Poetic allusions

Speaking of Barbara Pym, she scatters lines of poetry throughout her novels. One that stuck in my mind enough to make me look up the whole poem was in Less Than Angels. When Catherine, one of the main characters, has seen off her ex-lover Tom on his flight to Africa (where he is an anthropologist), she gets on a bus and rides randomly through London. She has thoughts on several levels, and on one level the lines keep repeating in her mind:

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?

I wonder if those were lines that went through Pym's own mind on occasions? The character Catherine is a fiction writer, as Pym was a novelist. The poem is "A Musical Instrument," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. If you follow the link and read the poem, you'll see it describes Pan treading around in the river water, muddying it and destroying the water lilies, in order to rip a reed out of the river and make a pan pipe out of it. After cutting and hollowing the reed, he blows through it (inspiration--god-breathed), making sweet music, and he says that is the only way to do it, but:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds of the river.

Just prior to those closing lines, the poem reveals the metaphor, that Pan has been "making a poet out of a man," and thus is about how suffering produces art and poetry. I wonder if Pym felt that was her story. She wrote exquisite novels based on often painful experiences in her own life. At times, maybe she wished she was just a reed with the reeds by the river. Yet it seems that she knowingly chose her way, almost perversely seeking unhappy outcomes, in love, anyway. (Like her character Prudence, in Jane and Prudence, she preferred unhappy love affairs to happy ones.) In other areas of life, Barbara Pym seems to have been happy enough, enjoying companionship with her sister and close friend, Hilary Pym, gardening, knitting, sewing, reading. Another theme of her novels is the consolation provided by doing small, seemingly unimportant, but useful tasks.

I have two pages about Barbara Pym at my personal website, one about her and her books and the other with some favorite passages from her books.