The Sensitive Plant

THE SENSITIVE PLANT

When Shelley wrote The Sensitive Plant he was drawing very near the end of his poetry. It was one of the poems belonging to the days at Pisa, whither the Shelleys had gone late in the January of 1820. In the next winter—a winter of many painful associations for him, and many discouragements and reminders of evil fortune—he wrote this mysterious song of beauty and death. The idea of it appears to have come to him from the flowers which Mrs. Shelley had collected round her in her own room at the house they occupied on the south side of the Arno. Their fragrance, as it exhaled on the wintry Italian sunshine, and the sense of their fading loveliness, added to certain graver influences of which we read,—the death of a dearly-loved child, the illness of a dear friend,—contributed, no doubt, to provide that “atmosphere of memorial dejection and very sorrowful delight,” of which an old Italian poet speaks, as being propitious for the working of the imagination. But a miracle is not less miraculous because we know the conditions under which it was worked, and something inexplicable remains about The Sensitive Plant after we have gathered together everything we can of its circumstances and the moods of its poet in the memorable Pisan days when it was written.

All through this period, so far as we can gather, Shelley was extremely discouraged about his poetry and the reception it had attained hitherto. From Medwin and others we learn of the special resentment he felt at the continual hostilities of the powerful quarterly engines of critical opinion. In a letter to Ollier, he said, during 1820: “I doubt whether I shall write more. I could be content either with the hell or the paradise of poetry, but the torments of its purgatory vex me without exciting my powers sufficiently to put an end to the vexation.” However, when a poet of Shelley’s plenary inspiration decides not to write, he is likely to be impelled most strongly by his dæmon to new flights. The “Ode to a Skylark,” the “Witch of Atlas,” the “Ode to Liberty,” among other poems, belong to this period; and with them we have the invincible declaration of the poet’s rights and inalienable liberties, to be found in his prose “Defence of Poetry.” One or two stanzas there are in the “Witch of Atlas,” and one or two passages in the “Defence,” which strike us as being more intimately connected with the occult imaginative origins of The Sensitive Plant than anything found elsewhere in his writings. Take the strange, melodious verses in which the radiant creature of the mountains is presented,—the lovely lady garmented in the light of her own beauty, to whom the camelopard and the brindled lioness, the herdsmen and the mountain maidens came:

A few stanzas later, and we come to the idea of the strange seed, which was wrapt in mould, and watered all the summer with sweet dew. At length:

This brings us as near, I imagine, to the idea of The Sensitive Plant as we are likely to find ourselves in any other most Shelleyan region of his poetry. The lines recur persistently to the mind in reading the later poem; and almost as suggestively is it haunted by one passage at least in the “Defence,” which speaks with a sort of aerial eloquence of a Poetry whose art it is to arrest “the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide.”

When one considers the rarity and the half-impalpable conditions of this chosen realm of his poetry, and turns to The Sensitive Plant as one of its most essential expressions, one is at first rendered half-incredulous of the power of a kindred art to interpret effectively such a poem. But, in fact, there is a much more concrete imagery—whether of flowers or weeds, directly presented or definitely symbolised; or of the Lady who haunts among them—than one at all remembers until one takes to conning its stanzas closely with an eye to such effects.

The Sensitive Plant lends itself more readily to the art of the symbolist, in particular, than any other of Shelley’s poems. It would be quite possible for a critic with a turn for metaphysics, and a certain German patience of analytic ingenuity, to read into its exquisite fable of mortality a whole world of significance, which the poet himself had never suspected. But the symbolic artist, if he be too, as needs be, a symbolic poet, is saved by his art. The spirit of the poem is likely to obsess him, and compel from him only such an interpretation as is, allowing for the casual differences of kindred arts and sympathetic temperaments, truly and finely accordant with its own essential qualities and terms of expression. The true poets have that power of continuing to enlarge the original issues and influences of their song long after its immediate effect has died away. Shelley commands with a more than usual lyric enchantment a sphere that, like the magic house of Merlin, can go on enlarging itself; until one figures him, not as the sad spirit of the garden in this poem, but as the radiant spirit of his “Hymn of Apollo”:

Ernest Rhys.

A NOTE UPON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

In one sense a beautiful poem can never be illustrated: being beautiful it is already perfect, and, to intelligent minds, illustrates itself. Everything that it says it says in the best possible way; within the limits of the medium chosen, it is absolute.

If, therefore, illustration is to be an attempt to say over again what the poet has already said perfectly, it is certain to prove itself superfluous, and to be nothing better than a labour of tautology. But there is a quality in all fine work which gives invitation into the charmed circle of its influence to whatever is freshly and sympathetically touched with the ideas it conveys. Great work tells so differently on different minds; not by contrary but by kindred ways it speaks freshly perhaps to each individual.

Thus, to express accurately in another medium an appreciation, an individual sense of delight or emotion in work of finished and constructive beauty is the only way of illustration which seems to me profitable. The appreciation may be faulty; but in so far as it states a personal view of its subject, it has legitimate standing ground.

