Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit— let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair With a russet coat.
Or the melon— let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste— it is better to taste of frost— the exquisite frost— than of wadding and of dead grass. For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves— spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled from some far wood right across the melon-patch, break pear and quince— leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place. Helen herself seems almost ready for this sacrifice--at least, for the immolation of herself before this greatest love of Achilles, his dedication to "his own ship" and the figurehead, "an idol or eidolon.
National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poems Find and share the perfect poems. Sheltered Garden. I have had enough. I gasp for breath. I have had enough— border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress.
This poem is in the public domain. Stars Wheel in Purple Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star as bright Aldeboran or Sirius, nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War; stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight; yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous; yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face, when all the others blighted, reel and fall, your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.
At Baia I should have thought in a dream you would have brought some lovely, perilous thing, orchids piled in a great sheath, as who would say in a dream , "I send you this, who left the blue veins of your throat unkissed.
Helen in Egypt, Eidolon, Book III: 4 Helen herself seems almost ready for this sacrifice--at least, for the immolation of herself before this greatest love of Achilles, his dedication to "his own ship" and the figurehead, "an idol or eidolon.
Gardens are archives of cultural configurations expressed in the idioms of garden design. In the early twentieth century, the public garden was a representational place, cultivated through elaborate landscape design intended to teach lessons about gender, courtship, empire, and nation.
They were also a place for political representation. That which unites all three kinds of space is didactic purpose: horticultural lessons and social cultivation. Since the s, the government invested millions of pounds in an ambitious project to create or refurbish public gardens in the six largest cities in England.
Similarly, school vegetable gardens taught lessons about domestic economy, small-scale agriculture, and mathematics. In Evolution of the Amateur Gardener an anonymous writer opines,. Quoted in Petrie, Notes , Inevitably the garden was also a site of resistance to these municipal stabilizing purposes.
In , two months before Pound moved to London, Hyde Park was the site of the largest political demonstration London had ever seen. Here suffrage demonstration employed pageantry, manipulating the language of advertising to produce a spectacle that articulated a collective will.
Three years later H. Women in costume marched under banners for Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and India. Sylvia Pankhurst describes the scene as a triumph of political spectacle:. As far as the eye could reach was one vast mass of human beings——not black, as crowds usually are———but coloured, like a great bed of flowers because of the thousands and thousands of women all dressed in the lightest and daintiest of summer garments.
The analogy recognizes the traditional association of women as flowers, a deliberate strategy suffragettes employed to seem less threatening, and, it implies that women belong in public spaces; they are part of the cultivated urban environment.
To advertise these demonstrations, suffragettes produced laurel leaf bordered posters featuring an individual woman rallying supporters, framed by green lawns. Modeled on the language of flowers, purple stood for dignity, white stood for purity, and green stood for hope.
The suffragette costume of flowing white dresses, also gaily adorned with purple, green, and white ribbons, produced a flower-like appearance.
With the English press characterizing suffragettes as vinegar spinsters, mannish, and brute-like, activists resisted these caricatures by embracing a visual association with hegemonic gender conventions. The embrace of floral imagery was a deliberate rhetorical decision. As Janet Lyon has noted, many suffragettes studied alongside vorticists at the Slade School of Fine Art and were trained in the same avant-garde precepts.
The prewar suffrage movement shared with the vorticists the same militant spirit, defending their causes against charges of disease and degeneracy. Suffragettes recognized cultivated nature as political——and they put this insight to use. Their promotional material employed violets and other common cultivated garden flower embellishments. In addition to feminine floral dress, the suffragette strategy of adopting some feminine conventions carried over to textual reference.
After all, what could be less political than a tulip? What could be more feminine than a love of flowers? A year earlier, in , she had severed ties with the WSPU, citing frustration with its collectivism and the autocratic control of the Pankhursts and had launched the Freewoman. Although the Freewoman was perceived as an extension of the suffrage press, both it and the New Freewoman audaciously flouted the bourgeois respectability demanded by the WSPU. We are becoming more convinced that women will have to move apart the better to come together in a wider understanding.
In H. With a change in title to the Egoist , the little magazine consolidated its politics under the term egoism. With Pound, Aldington, and H.
