Flowers - Bloomin' Lovely

The garden is looking sorry for itself. Chopped down for winter, the three intertwined buddleia are naked sticks protruding from the soil, shorter than the fence. They look dead, but I’m sure I haven’t killed them. I can’t say the same for the annoying bindweed that was wrapped tightly around more branches than I realised. It has disappeared for now. Springtime will see it re-emerge, ready to attack, and once again I’ll be fighting the losing battle of trying to keep it away. I’m considering training it on to some trellis somewhere at the side. It is an attractive plant, just damages other things. We’ll see. The buddleia didn’t flower very well and I didn’t see a single butterfly, though I was away for most of the summer.

I'm not a good gardener, home or away, but I make an effort and do my best. Bulbs are planted for spring. I look forward to daffodils, tulips, irises, grape hyacinths and something I’ve never heard of that looked very pretty on the box. I do this every autumn, full of enthusiasm, expecting to grow the best spring garden ever and the wonderful flowers will compensate for every ache and pain. Something is always lacking – green fingers – so, in all seasons I try to plant things that will flower nicely and look after themselves. A favourite is the Totally Tangerine geum. They come back stronger each year. There are two, in different flower beds. In bloom, one is more stunning than the other. The slightly weaker one was bought when I was feeling cross about someone connected to football and I think it shows, but it doesn’t matter now.

I love to have flowers in the house. Last week I was overwhelmed and delighted to be given beautiful roses including yellow ones for friendship from a lovely friend of many years. She didn’t know this, but things have been tough for me lately. The flowers, with their special significance, really helped to cheer me up.

I always have daffodils in remembrance of my father. When he passed away, his garden path was lines with an abundance of shades of yellow, cream and orange created by an amazing display of various daffodils. It’s nice to see them appear in my garden.

I hope I have success with poppies next year. They always look lovely, but can be so delicate that they don’t last very long.

I’ve chosen two poems,

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth 1770-1850

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae 1872-1918

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Roses

Roses are the topic this week! They come high on the list of flowers that I like, along with iris and gerbera. What gives the rose the edge over others in the boquet in my estimation is their delicious scent - and I'm talking about home-grown organic roses here, not hothouse blooms from some euro-polytunnel or those flowers grown in and flown in from Kenya. Imported roses might look good but they have no smell and the means of production is frequently ecologically unsound (all those fertilisers leaching into the water table).

A perfect rose, with its complex array of petals, fascinating gradations of colour and heady aroma is truly a thing of beauty. Love the rose.

It possibly has more symbolism attached to it than any other form of flora or fauna. The red rose is the adopted emblem of my adopted county (Lancashire) as is the white rose the emblem of that lot on the other side of the Pennines - and indeed a series of battles was fought in the late 15th century that bore the name War of the Roses on account of the main protagonists.

My take on the theme has given rise to not one but two poems this week. The first, Roses, is by Billy Collins, a favourite poet of my dear departed friend Christopher (Christo) Heyworth. Billy Collins is a former Poet Laureate of the USA (2001-2003) and this poem is taken from his 2011 collection Horoscopes For The Dead. The second is a composition of my own in which I've tried to give the idea of roses a somewhat lateral literal twist. (It always amuses me to hear people drop 'literally' into conversations.) What you need to know about the protagonists of Twomb, Alec and Lisa, is they are also varieties of rose.

'Alec' and 'Lisa' entwined symbolic above the grave

First, then, this wonderfully observed and wry piece by Billy Collins, written on a visit to England a few years ago...

Roses
In those weeks of midsummer
when the roses in gardens begin to give up,
the big red, white, and pink ones -
the inner, enfolded petals growing cankerous,
the ones at the edges turning brown
or fallen already, down on their girlish backs
in the rough beds of turned-over soil,

then how terrible the expressions on their faces,
a kind of was it all really worth it? look,
to die here slowly in front of everyone
in the garden of a bed-and-breakfast
in a provincial English market town,
to expire by degrees of corruption
in plain sight of all the neighbours passing by,

the thin mail carrier, the stocky butcher
(thank God the children pay no attention),
the swivelling faces in the windows of the buses,
and now this stranger staring over the wall,
his hair dishevelled, a scarf loose around his neck,
writing in a notebook, writing about us no doubt,
about how terrible we look under the punishing sun.

