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:
“For she was beautiful: her beauty made
The bright world dim, and everything beside
Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade:
No thought of living spirit could abide
(Which to her looks had ever been betrayed)
On any object in the world so wide,
On any hope within the circling skies,
But in her form, and in her inmost eyes.
* * * * *
“The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling
Were stored with magic treasures—sounds of air,
Which had the power all spirits of compelling,
Folded in cells of crystal silence there.”
* * * * *
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:
“The plant grew strong and green—the sunny flower
Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began
To turn the light and dew by inward power
To its own substance.”
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”:
“All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine are mine,
All light of art or nature—to my song
Victory and praise in their own right belong.”
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.