For Marsden, the image is the primary form through which the world is apprehended. This interest in the real images of the mind is echoed in H. Because of their alliance with the Egoist , evidence of overt suffrage support from Pound or H. Pound and H. Intellectual curiosity aside, as resident aliens, their role in revolutionary politics would be more safely one of observation than of action at that point neither knew if they would stay long in England. However, H. Importantly, H. Early twentieth-century critics generalized the imagist garden trope as pastoral retreat, a means of obscuring history or celebrating mythic form.
They are not. These three poets respond to their times. But, what is more important, they respond to themselves. It is one of internal mental and emotional experiences, not of external events. The lone garden speaker of H. Certainly, the resemblance to landscapes found in The Greek Anthology is well-documented.
Perhaps, as Kusch has suggested, specific place names seemed too limiting for H. Imaginative geographies——part recollection, part invention—filter through daily experience of space. Just as H. In frustration the speaker asks,.
Desire is not directed toward an absent other but is instead an autoerotic desire for self-actualization. The orchard fruit and cottage flowers that grow in this tended and protected space have been picked in advance of ripening in order to protect them from bruising hailstorms, which ideologically translates to an effort to preserve youth-like beauty, effectively subjecting the arboreal inhabitants of this garden to cultivation, informed by gender standards.
In this way H. Cultivated flowers are the product of human intervention, but they are still part of nature, totemic elements of gendered cultivation practices. As with much of H. Although powerless to escape the old story of the garden, H. The old story is one in which women and fruit, are protected, picked, and sold at the marriage market. Recognizing that such flowers are the projection or material manifestation of gender ideology, the speaker invents a psychic storm to expose the sheltered garden to the undiscriminating forces of wind, rain, hail, and storm:.
In this passage the poem abandons the connections between flowers and women as it imagines the branch as an ontologically disruptive force exposing nonhuman material dependencies. The poem works in a series of increasing pressures, until the creative act of destruction momentarily dissolves obstacles. The action of the poem takes place as fantasy, flooding the garden with daydreams of destruction and producing a superpositioning of real and imagined.
In the dreamed garden, those flowering plants and, by extension, their ideological referents, English women who are able to survive exposure, bear the marks of their struggle. They gain strength and character from their contact with the human and nonhuman world.
Cultivated flowers are the product of human intervention, manifestations of gendered cultivation practices. With the onset of war, the fractious internal divides that had characterized prewar London transformed into rallying cries for the preservation of Empire and as a unified support of the English State. In this atmosphere suffrage and labor movements seemed like selfish individualist causes.
The urban municipal park presented, in addition to revolutionary political protest, new opportunities for crowd observation as different social classes mixed. Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion. Kensington Gardens was known as a permissive space harboring same-sex trysts, prostitution, and various clandestine liaisons.
The poem explores the anxiety attending the end of the aristocracy, the dissolution of rigid class barriers, and the emergence of the modern woman. The setting is a municipal garden, yet it does not mention bird, bud, or leaf.
Instead, the poem presents municipal nature only in social terms. Although all of the figures are within proximity of one another, none of them make direct contact. This separation is formally reflected in the division of the poem into three stanzas. Whereas H. Rather than a metonymic blending of the edges of human and vegetal ontology, like that of the spectacles of women protestors in Hyde Park, the Kensington Garden scene emphasizes the unnaturalness of class distinction.
The poem hinges on a tension between the promiscuous intimacies of public space and the moralizing expectations of public gardens——focused in the figure of a solitary patrician woman. On one hand, the metonymy associates the woman with silk as an expensive luxury commodity. The speaker muses that her class is dying out and she has by will or biology separated herself from lines of inheritance.
Potentially misidentifying the social status of women in public gardens, that is, confusing respectable middle-class women with streetwalkers, was a real anxiety. Victorian-era reformer Josephine Butler describes the frequency of mistaken identities, of middle-class women confused for prostitutes. Elizabeth Wilson has noted that prostitution was so common and comparatively well-paying prostitution paid better than dressmaking that many women at some time engaged in selling their bodies, though often enough moved on to respectable married lives.
It was only in the s that younger middle-class women in England walked in the city, in significant numbers, unattended,—and municipal parks like Kensington Gardens, offered some of the first safe areas in which they might appear unchaperoned. Kensington Gardens had recently abandoned its dress code, effectively creating an open-to-all policy.
Disdainful of her self-imposed isolation, the bohemian-artist-speaker muses on the horror he would inspire in her by such an act of perceived effrontery. The final line is also a moment of self-disdain. Though confident of his decoding abilities, bourgeois propriety immobilizes the speaker.
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