I have endeavoured to make evident in my drawings the particular way in which this poem has appealed to me. The garden, fine and elaborate, full of artifice, opposing with an infinity of delicate labour the random overgrowth of the wilderness which seeks jealously to encroach on it, has perhaps this to hint concerning all forms of beauty of man’s devising,—that, in spite of the pains entailed in their cultivation, the fragile and conditional state of their constitution remains: over all such things at last comes the tread of Pan, effacing, and replacing with his own image and superscription, the parenthetic grace—so spiritual almost in some of its suggestions—of the garden deity.

The lady of the garden, the charming sentimentalist, whom I can only excuse for not killing the slugs and snails by believing that she wore a crinoline and was altogether ignorant of natural laws, harmonises exquisitely for a while with her high-clipped hedges and garden statuary. It is an ensemble to gaze into as into a picture: but the shadows of ruin and decay cross it; it is too graceful to last. Pan is stronger than any form of beauty that springs out of modes and fashions.

So, when she dies, she is but the forerunner of the death of the whole garden: when she evaporates the petite mort runs through all its bowers and alleys: its apparitions rise and follow her funeral with a sense that their own time of dissolution approaches; and the mode passes through a period of squalor and morbid abandonment back into the hands of the ultimate master of things earthly.

It is an unpopular thing, may be, to assert that man’s sense of beauty is so conditional to himself and the uses he makes of it. Yet here we are shown how, with war to the death, unsightly overthrow follows his abandonment of his stolen pleasure-ground, and wipes out his trespassing footprints.

Man’s sense of beauty is his own: it is not Nature’s. The aim of all art is to restrict Nature, and teach her that her place is not in the high places of men; and we only admire Nature because in the present strength of our civilisation we are strong enough to pet her. Hannibal was a better judge of the true unsightliness of Alpine scenery than we ourselves.

I should have preferred to add nothing to what I have drawn: but an explanation of my unkind view of the rival claims of Pan and the Garden-god has been wrung from me.

For the present the genius of civilisation, numerating duration into hours and years and centuries for man’s convenience, overrides the slow-crawling tortoise of Time: but it will not always be so; and earth will come at last to be altogether rid of us and that superfluous “sense of beauty” which has so long yoked her back, and hedged her wastes and furrowed her fields.

Laurence Housman.

THE SENSITIVE PLANT

FIRST PART — I — II — III — IV — V — VI — VII — VIII — IX — X — XI — XII — XIII — XIV — XV — XVI — XVII — XVIII — XIX — XX — XXI — XXII — XXIII — XXIV — XXV — XXVI — XXVII — XXVIII

A sensitive plant in a garden grew,

And the young winds fed it with silver dew,

And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,

And closed them beneath the kisses of night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,

Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;

And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast

Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss

In the garden, the field, and the wilderness,

Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want,

As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

The snowdrop, and then the violet,

Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,

And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent

From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied windflowers and the tulip tall,

And narcissi, the fairest among them all,

Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess,

Till they die of their own dear loveliness;

And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,

Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,

That the light of its tremulous bells is seen

Through their pavilions of tender green;

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,

Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew

Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,

It was felt like an odour within the sense;

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,

Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,

Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air

The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up

As a Mænad, its moonlight-coloured cup,

Till the fiery star, which is its eye

Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,

The sweetest flower for scent that blows;

And all rare blossoms from every clime

Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

And on the stream whose inconstant bosom

Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom,

With golden and green light, slanting through

Their heaven of many a tangled hue,

Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,

And starry river-buds glimmered by,

And around them the soft stream did glide and dance

With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.

And the sinuous paths of lawn and moss,

Which led through the garden along and across,

Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,

Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,

Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells

As fair as the fabulous asphodels,

And flowrets which drooping as day drooped too,

Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,

To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.

And from this undefiled Paradise

The flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes

Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet

Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),

When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them,

As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,

Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one

Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;

For each one was interpenetrated

With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,

Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear

Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.

But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit

Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,

Received more than all, it loved more than ever,

Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver,

For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;

Radiance and odour are not its dower;

It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,

It desires what it has not, the beautiful!

The light winds which from unsustaining wings

Shed the music of many murmurings;

The beams which dart from many a star

Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;

The plumèd insects swift and free,

Like golden boats on a sunny sea,

Laden with light and odour, which pass

Over the gleam of the living grass;

The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie

Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,

Then wander like spirits among the spheres,

Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;

The quivering vapours of dim noontide,

Which like a sea o’er the warm earth glide,

In which every sound, and odour, and beam,

Move, as reeds in a single stream;

Each and all like ministering angels were

For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,

Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by

Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.

And when evening descended from Heaven above,

And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,

And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,

And the day’s veil fell from the world of sleep,

And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned

In an ocean of dreams without a sound;

Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress

The light sand which paves it, consciousness;

Only overhead the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,

And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant.

The Sensitive Plant was the earliest

Up-gathered into the bosom of rest;

A sweet child weary of its delight,

The feeblest and yet the favourite

Cradled within the embrace of night.

