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

Other elements of the poem, however, complicate this reading. First, the word itself is Latin for little sword, and thus bears distinctly masculine connotations. Second, McGuckian throughout emphasizes the flower's asexual method of propagation. The poem's only end rhymes, "clone" and "own," accent this strategy, and McGuckian startles us with an image of sexual violence only to defuse it in the following line: "its grains ripped / Benignly." While McGuckian to some extent identifies her aesthetic with this plant's pleasing arts, rooting her own poetry in a narrowly observed domestic world, she also portrays this world in startling, defamiliarizing ways. Her gladiolus-woman-poet, despite these traditional attributes, possesses an ambiguous though intense sexuality and exerts her own, apparently passive, mastery of her environment. The poem remains tantalizingly ambiguous in its attitude: does McGuckian present this model with amused detachment, approval, or some other judgment?

Flowers as figures for female experience might seem to emphasize heterosexual eroticism (as Dickinson's nectar-drunken bees do) and reproduction. Hence H.D.'s wild specimens hint at her own modern marriage, in which each member exercised a sexual freedom that challenged the institution's conventions. Even McGuckian, though, finds examples in her border garden of unconventional sexuality. Talking to or about their flowers, each poet investigates a range of erotic and literary possibilities.

Garden varieties

Unlike McGuckian's collection, H.D.'s Sea Garden contains no title poem. Instead, "Sheltered Garden" defines the antithesis of the title image (Collected Poems 19-21). "Sheltered Garden" implicitly describes the discipline of conventional femininity in withering terms, preferring the dangers of the sea's harsh weather to the safety of garden walls. She decries the "beauty without strength" fostered by constraint and declares, "it is better to taste of frost--/ the exquisite frost--/ than of wadding and of dead grass." If gardens are "deadly, sweet, and overripe paradises," as Laity puts it (45), H.D.'s paradoxical title retains only the lightest possible suggestion of the term's association with containment. (14) If H.D.'s poem desires escape from confined Victorian womanhood to modern sexual liberation, it also seeks "a new beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place."

H.D.'s longing for wind in "Sheltered Garden" and other Sea Garden poems suggests a search for inspiration, for an invigorated poetic voice. Chillingly, however, it also recalls the particulars of her 1915 stillbirth. Richard Aldington described the experience to Amy Lowell in a letter of 21 May: "I haven't seen the doctor, but the nurse said it was a beautiful child & they can't think why it didn't live. It was very strong, but wouldn't breathe" (16). A sheltered garden, then, not only suggests Victorian femininity and pre-imagist aesthetics but also evokes a uterine space that promises to protect life but ultimately destroys it. This poem, in fact, describes fruit that is "smothered" by straw: "this beauty,/beauty without strength,/chokes out life" (20). While H.D. here seeks a kind of poetry repudiating old constraints, her diction also remembers a perfect yet lifeless baby whom she cannot resuscitate. Instead, she wishes to "forget, to find a new beauty": her art both memorializes the loss and hopes to supplant it with new life.