I Want This Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral
Jane Kenyon’s “The Pond at Dusk” is a quiet, mischievous reckoning with nature and mortality. Our critic A.O. Scott plumbs its depths.
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Isabella Cotier
By A.O. Scott
July 23, 2025
You can hear a reading of this poem at the bottom of the page.
“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.
The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals . Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead , dropping now and then toward
the outward - radiating evidence of food .
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves , and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms .
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster : the day comes at last ,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews .
Its 12 lines reject false comfort and offer something more useful in its place: a measure of clarity about the human situation.
For two of its three stanzas, this reads like a nature poem. And like most nature poems, it understands the natural world both as a series of phenomena and as a storehouse of symbols.
Insects, birds and trees just are what they are. But people can’t seem to look at anything in nature without trying to read it. Which is, inevitably, to misread, to write our own thoughts onto the universe’s inscrutable page.
Jane Kenyon, contemplating a pond in the gloaming, catches tremors of worry in what she sees.
She turns errors of perception into a kind of conceptual mischief, a charming game in which unease plays tag with reassurance. You can call the ripple on the water a “wound,” which turns its disappearance into healing.
The fly that caused that brief disturbance buzzes off to become prey for the swallows, but any potential violence in that image is dissolved as the insect is reclassified as food. We arrange the world as we translate it into language.
Sometimes we realize our mistakes. Kenyon’s second stanza emphasizes the fallibility of human perspective, and makes gentle comedy of our habit of inventing causes for alarm.
Is that a cloud of poison gas hovering over the orchard? Exhaust from an alien spaceship?
Did the barn catch fire?
It’s only the trees. Everything is fine.
And then it isn’t. As soon as we think the premonition of doom has been dispelled, the hammer drops. Sometimes — the worst times, as often as not — things are exactly as they seem to be. Lulled by the fading light over the water, we awaken to find ourselves at a funeral.
What happened? Whose funeral? The final stanza is blunt — spelling matters out plainly rather than playing with ambiguous images — but also enigmatic.
And death, the conclusion to every story, isn’t without its comic aspect, the slapstick of the pallbearers grappling with their burden. The brusque last line might be taken as a punchline.
A few things to know about Jane Kenyon: She lived for much of her writing life on a farm in New Hampshire, the ancestral property of her husband, Donald Hall, who was also a poet. She suffered from depression, and wrote about it, and was just 47 when she died of leukemia, in 1995. She wrote about that illness too. Mortality is a presence in many of her poems, an emotional weight, an intellectual puzzle and a philosophical anchor.
Jane Kenyon in 1992.
William Abranowicz/Art + Commerce
In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.
Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.
The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals . Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead , dropping now and then toward
the outward - radiating evidence of food .
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves , and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms .
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster : the day comes at last ,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews .
In “The Pond at Dusk” she sees a lot, and conveys it in very few words.
Just 73 of them, arranged into four sentences of increasing complexity.
This is free verse, which means that the music happens not through meter or rhyme but in the line breaks.
Those breaks are also subtle cliff-hangers. The eye, looking for continuity, finds white space. The voice pauses, creating a breath’s worth of suspense. What are the swallows dropping toward?
What is it that looks like smoke? Like disaster?
There is nothing mysterious in this poem. A bug skims the water. A flock of swallows scatters. Trees are in leaf and in blossom. Someone has died. And yet the poem itself swells with mystery, an intimation of deep waters running under the placid surface.
We are in the presence of a strong voice — witty, unassuming, wise — but the speaker is nonetheless elusive. There is no “I” in evidence, though the disparate elements of the poem are brought together in one person’s mind. This isn’t a scene, but a sequence of thoughts.
And also feelings, even if the language of explicit emotion is absent. Pain, anxiety and grief are invoked in successive stanzas, but always in a sidelong manner, and never for very long.
The human world is distant, almost abstract. We don’t hear names or see faces.
We notice artifacts — the structures that people carpenter together to accommodate their needs. The sounds of mourning in the church have been muted.
But church, in this poem, is where we end up. Outside the coffin, at least for now.
The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals . Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead , dropping now and then toward
the outward - radiating evidence of food .
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves , and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms .
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster : the day comes at last ,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews .
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