Pretty Polly Wants a Myth

The third essay in The Rose & the Briar is worth the admission price all by itself. Rennie Sparks lights up “Pretty Polly” with an incendiary display of history, mythology, sociology, poetry, and folklore (her bibliography alone could stock a bookcase for a year's worth of soulful wisdom reading). Daring!

But she does what Ann Powers in the previous essay didn’t: follow the changes in a folk song through the years and over the sea and shed light on it all. From the Christian bloodletting of goddesses to Puritan scalps and massacres to Richard Speck and murdered nurses, she follows the line of myth and violence through the musical strains of “Pretty Poll” (listen here to Dock Boggs version) and illuminates the sky. Here’s a flash:

I think “Pretty Polly” is an attempt to speak to these … nature spirits. It is a ritual of bloodletting, an appeal to invisible forces, a cry to the goddess to come embrace us with her thorny arms. Polly’s murder works as Joseph Campbell believed all myth has worked—as a secret opening, a knife slashed in the veil of experience through which deep knowledge may seep. To those not gifted enough to hear the bean plants talk or see the faeries dancing, myth may be our only access to places outside our conscious perception of reality. (pg. 48)

I love that flicker: “myth may be our only access to places outside our conscious perception of reality.” It’s what folk songs do in that weird way they do. And what poetry can do as well when it wants to.

Robert Bly speaks to this power and practices what he preaches, sometimes too fervently I suppose, like a fundamentalist sometimes will do. But his heart (there’s that voodoo word again) is in the right place. Gary Snyder too. And of course Robert Frost who only knew New England legend all too well.

Words breathing life into myth. Let God be the universe if you so wish. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Can I hear an amen!