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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Charlotte
Smith (1749 - 1806)
"Flora"
(First
published in Intercapillary
Space.)
Flora descends, to dress the
expecting earth,
Awake the germs, and call the buds to birth;
Bid each hybernacle its cell unfold,
And open silken leaves, and eyes of gold !
Of forest foliage of the firmest shade
Enwove by magic hands, the car was made;
Oak, and the ample Plane, without entwined,
And Beech and Ash the verdant concave lin'd;
The Saxifrage, that snowy flowers emboss,
Supplied the seat; and of the mural moss
The velvet footstool rose, where lightly rest,
Her slender feet in Cypripedium drest.
The tufted rush, that bears a silken crown,
The floating feathers of the thistle's down,
In tender hues of rainbow lustre dyed,
The airy texture of her robe supplied,
And wild convolvuli, yet half unblown,
Form'd, with their wreathing buds, her simple
zone,
Some wandering tresses of her radiant hair,
Luxuriant floated on the enamour'd air;
The rest were by the Scandix' points confin'd
And graced a shining knot, her head behind¬
While, as a sceptre of supreme command,
She waved the Anthoxanthum in her hand.
(from
"Flora")
I have read somewhere that this poem was intended for children. But Charlotte
Smith, more than most poets, was intensely interested by botany; indeed it's a
twin major theme, along with her inconsolable despondency (which from the
little I know of Smith's life was amply justified). That despondency is
unexpectedly muted in this poem, observed only at the start and end of the
poem, and perhaps that is part of the adaptation for an audience of children.
Anyway, I'm going to talk about the botany, and the poetic challenge of
Linnaeus, brought to notice by Erasmus Darwin, whose poems began to appear in
1783, just after Smith's first sonnets. The influence here is manifest: e.g.
"hybernacle" (winter bud) is Linnaeus' term, via
In a larger way the Linnaean scheme of naming species presents a challenge by
suddenly and dramatically opening out the number of things that can be spoken
about in poetry. For centuries or even millenia the variety of flowers had been
reduced in literate
From fairest creatures we desire
increase,
That thereby beauty's
rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory...
Because of the patina developed by the idea of "rose", we don't need
to be told that the addressee of these lines is both noble and beautiful, even
if his relationship to the spicy nest of female sexuality (the other immemorial
idea that was blended into the conception of "rose") remains
initially enigmatic.
Against this background it took the confidence of a Chaucer to admit, with an
air of cheeky intimacy, that his own favourite flower was the daisy.
So the first thing we notice, even now, about Smith's mythological description
of Flora is how the Linnaean influence, like a bulk upload of some hitherto
unknown culture, completely displaces these immemorially noble emblems just
where you might expect to find them. Smith's Flora bears, as her sceptre,
nothing more noble than a stem of Anthoxanthum (Sweet Vernal Grass), a
plant that is humble in several senses: common, overlooked, and altogether
unknown to poetic tradition. Linnaeus offered a democratization of botanical
values that could be a powerful liberation to a poetic outsider like this
author.
Humble, too, is Smith's choice for Flora's clothing; tufted rush (I think this
means cotton-grass) and thistledown. Here, as in the use of Scandix (Shepherd's-needle) as a pin, and
Cypripedium (Lady's Slipper) as
a shoe, you can detect the influence of
What is unlike
The woods yet leafless; where to
chilling airs
Your green and pencil'd blossoms, trembling,
wave.
But "Flora" shows that this was not yet an established (and hence eventually
limiting) mode. The waves made by the Linnaean influx were still unsettled, and
this vast expansion to the body of what could be written might also take other
forms, e.g. a destabilizing encrustation of the mythologizing vision. (There's
probably a term for this mythological vision that a student of Renaissance
forms might be able to supply here: a mythological/allegorical triumph, a
masque with a relative paucity of narrative, but elaborately described in the
manner of an ekphrasis.) The sylphs or fays are Popeian, ultimately Miltonic,
but are in strange garb.
In honeyed nectaries couched, some
drive away
The forked insidious earwig from his prey;
Fearless the scaled libellula assail,
Dart their keen lances at the encroaching snail;
Arrest the winged ant, on pinions light,
And strike the headlong beetle in his flight.
Libellula (dragon-flies) may
seem like what a sensible commentator would call "a false note"; they
seem a rather unlikely opponent for the watch, being purely carnivorous. But it
only needs a glance at
Quite a lot of the material in "Flora" is taken from books, and has
no idea of a decorum of local reference.
Lady's-Slipper Orchids, after all, are distinctly exotic - a rare native that
Smith had surely never seen. And she is quite happy to co-opt the non-native Tradescantia, Yucca and Passiflora
as materials for her visions. Yet as the poem develops something unexpected
happens, Smith becomes an ecologist - drawing now on her own observation of
plant communities. In fact "Flora" expands on the sequence outlined
in her sonnet "To the Goddess of Botany"
where my tired, and tear-swollen
eyes
Among your silent shades of soothing hue,
Your 'bells and florrets of unnumber'd dyes'
Might rest--And learn the bright varieties
That from your lovely hands are fed with dew;
And every veined leaf, that trembling sighs
In mead or woodland; or in wilds remote,
Or lurk with mosses in the humid caves,
Mantle the cliffs, on dimpling rivers float,
Or stream from coral rocks beneath the ocean's
waves.
