Interconnection

Michael Schmidt’s poem “The Pond” acknowledges the intricate relationship between the human speaker and life at a local pond. Over the years, the speaker frequents this pond and becomes a fixture in the water’s reflection. When a drought one particularly hot summer empties the pond and kills its fish, the speaker loses his capacity for imagination and connection. Thus Schmidt not only presents the theme of interconnection through its felt sense in the speaker at the beginning of the poem, but also through absence and erasure. While this poem does not explicitly draw connections between human activity and the drought, it does register the ways in which passivity can harm an environment and its inhabitants. Ultimately, the speaker values the lives inside the pond and experiences grief, apathy, and isolation in response to the death that occurs there.

The pond’s flora and fauna...