Both flower and flower gatherer: Medbh McGuckian's The Flower Master and H.D.'s Sea Garden

Scions

As students of overlapping traditions, H.D. and McGuckian inherit the garden trope from multiple precursors. Both certainly allude to Eden; Docherty even emphasizes references to the Fall in McGuckian's book over the pregnancy motif stressed by McGuckian herself and most of her critics. H.D.'s readers register the Hellenism in her gardens: Friedman calls Sea Garden "a sequence of modern pastorals," referring to Theocritus as a model (51); Gregory identifies H.D.'s "reinvention of the Orphic prayer" in this volume, drawing on romantic Hellenism (83); Collecott finds an embedded network of allusions to Sappho (159, 266-67). H.D. and McGuckian were also particularly steeped in Victorian literature, which is marked by its own horticultural obsessions, H.D. because she came of age in the early part of the twentieth century and McGuckian through her thesis research. (15) Finally, both encountered the flower trope through Dickinson's work, although at the time H.D. composed Sea Garden, Dickinson's work had been published only in bowdlerized versions.

However, these two poets share other important circumstances. Sea Garden and The Flower Master both constitute debut collections by ambitious women poets powerfully formed by the British literary tradition, although both felt marginal to it by reason of sex and national identity, and McGuckian felt marginal to it as well by religion. Most crucially for my argument, each first book documents pregnancy and the poet's concern with her own fertility, although neither writes plainly about the subject. The themes and vocabulary shared by these volumes reflect parallels between the poets' interests and situations. Even their metaphors, to some extent, join at the root.

McGuckian's experiments certainly build on the "papery legacies," as "The Flower Master" puts it, of previous women poets including H.D. However, the differences between these two prominently titled poems suggest how widely their attitudes toward gender diverge. While H.D. celebrates a harsh, androgynous beauty, "The Flower Master" thrives in sheltered space and admires the delicacy of its shade-loving specimens. While "Mid-Day," the fourth poem in Sea Garden, laments "hot shrivelled seeds" (Collected Poems 10) scattered over pavement in a strong image of writer's block and, simultaneously, a troubled pregnancy (Friedman 49), McGuckian's collection seethes with fertility, depicting numerous crowded, feminine houses and greenhouses; collecting various nests, seeds, and children; evoking moons and milk fevers. Both compare procreation with literary composition, but H.D.'s struggling flowers imply her pessimism about a female artist's ability to nurture offspring. McGuckian expresses far more hope about the coexistence of art and motherhood. Her poetry, in fact, deeply roots itself in maternity as material, just as Ostriker prescribes.

Contrasts in the imagery, then, reflect contrasts in sexual politics, although their terms and figures share common elements. The Flower Master, like Sea Garden, depicts disruptive desires and bends readers' expectations, as hostile reviews have attested (see Ann Beer for a catalog of these). Nevertheless, when McGuckian tells Sailer, "I feel very tied by laws and very bound" ("Interview," ed. Sailer 115), she sounds as different as she possibly could from H.D. in her early poems, which, coded as they are, revel in risk, resistance, and broken mores. This contrast echoes in their comments about the relationship between womb and brain. "My womb is almost my brain," McGuckian has declared, again to Sailer (121), insisting on the femaleness of her writing as deliberately as H.D. adhered to those genderless initials. (16) In her Notes on Thought and Vision H.D. explains creative work in comparable terms. She describes "the over-mind," her phrase for a state of insight or vision, as a closed, watery space, distinctly uterine (18-19). However, she also argues for creative activity that is not inflected by sex: "the brain and the womb are both centres of consciousness, equally important.... The two work separately, perceive separately, and yet make one picture" (21, 23).