A Hibiscus but alas no Salvia!
I have written twice about D.H. Lawrence, here and here. Since then my idea of feeling depressed when I think or read Lawrence has not changed.
A few days ago I scanned a hibiscus that is much too big for our garden. It somehow survived out in our lane from last year even if these plants are iffy in our Vancouver weather. Perhaps I can convince my son-in-law to transfer it to his Burnaby garden.
When possible I try to find some sort of reference, essay or poem to my plant scans. The idea of simply placing a plant scan with no relevant information is anathema to me.
Imagine that when I placed hibiscus into Google the only poetic reference was a long poem by Lawrence. He wrote it in the 20s while in Italy so the poem is about the political overtones of the time. It seems that libertarian Lawrence (he changed his tack many years later) did not like leftists or commies.
The other plant in his poem is salvia. I asked my Rosemary if we had any blooms. She told me that for reasons she did not understand our Salvia patens has not done so.
_Hark! Hark!
The dogs do bark!
It’s the socialists come to town,
None in rags and none in tags,
Swaggering up and down_.
Sunday morning,
And from the Sicilian townlets skirting Etna
The socialists have gathered upon us, to look at us.
How shall we know them when we see them?
How shall we know them now they’ve come?
Not by their rags and not by their tags,
Nor by any distinctive gown;
The same unremarkable Sunday suit
And hats cocked up and down.
Yet there they are, youths, loutishly
Strolling in gangs and staring along the Corso
With the gang-stare
And a half-threatening envy
At every _forestière_,
Every lordly tuppenny foreigner from the hotels,
fattening on the exchange.
_Hark! Hark!
The dogs do bark!
It’s the socialists in the town_.
Sans rags, sans tags,
Sans beards, sans bags,
Sans any distinction at all except loutish commonness.
How do we know then, that they are they?
Bolshevists.
Leninists.
Communists.
Socialists.
-Ists! -Ists!
Alas, salvia and hibiscus flowers.
Salvia and hibiscus flowers.
Listen again.
Salvia and hibiscus flowers.
Is it not so?
Salvia and hibiscus flowers.
_Hark! Hark!
The dogs do hark_!
Salvia and hibiscus flowers.
Who smeared their doors with blood?
Who on their breasts
Put salvias and hibiscus?
Rosy, rosy scarlet,
And flame-rage, golden-throated
Bloom along the Corso on the living, perambulating bush.
Who said they might assume these blossoms?
What god did they consult?
Rose-red, princess hibiscus, rolling her pointed Chinese
petals!
Azalea and camellia, single peony
And pomegranate bloom and scarlet mallow-flower
And all the eastern, exquisite royal plants
That noble blood has brought us down the ages!
Gently nurtured, frail and splendid
Hibiscus flower —
Alas, the Sunday coats of Sicilian bolshevists!
Pure blood, and noble blood, in the fine and rose-red veins;
Small, interspersed with jewels of white gold
Frail-filigreed among the rest;
Rose of the oldest races of princesses, Polynesian
Hibiscus.
Eve, in her happy moments,
Put hibiscus in her hair,
Before she humbled herself, and knocked her knees with
repentance.
Sicilian bolshevists,
With hibiscus flowers in the buttonholes of your Sunday suits,
Come now, speaking of rights, what right have you to this
flower?
The exquisite and ageless aristocracy
Of a peerless soul,
Blessed are the pure in heart and the fathomless in bright
pride;
The loveliness that knows _noblesse oblige_;
The native royalty of red hibiscus flowers;
The exquisite assertion of new delicate life
Risen from the roots:
Is this how you’ll have it, red-decked socialists,
Hibiscus-breasted?
If it be so, I fly to join you,
And if it be not so, brutes to pull down hibiscus flowers!
Or salvia!
Or dragon-mouthed salvia with gold throat of wrath!
Flame-flushed, enraged, splendid salvia,
Cock-crested, crowing your orange scarlet like a tocsin
Along the Corso all this Sunday morning.
Is your wrath red as salvias.
