PART 1.
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
The snowdrop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.
Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream's recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;
And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;
And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:
And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;
And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.
And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was pranked, under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,
Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,
And starry river-buds glimmered by,
And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.
And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across,
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,
Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow'rets which, drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers (as an infant's awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),
When Heaven's blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver,--
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!
The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass;
The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
The quivering vapours of dim noontide,
Which like a sea o'er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam,
Move, as reeds in a single stream;
Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by
Like windless clouds o'er a tender sky.
And when evening descended from Heaven above,
And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,
And the day's veil fell from the world of sleep,
And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound;
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
The light sand which paves it, consciousness;
(Only overhead the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant);--
The Sensitive Plant was the earliest
Upgathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of Night.
PART 2.
There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.
A Lady, the wonder of her kind,
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,
Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,
Like the lamps of the air when Night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!
She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes,
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:
As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted Heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her.
Her step seemed to pity the grass it pressed;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.
And wherever her aery footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o'er the dark green deep.
I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,--
In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris
Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.
And many an antenatal tomb,
Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging round the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.
This fairest creature from earliest Spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
Mi the sweet season of Summertide,
And ere the first leaf looked brown--she died!
PART 3.
Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,
Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.
And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chant,
And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low;
The weary sound and the heavy breath,
And the silent motions of passing death,
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin-plank;
The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.
The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
To make men tremble who never weep.
Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.
The rose-leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Paved the turf and the moss below.
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.
And Indian plants, of scent and hue
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf by leaf, day after day,
Were massed into the common clay.
And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red,
And white with the whiteness of what is dead,
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed;
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.
And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,
Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem,
Which rotted into the earth with them.
The water-blooms under the rivulet
Fell from the stalks on which they were set;
And the eddies drove them here and there,
As the winds did those of the upper air.
Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless network of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.
Between the time of the wind and the snow
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,
Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back.
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretched out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.
And hour by hour, when the air was still,
The vapours arose which have strength to kill;
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.
And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.
The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves, which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.
For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.
For Winter came: the wind was his whip:
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;
His breath was a chain which without a sound
265The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.
Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath.
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!
And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air
And were caught in the branches naked and bare.
First there came down a thawing rain
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;
And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy, and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When Winter had gone and Spring came back
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.
CONCLUSION.
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.
Whether that Lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
Shelley was a highly speculative poet. His verse explored the nature of the world and the principles of human experience through a well trained philosophical lens. Shelley's verse was one of intelligence and was a poetry that openly worked through questions concerning epistemology and ontology. Shelley's poetry questioned the nature of reality, of perceived knowledge, and of universal truth. His poetry showed a mind that refused to settle on a single preposition, on a definable truth; rather, his writing operated more as a method, as a work of sustained psychological inquiry into the relationship between sense and perception. Shelley worked over the relationship between how one sees the world and how that frame of seeing informed not only knowledge, but also informed what in the world was perceived. For Shelley looking onto a thing was to change it, that the mind is shaped by and shapes the world around it. The world was for Shelley, to borrow a title from one of his poems, mutable, "that naught may endure but Mutability" ("Mutability" ln. 16). In Shelley's epistemological universe nothing was stable, or in a singular form; however, Shelley did not find from within this position an untenable world devoid of meaning but instead, aligned his thinking and art to also be in continual motion. Shelley's poem "The Sensitive-Plant" was one of the longer poems in which Shelley contended with a world in constant flux and the difficulty of locating meaning in a universe governed by chaos and entropy. In "The Sensitive-Plant" Shelley has designed a poem that explicitly works toward the position that in a seemingly