From: A Choice of Comic and Curious Verse (Penguin)

The first verse is the loveliest “superfine gloss”, “pink lilies and things”, “wings of its duck”. You can see a pond with high mossy banks. You want to come closer but you know you shouldn’t try. It must be morning when the light is spun so thin that the gloss is barely visible. And I have to smile at the “lilies and things” where we are taught to expect beautiful words, more of a what we could see in the pond if were we there and instead Daniel finishes with a child’s sense of importance “and things”.

But who likes the soupy surface of scum? Children like gross things, maybe that is it.

Water-waved reeds… I read it as water-weaved at first and thought that was a fresh image bringing the mesmerizing warmth of a woman in a cozy room to shaded cool waters. Start of a dark fairy tale.
Water waving weeds. Weeds in water slowly moved by the ducks and the wind.

Our Pond

I am fond
Of our pond,
Of the superfine gloss
On its moss,
Its pink lilies and things
And the wings
. Of its duck.

I am keen
On the green
Soupy surface of some
Of its scum,
Its water-waved weeds,
Its three reeds
. And its muck.

Yesterday,
As I lay
And admired its thick skin,
I fell in;
I went walloping down
Till I stuck.

I am fond of our pond,
But I like it much more
From the shore.
It was quite out of place
On my face,
. Where it stuck.

Daniel Pettiward