You socialists?
You with your grudging, envious, furtive rage,
In Sunday suits and yellow boots along the Corso.
You look well with your salvia flowers, I must say.
Warrior-like, dawn-cock’s-comb flaring flower
Shouting forth flame to set the world on fire,
The dust-heap of man’s filthy world on fire,
And burn it down, the glutted, stuffy world,
And feed the young new fields of life with ash,
With ash I say,
Bolshevists,
Your ashes even, my friends,
Among much other ash.
If there were salvia-savage bolshevists
To burn the world back to manure-good ash.
Wouldn’t I stick the salvia in my coat!
But these themselves must burn, these louts!
The dragon-faced,
The anger-reddened, golden-throated salvia
With its long antennae of rage put out
Upon the frightened air.
Ugh, how I love its fangs of perfect rage
That gnash the air;
The molten gold of its intolerable rage
Hot in the throat.
I long to be a bolshevist
And set the stinking rubbish-heap of this foul world
Afire at a myriad scarlet points,
A bolshevist, a salvia-face
To lick the world with flame that licks it clean.
I long to see its chock-full crowdedness
And glutted squirming populousness on fire
Like a field of filthy weeds
Burnt back to ash,
And then to see the new, real souls sprout up.
Not this vast rotting cabbage patch we call the world;
But from the ash-scarred fallow
New wild souls.
Nettles, and a rose sprout,
Hibiscus, and mere grass,
Salvia still in a rage
And almond honey-still,
And fig-wort stinking for the carrion wasp;
All the lot of them, and let them fight it out.
But not a trace of foul equality,
Nor sound of still more foul human perfection.
You need not clear the world like a cabbage patch for me;
Leave me my nettles,
Let me fight the wicked, obstreperous weeds myself, and put
them in their place,
Severely in their place.
I don’t at all want to annihilate them,
I like a row with them.
But I won’t be put on a cabbage-idealistic level of equality
with them.
What rot, to see the cabbage and hibiscus-tree
As equals!
What rot, to say the louts along the Corso
In Sunday suits and yellow shoes
Are my equals!
I am their superior, saluting the hibiscus flower, not them.
The same I say to the profiteers from the hotels, the money-
fat-ones,
Profiteers here being called dog-fish, stinking dog-fish,
sharks.
The same I say to the pale and elegant persons.
Pale-face authorities loitering tepidly:
_That I salute the red hibiscus flowers
And send mankind to its inferior blazes_.
Mankind’s inferior blazes,
And these along with it, all the inferior lot —
These bolshevists,
These dog-fish,
These precious and ideal ones,
All rubbish ready for fire.
And I salute hibiscus and the salvia flower
Upon the breasts of loutish bolshevists,
Damned loutish bolshevists,
Who perhaps will do the business after all,
In the long run, in spite of themselves.
Meanwhile, alas
For me no fellow-men,
No salvia-frenzied comrades, antennae
Of yellow-red, outreaching, living wrath
Upon the smouldering air,
And throat of brimstone-molten angry gold.
Red, angry men are a race extinct, alas!
Never
To be a bolshevist
With a hibiscus flower behind my ear
In sign of life, of lovely, dangerous life
And passionate disquality of men;
In sign of dauntless, silent violets,
And impudent nettles grabbing the under-earth,
And cabbages born to be cut and eat,
And salvia fierce to crow and shout for fight,
And rosy-red hibiscus wincingly
Unfolding all her coiled and lovely self
In a doubtful world.
Never, bolshevistically
To be able to stand for all these!
Alas, alas, I have got to leave it all
To the youths in Sunday suits and yellow shoes
Who have pulled down the salvia flowers
And rosy delicate hibiscus flowers
And everything else to their disgusting level,
Never, of course, to put anything up again.
But yet
If they pull all the world down,
The process will amount to the same in the end.
Instead of flame and flame-clean ash
Slow watery rotting back to level muck
And final humus.
Whence the re-start.
And still I cannot bear it
That they take hibiscus and the salvia flower.
