So Strangely Married: Peggy Pond Church’s The Ripened Fields: Fifteen Sonnets of a Marriage

A N D R E W E L K I N S Chadron State College “So Strangely Married”: Peggy Pond Church’s TheRipened Fields: Fifteen Sonnets ofa Marriage i In 1924, nine years before her first of eight books of poetry was published, Peggy Pond (1903-1986) married Fermor Church, an in­ structor in the Los Alamos (New Mexico) Ranch School, the boys’ school founded byAshley Pond, Peggy’s father. Between 1943 and 1953, Church wrote a series of sonnets about her marriage (Armitage, 29). After Fermor died of a brain tumor in 1975, Church converted the final sonnet in the sequence into an elegy for her husband. The collection, The Ripened Fields: Fifteen Sonnets of a Marriage, was first published in its current state in 1978, although an earlier version (without the elegy) had appeared in the Fall, 1954, edition of Inward Light, the Quaker journal. The fifteen poems in The Ripened Fields, written in response to the difficult mixture of harmony and discord that is at the heart of any long-lasting marriage, are the poet’s vision of the human psyche and marriage as she came to understand both during her fifty-year marriage. As Church wrestles in her poems with the problems inherent in a relationship between the sexes, the sonnet sequence develops into a dramatic narrative of self-discovery. Because the poet’s understanding of psychological processes is influenced heavily by the theories of Carl Jung, which she and her husband read together as they struggled with their marriage (Armitage, 8), a brief detour through Jung’s theories about the relation between the individual psyche and marriage will help us understand Church’s poems. Jung tells us that we each confront the world with a mask, what he calls our “persona” or “outward face,” “strongly influenced by environ- 354 Western American Literature mental conditions” (Essential, 102), which “comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience” (Essential, 99), and which therefore is likely to exhibit those traits our culture traditionally associates with our gender. However, he also tells us that we are all composed of male and female components, and that, again “for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience,”we tend to ignore that part of ourselves composed of traits not traditionally associated with our cultur­ ally determined gender roles. These parts Jung calls the anima in the man and the animus in the woman, the part of ourselves with which we are least comfortable, congenial, or familiar. These hidden compo­ nents, “shaped by the unconscious and its qualities” (Essential, 102), of course, do not simply go away or behave themselves. The anima in the man and the animus in the woman are “represented in the unconscious by definite persons with the corresponding qualities” (Essential, 103). That is, the cross-gender halfof our psyche produces in our unconscious an image of itself, which we then, in Jung’s theory, project onto the world, like a beacon, aswe search for the one person whose image will fit our internal image of our other half. As Jung puts it, we habitually project onto the world “the replica of [our] own unknown face” (Psyche and Symbol, 8). “Such an image,”Jung says, “is called a ‘soul-image’” (Essential, 103), and any person in the external world who corresponds to our “soul-image” produces an immediate effect: ‘This person is the object of intense love or equally intense hate (or fear). The influence of such a person is immediate and absolutely compelling, because it always provokes an affective response” (Essential, 103). The matter of falling in love gets more complicated when we add Jung’s notion that, like Wordsworth’syouth “trailing clouds of glory,”we enter life with vague intimations of a time when we, or when our ancestors, were psychically integrated beings, male and female selves living together comfortably within one skin, not like the iceberg beings we are now, great portions of our psyches buried in the cold depths of our unconscious, waiting their chance to emerge. In his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book ofLife, a book Church and her husband read together (Armitage, 29), Jung tells us that, initially...