Final Project
Pepper Cunningham
As human beings and creatures of this earth, we have a tendency to carve out and cultivate small spaces of sanctuary. We cultivate in a physical and tangible sense when we garden and when we build, but also in a figurative sense when we cultivate ourselves. I have been turning the word over and over in my brain, and realized its many uses as both an activity that humans participate in as well as an external force that happens to the human world. The Oxford English Dictionary defines cultivation in a bevy of ways. Amongst others, it is defined as “the action or an act of preparing and using the land for growing crops”; “Improvement of the land without human intervention”; “The action of refining or improving a person, the mind, faculties, etc., by education or training”; “The condition of being cultivated culture, refinement; The devotion of special attention or study to (the development of) an activity, branch of knowledge”. Whether it is literal or figurative, it is the act of growing and improving something. Decomposition, on the other hand, implies deterioration. The OED defines decomposition as “The natural dissolution of compound bodies; disintegration; the process or condition of organic decay; putrescence.” I chose to use the word “decomposition” rather than “decay” because I enjoyed the wordplay. All of the poets we have studied this semester have participated in cultivating art through means of composition, and in many cases, the art that they cultivate revolves around the decomposition of the world around them. They cultivate self, grief, loss, and joy, while self, society, and bodies are rotting and decaying. We do not always create and destroy. Sometimes, it is quieter and more nuanced than that binary. Both humans and Nature are now and have always been active participants in building and crumbling. This is why cultivation and decomposition are overarching themes throughout historical arts and literature, and not much has really changed. Our souls can still relate to those concepts in the present, perhaps even more so.
Though I know that we are not required to go chronologically, I would like to begin with a brief discussion on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15 because it sets up the other poems that I have chosen to include, and frames the conversation. In the first line, Shakespeare considers “everything that grows,” which, in my reading, connotes not only growing organisms, but growing feeling and conceptualized thought. This is supported by his equation of humankind to plants “when I perceive that men as plants increase” (5). By conflating man with the stars and plants, he is implying the presence of human intellect and emotion. In the very next line, man is “cheered and checked by the self-same sky” (6). The alliteration of this line really drives home the juxtaposition between being supported and shot down under the same sky that cheers and checks every thing in the universe. All the world’s a stage, but the sky is the true director, audience, and crew. It has has observed and assisted with the building up and breaking down of every building, every life form, every philosophy. Though men are “vaunt in their youthful sap,” (7), they then decrease; they have been cultivated by youth, and inevitably age. When something is built, its beauty and perfection is ephemeral. It is the nature of the universe for everything to decay eventually, whether it is a structure, organic matter, or love. Shakespeare witnesses and acknowledges the inevitability of decay, but also appreciates the gorgeousness of the moment, that every single thing is perfect at some point in its existence. In the final couplet, Shakespeare brings the poem from the broad generalizations about the world as a performance of instability to a single person: “And all in war with time for love of you,/ As he takes from you, I engraft you new.” To me, this is a declaration of war on Time (which Shakespeare personifies as such in line 11) that is both about the individual and the nature of the world of poetry. When things begin to die, poetry can dig deep and create new life so that nothing is ever fully gone. Poetry has the ability to immortalize a moment in a life cycle. Every day turns into night, but every night turns into morning.