In "Flora", too, this sequence is traced out, but in much more
detail: through woodlands, freshwater habitats, coastal cliffs and eventually
into the sea itself;
Green Byssus, waving in the sea-born
gales,
Form'd their thin mantles, and transparent veils,
Panier'd in shells, or bound with silver strings,
Of silken pinna; each her trophy brings
Of plants, from rocks and caverns submarine,
With leathery branch, and bladder'd buds between;
There, its dark folds the pucker'd laver spread,
With trees in miniature of various red;
There flag-shaped olive-leaves, depending hung,
And fairy fans from glossy pebbles sprung;
Then her terrestrial train the nereids meet,
And lay their spoils saline at Flora's feet.
(a movement from land to sea that is evidently of much
importance to Smith, because we can still discern it beneath the unschematic
surface of her great unfinished poem, "Beachy Head", for which
"Flora" is in some respects a preparation; "
Our perception of ecological communities can be rationalized as scientific
observation (for instance that sea-lavender is found on cliffs but not in
woods). The experience of reading "Flora" suggests something
different, that Smith's discerning of these communities is an intuition, i.e.
an interaction between the human imagination and the natural world. What I'm
suggesting is that ecological communities are soft science; but I mean that as
the opposite of a criticism. Our conceptions of nature, like those of birth and
death, cannot be entirely hard because our own existence is overshadowed by
those bulwarks.
But now that this influx of intuition has transformed the poem, what has
happened to the elaborately described car and its attendant sylphs? It is still
with us: a minimal narrative has described (or rather, mentioned) the
procession coming down to earth, becoming water-borne, and drifting down a
stream to the sea, still in receipt of trophies and tributes. But Flora and her
train have become miniaturized, positively engulfed by the vast populus of
natural ecosystems, like a sovereign by subjects (at Wembley Stadium perhaps).
And we ask, sacreligiously, this being the case do we really need a sovereign
at all? Do we really need all this nonsense about Flora and other imaginary
entities when we have this wealth of nature, surely sufficient matter for
epiphany in itself? The answer, for Smith, seems to be yes. Or
rather not so much Flora herself, but the spirit of Fancy that brings her into
being. Without Fancy, Smith could not sustain a delight in nature; it
was something that had consoled her once.
She emits a few lines of realization (as e.g. the snowdrop above) but already
qualified by, and immediately dropping back into, the
larger despondency.
So I suppose we'll have to forgive it, and agree to be pleased by the ingenuity
of her armed sylphs that
spread
the hollow shield
Of lichen tough; or
bear, as silver bright,
Lunaria's pearly circlet, firm and light.
Lecanora chlarotera, from www.fungalpunknature.co.uk
(Above and below, potential shields for sylphs)
Lunaria annua, from Wikipedia
Hence in "Flora" the sad yearning of that recurrent address to Fancy:
Ah ! yet
prolong the dear delicious dream...
Still may thy attributes of leaves and flowers....
And still may Fancy's brightest flowers be
wove...
Thou visionary power! mayst
bid him view
Forms not less lovely, and as transient too...
The "him" in that last quotation is in effect the poet herself, the
sorrowful one. It becomes clear that her consolation lasts only so long as the
composition of the poem lasts, when Fancy is kept alive by use.
But it's the persistence of the
act of composition in these last hundred or so lines that, in
contrast to the unfulfilled yearning of these apostrophes, starts to
generate the poem's remarkable effect, just when its initial impulse may appear
to be in danger of running dry. The structure transforms, so what began as a
vertical kind of nature poetry breaks through into a horizontal one with the
excited promise of a new way of writing.
NOTES
1.
Hence Linneus names buds and bulbs the winter-cradles of the plant or
hybernacula, and might have given the same term to seeds. In warm
climates few plants produce buds, as the vegetable life can be
compleated in one summer, and hence the hybernacle is not wanted; in
cold climates also some plants do not produce buds, as philadelphus,
frangula, viburnum, ivy, heath, wood-nightshade, rue, geranium.
(Erasmus Darwin, from The Botanic Garden)
2.
Rude rocks with Filices and Bryums smile,
(Ferns and mosses, respectively.)
3.
The
summit bare,
Is tufted by the Statice; and there,
Crush'd by the fisher, as he stands to mark
Some distant signal or approaching bark,
Statice = Sea-lavender (Limonium)
4.
Nourish the harebell, and the freckled pagil;
(from "
The pagil is another name for the cowslip, described here as freckled because
of the orange marks near the throat of the corolla. The etymology of "pagil"
is unknown, but a connection has been supposed with the word
"paggle", meaning to droop, bulge, swell out like a bag, as in that
splendid vision of the cows in Greene's Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay:
With grouting dugs that paggle to the ground.
In the cowslip's case, this would have reference to the swollen calyx. This may
not be the place to speculate (but I'll do it anyway) on the extremely
submerged sexuality of Smith's poetry. When it peeps out at all, it is only
indirectly, for example in connection with flowers. But in so far as its
objects are discernibly gendered they strike me as female rather than male.
5.
Charlotte Smith's poems are all available online, thanks to Poemhunter.
The texts seem fairly good, but you need to ignore the way they break up
continuous blank verse into 15- or 16-line "stanzas".
Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden
(1791) is also available online, on Project
Gutenberg. (Part II repackages The
Loves of the Plants, first published in 1789.)
(2011)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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