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SECOND PART — XXIX — XXX — XXXI — XXXII — XXXIII — XXXIV — XXXV — XXXVI — XXXVII — XXXVIII — XXXIX — XL — XLI — XLII — XLIII

There was a Power in this sweet place,

An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace

Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,

Was as God is to the starry scheme.

A Lady, the wonder of her kind,

Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind

Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion

Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,

Tended the garden from morn to even:

And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,

Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth,

Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!

She had no companion of mortal race,

But her tremulous breath and her flushing face

Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes,

That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:

As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake

Had deserted Heaven while the stars were awake,

As if yet around her he lingering were,

Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her.

Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest;

You might hear by the heaving of her breast,

That the coming and going of the wind

Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.

And wherever her airy footstep trod,

Her trailing hair from the grassy sod

Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,

Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet

Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;

I doubt not they felt the spirit that came

From her glowing fingers through all their frame.

She sprinkled bright water from the stream

On those that were faint with the sunny beam;

And out of the cups of the heavy flowers

She emptied the rain of the thunder showers.

She lifted their heads with her tender hands,

And sustained them with rods and osier bands;

If the flowers had been her own infants she

Could never have nursed them more tenderly.

And all killing insects and gnawing worms,

And things of obscene and unlovely forms,

She bore in a basket of Indian woof,

Into the rough woods far aloof,

In a basket, of grasses and wild flowers full,

The freshest her gentle hands could pull

For the poor banished insects, whose intent,

Although they did ill, was innocent.

But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris

Whose path is the lightning’s, and soft moths that kiss

The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she

Make her attendant angels be.

And many an antenatal tomb,

Where butterflies dream of the life to come,

She left clinging round the smooth and dark

Edge of the odorous cedar bark.

This fairest creature from earliest spring

Thus moved through the garden ministering

All the sweet season of summer tide,

And ere the first leaf looked brown—she died!

THIRD PART — XLIV — XLV — XLVI — XLVII — XLVIII — XLIX — L — LI — LII — LIII — LIV — LV — LVI — LVII — LVIII — LIX — LX — LXI — LXII — LXIII — LXIV — LXV — LXVI — LXVII — LXVIII — LXIX — LXX — LXXI — LXXII

Three days the flowers of the garden fair,

Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,

Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous

She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant

Felt the sound of the funeral chant,

And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,

And the sobs of the mourners deep and low;

The weary sound and the heavy breath,

And the silent motions of passing death,

And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,

Sent through the pores of the coffin plank;

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,

Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;

From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,

And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,

Like the corpse of her who had been its soul;

Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,

Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap

To make men tremble who never weep.

Swift summer into the autumn flowed,

And frost in the mist of the morning rode,

Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,

Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,

Paved the turf and the moss below.

The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,

Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants, of scent and hue

The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,

Leaf after leaf, day after day,

Were massed into the common clay.

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red,

And white with the whiteness of what is dead,

Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past;

Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.

And the gusty winds waked the wingèd seeds

Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,

Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem,

Which rotted into the earth with them.

The water-blooms under the rivulet

Fell from the stalks on which they were set;

And the eddies drove them here and there,

As the winds did those of the upper air.

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks

Were bent and tangled across the walks;

And the leafless network of parasite bowers

Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.

Between the time of the wind and the snow,

All loathliest weeds began to grow,

Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck

Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.

And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,

And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,

Stretched out its long and hollow shank,

And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.

And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,

Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,

Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,

Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould

Started like mist from the wet ground cold;

Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead

With a spirit of growth had been animated!

Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake,

Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake,

Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,

Infecting the winds that wander by.

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,

Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,

And at its outlet flags huge as stakes

Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.

And hour by hour, when the air was still,

The vapours arose which have strength to kill:

At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,

At night they were darkness no star could melt.

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray

Crept and flitted in broad noonday

Unseen; every branch on which they alit

By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,

Wept, and the tears within each lid

Of its folded leaves which together grew

Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon

By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;

The sap shrank to the root through every pore

As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came: the wind was his whip:

One choppy finger was on his lip:

He had torn the cataracts from the hills

And they clanked at his girdle like manacles.

His breath was a chain which without a sound

The earth, and the air, and the water bound;

He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne

By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone

Then the weeds which were forms of living death,

Fled from the frost to the earth beneath:

Their decay and sudden flight from frost

Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant

The moles and the dormice died for want;

The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air,

And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

First there came down a thawing rain,

And its dull drops froze on the boughs again,

Then there steamed up a freezing dew

Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about

Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,

Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff,

And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When winter had gone and spring came back

The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;

But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,

Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION — LXXIII — LXXIV — LXXV — LXXVI — LXXVII — LXXVIII

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a spirit sat

Ere its outward form had known decay,

Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that lady’s gentle mind

No longer with the form combined

Which scattered love, as stars do light,

Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life

Of error, ignorance, and strife,

Where nothing is, but all things seem,

And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be,

Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all sweet shapes and odours there,

In truth have never past away:

’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,

There is no death nor change: their might

Exceeds our organs, which endure

No light, being themselves obscure.

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