On Ale’s post about Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden,” I mentioned in a comment that a forsaken garden is something that is both fertile breeding ground and a place where things can lie still and decompose. If we put Sonnet 15 and “A Forsaken Garden” in conversation with one another, we see that digging deep is important if human nature wants to interfere with natural processes, but regardless, everything will remain cyclical and time will march on. Metrically, this poem jumps around quite a bit. Even at the beginning of the poem, the first stanza jumps around from anapestic to iambic and back again. Though there is the mix in metrical feet and in syllables from line to line, it is cohesive by the constant alliteration and the three words at the end of each stanza. The alliteration gives it an interestingly sing-songy quality, which makes the last line of each stanza stand out more than it would if the poem lacked the alliteration and slant rhymes, so that the last line hits the reader like a ton of bricks. I look at this as the cultivation of a stanza only for it to decompose, like poetry, like a garden, like love. Swinburne takes us on a journey, and once we arrive at the last stanza where “Death lies dead” (80), it feels very final, like Death won the battle or got the last word in edgewise. However, I would argue that even though plants die and love dies, new plants and love will be reborn and either be cultivated by humankind or left to decay on their own, making way for the new. In that sense, Time has the last word. In his article “Of Time and the Garden: Swinburne’s ‘A Forsaken Garden,’” Michael A. Joyner puts it thusly: “As much as the speaker wishes to construct a garden in which progressive (diachronic) time does not exist, the ongoingness of time and the living and dying which take place within it, both in the human and phenomenal realms, will not be denied.”
I thought that this quote could also be somewhat applied to Louise Glück’s poem “The Garden.” In my post “Springtime and Freshness in Louise Glück’s ‘The Garden,’” I stated that Glück observes this young love in a garden that she “can hardly bear to look at” (2), and that the freshness of this love is existing in a quiet gentle madness. I was interested in Glück’s choice of flower in the fifth stanza:
Look at her, touching his cheek
to make a truce, her fingers
cool with spring rain;
in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus— (17-20)
Why a crocus? I couldn’t picture one, so I looked it up:
On the top is the flower, and on the bottom is Krokos and Smilax. I did not realize that the crocus had mythological roots (so to speak). There are many variations on the myth of Krokos, but the most common one that I found was that Krokos was a mortal who had a love affair with Smilax that angered the gods, so he was turned into a plant. They also appear briefly in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Due to the multitude of different versions, the crocus (and, by extension, saffron) had different meanings. It was seen as a sacred flower aiding in fertility and sexual awakenings but also as bad luck and associated with agonizing death of love or life. This was fascinating to me, as it seemed to parallel the point of the poem and the lovers depicted. The garden is this sanctuary of fecundity and spring, but spring is only the first month of the year, and the flowers that these lovers are cultivating—the life that they are cultivating—will one day decompose, either organically by death or through a messy breakup. The flowers will once more become dirt. On my classmate Lindsay’s excellent post, “Diminishing Stanzas and Circular Structure in Louise Glück’s ‘The Garden,’” she states that “With the most diminished stanza being the first, the poem has a circular feel as though it goes in an unending loop.” Lindsay goes on to mention that the diminishing stanzas could be indicative of the diminishing happiness of the speaker. I agree with that interpretation, but I also think that it can be inferred that though the poet’s happiness might be diminishing, it can once again spring back to life, as is the nature of seasonal rotations. The poet knows what is going to happen, she’s seen it happen before, yet she can’t look away from the life cycle. She sees the beauty and passion of cultivation.
As I’ve discussed a bit, there are different types of cultivation and decomposition. In Pound’s “The Garden,” we see beauty in the bittersweet decay of the ennui-stricken upper class. In Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” she “cultivates herself” (5-6) even while the sun is guttering and her world is falling apart following the deaths of both her parents. Paisley Rekdal’s “Nightingale” cultivates new perspectives and wonder among the living and dying (“I have never seen such a live, dead thing before”). Rosetti’s “A Sonnet” depicts the cultivation and deterioration of art and poetry; Frost’s “Home Burial” depicts a crumbling marriage, different methods of mourning, and the cultivation of grief; Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “The Orchard” is obsessed with physical, fleshy decay and rebuilding. This concept could be applied to so many of the poems that we have read for this class. The cultivation and decomposition of mind, body, plants, creatures, and structures are two of the only constants throughout Time, and thus, the transient and temporary can be immortalized in composition.
Links:
Of Time and the Garden: Swinburne's "A Forsaken Garden", Michael A. Joyner, Victorian Poetry
Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 99-105 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40003668
Krokos
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