having drunk from the well of Mnemosyne, an immortal and ancestral knowledge will assuage soul's grief for all time. Doneson calls this mytheme of person a song of silence, a deep longing and a great hope. (see The Memory Box, back cover) It is not ever to be forgotten.

........................Orphic Tablet,  Petelia, Italy

The very old Orphic account speaking to immortal memory and not just merely ephemeral memory is recorded in a tablet found at Petelia, Italy and published in Jane Ellen Harrision’s Prolegomena To The Study of the Greek Religions. 2 To call upon the assistance of Mnemosyne requires an unshakeable faith that Nous will stir soul awake—Psyche is movement! Psyche-a-stir, a wake, a be-coming to presence in presences is as old as (and as new as) a poetic image formed in likeness of its origin akin a divine root or archai.

Remembrance happens in soul-tending return of one’s mortal histories to one’s own true ground in the archetypal realm of being (memory as epistrophe). 3 It is said that some prefer to look in the other direction instead and drink from the waters of forgetfulness...

There is water
in the well, but
no one drinks from it.
Why, cries
the thirsty child?
Because, to drink
one must first look
into the face
reflected. - Starvation, p65 

The hymn recorded on the Orphic tablet warns the traveler against drinking from the river Lethe. Harrison calls it a well on the left that is left nameless but it is the notion that in death we forget all names for a troublesome world. The translation Harrison provides is by Gilbert Murray and is as follows

Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To this Well-spring approach not near.
But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,
Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.
Say: "I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.
And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory."
And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well-spring, And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship. . . .

The soul speaks to the well and must speak in avowal of origin which Harrison says reconstitutes a claim to drink from the well of Mnemosyne and so the well makes answer. That the poetry is shaken through with such wisdom and wakens the nature of psyche as immortal throughout the psyche of nature is recognized in such lines as these

There is
too much
inside
of me.

So, I
project
myself
unto the
land, and

Praise,
its beauty.    Acceptance, p45

It is a reasonable increase, a new land, an ancestral spirit, a poetic life in the depth soul sprung. It is a mysterious remembering in which Lethe’s powers are undone. For the origin claim is divine. The old Orphic claim is an unshakable faith, Harrison notes—immortality is possible only in virtue of the divinity of humanity whose sacrament it is to drink from this pool of resemblances. (Harrison, 574.)

The Platonist, Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), also published a translation in 1781 of an Orphic Hymn to Mnemosyne honoring this power to awaken the deep heart in remembering its origin among the stars (i.e. the archai)

To Mnemosyne or the Goddess of Memory:
The consort I invoke of Jove divine,
Source of the holy, sweetly speaking Nine [Muses];
Free from th' oblivion of the fallen mind,
By whom the soul with intellect is join'd.
Reason's increase and thought to thee belong,
All-powerful, pleasant, vigilant, and strong.
'Tis thine to waken from lethargic rest
All thoughts deposited within the breast;
And nought neglecting, vig'rous to excite
The mental eye from dark oblivion's night.
Come, blessed pow'r, thy mystics' mem'ry wake
To holy rites, and Lethe's fetters break. 4

Reason’s increase and thought belong to the waken heart lodged within the breast and soul-tended within the poet’s way. Let me close then, with the poet holding honor here and in way no last words but lasting ones. Because at root it isn’t a waking in resemblance of last words recorded.  It is in re semblances an origin and forever. It is a song.

The poet
will rise again,

Casting – a
great melody
upon the land.

Those
who hear
this new song

Will awaken,
as from a dream.

Even -
the nightingale
will listen to this

Symphony.

As,
once more,
the wonder

in a poet’s word – is known. -Poets, Songs of Silence: The Journey p76

End Notes