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Both flower and flower gatherer: Medbh McGuckian's The Flower Master and H.D.'s Sea Garden
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Lesley Wheeler
Although the publication history and spare presentation of H.D.'s first book have received little attention, excellent scholarship on Sea Garden illuminates its content and strategies, including its floral profusion. In fact, imagist poetry generally draws heavily from a botanical vocabulary. For instance, in the first imagist anthology, Pound's Des Imagistes (1914), of the 35 poems plus three verse satires at the end of the volume (separately subtitled "Documents"), 28 pieces contain references to flowers, plants, and gardens; 16 of the poems specifically mention flowers. Aldington's opening poem of 76 lines, "Choricos," provides a good example, invoking wreaths, leaves, flowers, gardens, hyacinths, and poppies. Related references in the same poem include a floral palette of white, green, red, and purple; allusions to Demeter's daughter, here called both Proserpine and Persephone, whose flower-gathering expedition ended in Hades; and qualities associated with flowers, including frailty, love, sweetness, beauty, and fragrance. Flowers constitute a crucial idiom for imagism partly because floral imagery represents an important resource for the classical and Asian traditions the imagists drew on (indeed, references to Greek antiquity populate the poems of Des Imagistes as heavily as floral allusions do, and the selections by Pound include translations from Asian sources). As Diana Collecott observes, Sappho's flowers are a key intertext for all that blooms in Sea Garden (211-20).
H.D. uses flower imagery throughout her whole career to a wide range of purposes: it alludes to crucial sources, encodes sexual and reproductive experience, and invokes a range of traditional meanings including beauty, poetry, love, and the fragility of human life. Her very titles testify to the persistence of the motif: her poetry collections include Red Roses for Bronze (1931) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946); the novels Asphodel and White Rose and the Red were unpublished in her lifetime. Not surprisingly, flower references also pervade her correspondence. Richard Aldington's letters persistently identify H.D. with their beauty: he wrote in 1918, for example, that "any flower makes me think of you" (60), and even more tellingly advised her against masturbation by warning a month later, "Don't talk to your flower too often--it is a strain on the nerves" (126). Such passages cast H.D. as both flower and flower gatherer, echoing the connection Sea Garden draws between modern poetry and sexual freedom. (11)
Iridaceae
McGuckian exercises her poetic freedom through a difficult style predicated on female experience and experiment. She responds to allegations of obscurity in her work by protesting to Kimberly S. Bohman, "It seems to me totally coherent" ("Surfacing" 105) and to McCracken, "They [the poems] are no more mysterious than a woman can help being to herself" (Interview 161). She generally insists, as in her interview with Sailer, that her work is "almost totally autobiographic" (113). "Autobiographic," however, does not indicate confessional transparency for McGuckian: the personal experiences from which the poems spring emerge faintly or not at all. Peter Sirr rightly characterizes her poetry as "poetry of occasion whose occasions are meticulously withheld" (464). Such withholding encourages many readers to speculate about her allusions to published texts and affinities with literary precursors. Thomas Docherty, for instance, cites Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil as an influence on The Flower Master (193, 200). (Cassandra Laity also connects the same collection to Sea Garden [45, 50].) Peter Denman persuasively argues for allusions to Charlotte Perkins Gilman in a piece from Venus in the Rain (169). Shane Murphy and Clair Wills ("Voices from the Nursery") discuss McGuckian's collage methods of composition throughout her oeuvre, in particular her mostly uncredited arrangements of phrases from nonfiction books into new works of poetry, a strategy that partakes of a tradition rooted in modernism, although she refrains from providing the endnotes supplied by Moore or T. S. Eliot. Partly because of her difficulty and this manipulation of echoing fragments, scholars have, in fact, affiliated her not only with Moore and Eliot but also with Yeats, Joyce, James, Stevens, Stein, H.D., and Woolf. (12)
