Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Persephone, 1874
I have always known about Lethe as the river (or pool) of Forgetting, but the Pool of Memory (i.e. of Mnemosyne, mother of the muses) has remained unknown to me until now, when I found it mentioned in a poem by Ed Hirsch:
I dreamt that you slipped a silver coin
under the tongue of my sleeping body
so I could bribe the miser Charon
to ferry me across the river to Tartarus
where I longed to drink from the pool
of Memory, avoiding the three-skulled dog
on the road to the Fortunate Island
in the Black Sea , near the foaming mouth
of the Danube where I could be reborn,
but I was sentenced to the punishment
field along with other tormented spirits
where I vowed to remember the ghostly
and baleful blue undersongs of Hades
and return with the waking world.
In order to drink from the Pool of Memory, you have to be a spiritual initiate who knows the sacred password. Orpheus was a poet and a musician; in Jungian parlance, Orpheus is the Poet archetype (cf Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus). Most poets and writers drink from the Pool of Memory, and hope to be keep on drinking from it as long as they live, since Memory really is the mother of the muses.
The Pool of Memory was located at the entrance to Elysium, a kind of paradise, though not yet the ultimate paradise, the Fortunate Isles.
And then there are also the orchards in Elysium -- as in Jon's poem about pomegranate orchards (sacred to Aphrodite, let us not forget), with Hades as a ruthless capitalist.
And of course the Pool of Memory also makes me think of Jack Gilbert, who'd hoped to spend his old age feasting on his memories, and instead turned out to be fated for the Pool of Lethe. Eventually he won't remember his name, much less that he used to be a poet. Nevertheless, he gave us some marvelous poems about the transformation of experience into memory.
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