godless and violent world there is some form of redemption or salvation. What Shelley ultimately does is to create a poem which, to follow the logic of its conclusion, can be re-ordered. That is, the poem can be read just as appropriately from beginning to end or from end to beginning, and still present the same meaning. Shelley created a poem in "The Sensitive-Plant" which attempted to locate a value in the world that sustained the violence of reality, Shelley located that value in the nature of beauty and, how perception affected the nature of beauty. It should first be noted that Shelley chose a unique poetic form to structure "The Sensitive-Plant". The poem is made up of 78 stanzas, each of two couplets following an aabb rhyme scheme throughout (save for the 14th, 28th, and 48th stanza which are made up of five lines with a rhyme scheme of aabbb). The tight and unrelenting rhyme scheme gives the poem a kind of sonic urgency; the rhymes operate as a continual march that never varies its consistency. The aabb rhyme scheme is a dangerous one in English language poetry and is generally the type of scheme that traditionally lends itself better for light verse or short lyrics. It is not a rhyme scheme that was regularly taken up in English poetry for long works or works like "The Sensitive-Plant", whose gesture was toward broad philosophical inquiry. It is, in effect, a scheme that was not regularly employed for 'serious' poetry. The choice of such a scheme, though, demonstrates two things. One: Shelley was willing to see what he could do within a rigid poetic form, and two: it gave the poem a structural unity, a unifying principle that gestured toward harmony and symmetry. Contextually, the balance in the rhymes is mimicked in the symmetries of the flowers in the garden of "The Sensitive-Plant", for the poem's main landscape is a landscape of flowers and flowers are the principle actors in the poem. The flowers, however, do not exist in the poem simply as objects but are instead anthropomorphized. They have desire and delights; they 'pant and tremble', they sleep, and they love. In addition to lending the flowers in the garden human characteristics, Shelley also describes the flowers in non-mortal terms, that is, as deified beauty, as Naiads, nymphs, and Maenads. During the first section of the poem, the section that focuses on the Sensitive-Plant, the flowers and the climate around them conspire in perpetuating a state of continued beauty. The odors of the flowers are lifted like music into the winds and spread across the garden "like ministering angels" (I. 94) in an "undefiled Paradise" (I. 58). The Sensitive-Plant though is unique in the garden in that it is the only plant that is not a flower and is described as being un-beautiful, "It loves-even like Love-its deep heart is full-/ It desires what it has not-the beautiful" (I. 76-77). This want for the beautiful though is a desire, though unfulfilled, which sustains the Sensitive-Plant and the process of seeking beauty, its own longings, leave the Sensitive-Plant "weary of its delight" (I. 112). It is in the first section of the poem that one of the main arguments concerning the nature of the mind is put forth:
And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
The light sand which paves-Consciousness. (I. 106-109)
Here, dreams work as a state of being which work on the waking life, on the consciousness of the world, and they do so in such a way that their impact on understanding is profound but nevertheless un-marked, immeasurable. In effect, dreams do the work of making the perceived world; they shape the construction of waking life. The construction of the world figures more prominently in the second section of the poem where the figure of a Lady is introduced into the garden. The figure of the lady, like the flowers, is placed outside of the mortal realm and, like the flowers, she is a source of beauty, but the Lady is one lined as a figure that amplifies the beauty of the garden. She is the "fairest creature from earliest spring" (II. 57). Also, this Lady operates in much the same way that dreams operate on consciousness. She spends most of her time in the garden tending it, by "killing insects" and removing "things of obscene and unlovely form" (II. 41-42). Though she creates shape of the garden she does not "mark" it: "And wherever her aery footstep trod,/ Her trailing hair from the grassy sod/ Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep" (II. 25-27). The Lady in the poem moves through the garden in a way similar to the way that dreams move through consciousness, designing what consciousness is without leaving its mark on it. The lady is also presented in ocean metaphors much like the metaphor used to explain consciousness as a Lady "like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean" (II. 8). In effect, the lady is the dream life of the garden, and if dreams then shape the world that is perceived, shape consciousness, then it is logical that the Lady dreams of paradise, "her dreams were less slumber than Paradise" (II. 15). The Lady is, therefore, a figure created in the dreams of Paradise, and Paradise is a figure created out of the dreams of the Lady. They are symbiotic, and when she dies Paradise dies with her. The third section of the poem examines the death and decay of the garden and the end of beauty. The third section of the poem is a meditation on the victory of violence against beauty; this section posits the victory as eternal and final: "When winter had gone and spring come back...the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and damels/ Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels" (III. 117). The death of beauty is also the end of sound and music, two elements which were heavily emphasized earlier in the poem. Winter enters the garden gesturing of silence with "One choppy finger...on his lip" (III. 91) and the wind now moves through the garden "without a sound" (III. 94). The synesthasia of the opening of the poem, "Of music so delicate, soft and intense,/ It was felt like an odour within the sense" (I. 27-28) has now been replaced by a motionless world that resides within a vacuum of sound and music. The end of beauty is also the end of music and song and the end of poetry. The third section ends with the defeat of sensation and beauty and the creation of an alien world that no longer desires that beauty increase. It is a tragic trajectory and the transition for a Paradise to a wasteland is not governed through a meaningful conflict, instead, it is just the arch of nature, the browning of a leaf and the death of a gardener. The movement between life and death is, in "The Sensitive-Plant", meaningless and random. Shelley, though, does not end the poem on this note of meaningless finality; instead, Shelley re-figures the role of death in the same way that he figured the relationship between dreaming and waking:
but in this life
Of error, ignorance and strife-
Where nothing is-but all things seem...
It is a modest creed...
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest,-a mockery. (IV. 9-16)
Here, death is a part of the dream and a part of consciousness, a figure that only exists because it has been willed into existence and that beauty and life, "In truth have never passed away-/ `Tis we, `tis ours, are changed-not they" (IV. 19-20). The transformation of the garden from beauty into death is a transformation of sense perception. The movement away from beauty is an internal movement, and it is not the world that becomes ugly but the reading of the world that has changed. In fact, for the poet, "love, and beauty, and delight/ There is no death nor change" (IV. 21-22). Beauty and desire are a constant in this world. That is that meaning is immutable and eternal, but our knowledge and perception of meaning and beauty obscures as it seeks: "[beauty] Exceeds our organs-which endure/ No light-being themselves obscure" (IV. 23-24).