TREELOGY. What do the daffodils say?

“Have you ever read Theodore Roethke? You must have. Still, sending you three poems. (I believe he had a greenhouse.)” An email from my friend — the words in parenthesis sound unfamiliar; I wouldn’t have expected him to use them, but he has. Why has he? I wonder. He’s not the kind to legitimise art by showing the raw material that produced it.

I actually read the third one first, not because that window popped up first, as if calling for attention, but because of the occurrence of the word ‘greenhouse’ in it. I’d like to see Roethke’s greenhouse — why did my friend consider it important to draw attention to it? The poem’s called ‘Child on Top of a Greenhouse’.

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,

My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,

The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,

Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,

A few white clouds all rushing eastward,

A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,

And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

I read once and stop. Is this his greenhouse? I must look more carefully. At first I am the ‘everyone’, ‘everyone pointing up’, but soon I’m no longer human. Light — our sudden encounter to it, and not to sunlight alone — turns us into something more than human. It’s a thought — and feeling — that comes to me quite often these days. The invention of sunglasses — and the umbrella before that — seems to have subtracted from our plant-like character. I feel disturbed by early-morning light intruding into my sleep. I am quite certain, though I have only my speculation to back me, that plants do not feel this way. Inside the poem’s greenhouse I find that I’m suddenly the chrysanthemum — I’m ‘staring up like accusers/Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight’. The ‘staring up like accusers’ is, of course, Roethke’s employment of pathetic fallacy, a rhetorical device that attributes human emotions to things, plants or animals. Although I’d been encountering it all my life, I became conscious of its technical name, as if it were the name of an ailment, when I was in college.

We were reading from Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ in class:

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait’.

The flowers were speaking in the poem. It didn’t seem odd to me. Wasn’t it only an extension of us dressing up as flowers in a school concert and singing to each other? Why was our professor making it sound as if it was a pejorative? Once home, and with my books, I found that the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’ had come from John Ruskin — he had used it to critique a certain kind of sentimentality in Modern Painters.

Was pathetic fallacy really a lazy cop-out for writers? When I began trying to write poems from an imagined non-anthropocentric point of view — I say this with a mixture of confusion and trepidation, being acutely aware that even the desire for a non-anthropocentric view is an anthropomorphic pastime — I would grope for ways in which that might be made possible. It was then that I began to gradually see why Ruskin had his reservations about pathetic fallacy. The word ‘agency’ hadn’t been co-opted in Ruskin’s time, nor had it been in mine, in the provincial university where I studied in the mid-’90s. It’s one that might be helpful to explain what is wrong with the instinct for pathetic fallacy — do the rose and the lily and the passion-flower in Tennyson’s poem or the chrysanthemums in Roethke’s poems have agency of any kind?

Last week, I read Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (also called ‘The Daffodils’ in school textbooks) and ‘The Solitary Reaper’ with my students. In the first, the daffodils are ‘fluttering and dancing in the breeze’. Both ‘flutter’ and ‘dance’ need will and agency. In ‘The Solitary Reaper’, though we see the Highland Lass ‘reaping and singing by herself’, she is denied agency. We do not know the subject of her song, we do not hear her stop singing either. The song fades because the speaker moves away from the song. Wordsworth had defended himself against Ruskin by saying that ‘objects ... derive their influence not from properties inherent in them ... but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects’. I couldn’t help thinking that even flowers, the ‘host of golden daffodils’, had been given agency and understanding by male poets in a way that women then hadn’t been.

Sumana Roy, author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri;

Twitter: @SumanaSiliguri

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