                                                          Billy Collins


To finish, after a little judicious last-minute pruning, your Saturday blogger's dew-fresh offering...

Twomb
Side by side in death as in life
here lie interred a husband and wife,
Alec T. and Lisa Floribunda Rose.

The red and the white, for his verse and her prose,
entwine now symbolic, a sheltering bower
of protective thorn and commemorative flower

over this tomb of two writers of note:
she, the short-listed novelist who wrote
thinly-disguised tales of their marital strife; 

he, whose poems could cut like a knife,
the short-sighted fiery poet, her foil.
Worms compost through their mortal coils,

enriching the soil in this communal tomb,
make of their burial a friable womb
which nurtures both roses, the white and the red.

So despite the fact Alec and Lisa are dead,
their essence lives on in spike and in petal,
rose-blossoming peace after decades of battle.


Thanks for reading. Love one another, S ;-)

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By Any Other Name

Hope Mirrlees' poem, My Soul Was a Princess, was first published last year, in a posthumous collection, some 33 years after her death.  Although her most famous poem, Paris: A Poem, is in the modernist style, this piece is more lyrical, more personal.  It seems to cross between the narrative and the lyrical.  Were it not for the first two words, this could be a description lifted from fairytale or fantasy, as in Mirrlees novel, Lud-in-the-Mist.  Instead, the soul is personified in a manner which psychologists would, no doubt, find fascinating.  The perceived author's historical soul becomes a character from another world (I'll leave it to you to work out the number of narrative levels between writer and reader) which smacks of emotions repressed, perhaps embarrassing to divulge.

The drab, unfulfilled tone of longing is sustained throughout the verse through sound and imagery.  The assonant, open-mouthed 'Oh' is engaged from the second stressed vowel in 'soul'.  On line 4 it reappears with 'no hope' only to reemerge on line 10 in 'ghosts of long dead woes', culminating in the final, forceful molossus, 'one red rose'.  And the molossus is used to break up the rhythm and create emphasis in a poem with an abundance of unstressed, or invisible, sounds which add a ghostly whisper to the spoken words.  On line 8 in particular, the phrase 'gray, chill, yearning' forces the reader to slow down, to dwell on the image of the desolate palace, the longing soul. 

The palette which comprises the bulk of the poem is greyscale.  A white moon is followed by silver and pearls.  There is 'no hope of noon'.  Her garments are like 'shrouds' - another ghastly apparition - and violet, which seems a cold, hard colour.  Her fate and her face are both 'wan', her eyes grey, her skin like milk.  Her hair is fabulously captured as 'a pinion of night' so that you can imagine a great, dark swathe of black hair sweeping down towards the ground like a raven's wing. 

What action there is harks back to the theme of the ghastly or demised.  The princess 'dwelt in state', the word dwell being akin to lingering, suggestive of a long, dull passage of time.  A body 'resting in state' is also called to mind which further emphasises the dormant nature of the character.  On line 9 we are told that she 'sat and wept' and by line 12, when she seems to come to life, the double-meaning of the verb 'cry' is not lost on the reader. 

The repetition and layering which creates a scene of oppressive drabness is finally broken by a single, uncluttered image - that of the 'one red rose'.  A powerful symbol of love which stretches back to the classical Greek era, this red bloom is sufficient to sweep away the entire scene which preceded it. Finally, the extended metaphor is clear.  This is what she was yearning for, something bright and full of life; of promise and passion.  The focus of the reader is left on that expectation of fulfilment.  The grey, empty days in the palace seem reasonable as they fade into the background while the 'one red rose' blazes, temptingly, outside the window.  And ultimately this is what gets us through the winter isn't it?  The long, dark nights stretch out before us and the air begins to nip.  But we can withstand winter's woes because we know there's a red rose waiting to draw breath, if we can only withstand the chill a little longer. 

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