What Would Dr. Freud Say?

from the nifty H.D.:

Oread

Whirl up, sea—

Whirl your pointed pines.

Splash your great pines

On our rocks.

Hurl your green over us—

Cover us with your pools of fir.

A Sexy Christmas Tree Poem

well, sort of about Christmas trees.










by Marianne Moore

Rosemary

Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary -
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly -
born of the sea supposedly,
at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary -

since the flight to Egypt, blooming indifferently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers - white originally -
turned blue. The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
is not too legendary

to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when he was thirty-three,
it feeds on dew and to the bee
"hath a dumb language"; is in reality
a kind of Christmas tree.

Maybe a Little Too Sexy?

Wallace Stevens says that the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Sometimes more successfully than others.

This is a very sexy poem, especially the last stanza. You've been warned.


Floral Decorations for Bananas



Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won't do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!


You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!


But bananas hacked and hunched ...
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.


And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

The Pipes of Pan

The story of Syrinx is another that bears much fruit for the tree fetishist.

It's pretty much the same story as Daphne, except with an even more explicit relationship between desire, loss, compensation, violence, and art. Syrinx is transformed into the reeds from which Pan makes his pipes.

So here are some thoughts on Pan and Syrinx.

Here's a comic take from Richard Niccols, In Syringam Panafugientem:

From rugged Pan though lovely Syrinx fled,
Pretending so to save her maidenhead;
Yet in the end the chaster Nymph did stay
To be the pipe, when Pan would please to play.

And here's one for the Canadians, by Bliss Carman, from his Sappho series:

LOVER, art thou of a surety
Not a learner of the wood-god?
Has the madness of his music
Never touched thee?

AH, thou dear and godlike mortal,
If Pan takes thee for his pupil,
Make me but another Syrinx
For that piping.

Laurel

The story of Daphne is especially fruitful for these poems. So far, in the random sampling pulled from my brain and onto the blogpage, a number refer to the story: the Marvell and the Pound specifically, and Crane more generally.

It's unsurprising that it should recur, I guess. The story is, after all, erotic and disturbing and a embodies a pretty enduring metaphor about poetry (and poets).

For those of you who mighta forgot, the story goes something like this:

Apollo falls in love with Daphne, who wants nothing to do with him, prefering her virginity to his charms. He pursues her, and when he has nearly captured her, the poor girl prays to lose her beauty, her form, in order to escape Apollo's intended rape.

Her prayer is granted, and her skin silvers over with bark, her hair rustles with leaves, her arms grow to branches, and her "swift feet" fix to the ground as root.

Witnessing this, Apollo kisses the laurel tree and says that although he can no longer have her as a bride, he will honor the laurel and always wear a laurel wreath around his lyre.

You don't have to be Dr. Freud to raise the eyebrows at that one!

That's the thing with writing, isn't it? We'd always rather get what we want (sex), but if we can't we'll settle for transforming the loss and desire into poetry, no matter the cost to the rest of those involved.

Anyway, here's some poems about Daphne.

William Drumond's Daphne

Now Daphnès armes did grow
In slender Branches, and her braided haire
Which like gold waues did flow
In leauie Twigs was stretched in the aire;
The grace of either foot
Transform'd was to a root,
A tender Barke enwrapes her Bodye faire.
Hee who did cause her ill
Sor-wailing stood, and from his blubb'red eyne
Did showres of teares vpon the rine distill
Which watred thus did bude and turne more greene.
O deep Dispaire! o Hart-appalling Griefe!
When that doth woe encrease should bring reliefe.

And here's another one from H.D., called If You Will Let Me Sing

If you will let me sing,
That God will be
gracious to each of us,
who found his own wild Daphne
in a tree,
who set
on desolate plinth,
image
of Hyacinth.

What Are You Getting Your Wife For Arbor Day?

Here's another eroticized poem about someone turning into a tree. From the amazing and underrated Hart Crane.

Garden Abstract

The apple on its bough is her desire,-
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,

Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

Not Too Sexy

Two more tree poems. These aren't particularly erotic, though (except in the sense that good poetry is pretty sexy). Just regular old turning-into-a-tree poems.



W.B. Yeats

Mongan Thinks of his Past Greatness

I HAVE drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel tree and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:	5
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies;	10
Although the rushes and the fowl of the air
Cry of his love with their pitiful cries.

And another from Ezra Pound, one of my favorite poems ever even though I can't say why:

The Tree

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.

Nature is Too Green and Badly Lit

But that didn't stop our old friend John Keats from looking for a little "full-throated" ease there.

Here's a sexy bit from "Ode to Psyche." It sounds like maybe Keats should find the Girl from the Pound poem. They both seem to be suffering from some kind of dendrogenic disorder:

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane	50
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains steep by steep;	55
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,	60
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,	65
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!

Nature Loving

Wow - there are lots of sexy tree poems out there.

How do you explain to your wife how you got Dutch Elm disease?

From Andrew Marvell's The Garden:

No white nor red was ever seen
So amorous as this lovely green ;
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress' name.
Little, alas, they know or heed,
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheresoe'er your barks I wound
No name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passion's heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat :
The gods who mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

Dendrophilia

I realize that erotic poems about trees is a bit of a niche market.

Well, the heart wants what it wants.

Ezra Pound

A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

Flirting With Trees

This is longish, but it's all pretty sexy and I've put the really good bits in (what else?) green. For those of you who like to skip to the dirty passages.

I've been known to read that way, myself. I think I was thirty before I realized that Portnoy's Complaint actually had a story.

Without further ado, here's some sexy tree poetry from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.*

Perdita

[To Polixenes] Sir, welcome:
It is my father’s will I should take on me
The hostess-ship o’ the day.

To Camillo

You’re welcome, sir.
Give me those flowers there, Dorcas. Reverend sirs,
For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming and savour all the winter long:
Grace and remembrance be to you both,
And welcome to our shearing!

Polixenes

Shepherdess,
A fair one are you—well you fit our ages
With flowers of winter.

Perdita

Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ the season
Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors,
Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.

Polixenes

Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?

Perdita

For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.

Polixenes

Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

Perdita

So it is.

Polixenes

Then make your garden rich in gillyvors,
And do not call them bastards.

Perdita

I’ll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them;
No more than were I painted I would wish
This youth should say ’twere well and only therefore
Desire to breed by me. Here’s flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram;
The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun
And with him rises weeping: these are flowers
Of middle summer, and I think they are given
To men of middle age. You’re very welcome.

Camillo

I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,
And only live by gazing.

Perdita

Out, alas!
You’d be so lean, that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through.
Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might
Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o’er and o’er!

*I wonder if this was one of the "three Shakespeares" the President claims to have read.

The Beginning

This blog has its genesis in a really crappy day at work. I took the afternoon off and read some Robert Herrick and was immensely cheered by a dirty poem about a tree.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Vine

I DREAM'D this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthrall'd my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embrac'd:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem'd to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curles about her neck did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy'd,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock then like a Vine.