Title: The sensitive plant
Author: Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Language: English
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Of this Special Edition on Japanese Paper only 50 copies have been
printed for the Guild of Women-Binders, of which this is No. 38



[Illustration]



                                   THE
                             SENSITIVE PLANT
                                 BY PERCY
                              BYSSHE SHELLEY

                              ILLUSTRATED BY
                                 LAURENCE
                                 HOUSMAN

                     London: Printed for the Guild of
                     Women-Binders. 61 Charing Cross
                             Road. W.C. 1899



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


    _Death in the garden_ (_page 42_)      _Frontispiece_

    _The winds ministering_            _To face page_ 19

    _The dying narcissus_                     ”       20

    _The rose-nymph_                          ”       22

    _Pan covetous_                            ”       26

    _Night in the garden_                     ”       30

    _The ruling grace_                        ”       34

    _The garden enclosed_                     ”       38

    _The shadowed doorway_                    ”       40

    _The garden panic_                        ”       46

    _Pan paramount_                           ”       48

    _The garden entombed_                     ”       52



THE SENSITIVE PLANT


When Shelley wrote THE SENSITIVE PLANT he was drawing very near the
end of his poetry. It was one of the poems belonging to the days at
Pisa, whither the Shelleys had gone late in the January of 1820. In the
next winter—a winter of many painful associations for him, and many
discouragements and reminders of evil fortune—he wrote this mysterious
song of beauty and death. The idea of it appears to have come to him
from the flowers which Mrs. Shelley had collected round her in her own
room at the house they occupied on the south side of the Arno. Their
fragrance, as it exhaled on the wintry Italian sunshine, and the
sense of their fading loveliness, added to certain graver influences
of which we read,—the death of a dearly-loved child, the illness of
a dear friend,—contributed, no doubt, to provide that “atmosphere of
memorial dejection and very sorrowful delight,” of which an old Italian
poet speaks, as being propitious for the working of the imagination.
But a miracle is not less miraculous because we know the conditions
under which it was worked, and something inexplicable remains about THE
SENSITIVE PLANT after we have gathered together everything we can of its
circumstances and the moods of its poet in the memorable Pisan days when
it was written.

All through this period, so far as we can gather, Shelley was extremely
discouraged about his poetry and the reception it had attained hitherto.
From Medwin and others we learn of the special resentment he felt at
the continual hostilities of the powerful quarterly engines of critical
opinion. In a letter to Ollier, he said, during 1820: “I doubt whether I
shall write more. I could be content either with the hell or the paradise
of poetry, but the torments of its purgatory vex me without exciting my
powers sufficiently to put an end to the vexation.” However, when a poet
of Shelley’s plenary inspiration decides not to write, he is likely to
be impelled most strongly by his _dæmon_ to new flights. The “Ode to a
Skylark,” the “Witch of Atlas,” the “Ode to Liberty,” among other poems,
belong to this period; and with them we have the invincible declaration
of the poet’s rights and inalienable liberties, to be found in his
prose “Defence of Poetry.” One or two stanzas there are in the “Witch
of Atlas,” and one or two passages in the “Defence,” which strike us
as being more intimately connected with the occult imaginative origins
of THE SENSITIVE PLANT than anything found elsewhere in his writings.
Take the strange, melodious verses in which the radiant creature of the
mountains is presented,—the lovely lady garmented in the light of her own
beauty, to whom the camelopard and the brindled lioness, the herdsmen
and the mountain maidens came:

    “_For she was beautiful: her beauty made_
      _The bright world dim, and everything beside_
    _Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade:_
      _No thought of living spirit could abide_
    _(Which to her looks had ever been betrayed)_
      _On any object in the world so wide,_
    _On any hope within the circling skies,_
      _But in her form, and in her inmost eyes._

       *       *       *       *       *

    “_The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling_
      _Were stored with magic treasures—sounds of air,_
    _Which had the power all spirits of compelling,_
      _Folded in cells of crystal silence there._”

       *       *       *       *       *

A few stanzas later, and we come to the idea of the strange seed, which
was wrapt in mould, and watered all the summer with sweet dew. At length:

    “_The plant grew strong and green—the sunny flower_
      _Fell, and the long and gourd-like fruit began_
    _To turn the light and dew by inward power_
      _To its own substance._”

This brings us as near, I imagine, to the idea of THE SENSITIVE PLANT
as we are likely to find ourselves in any other most Shelleyan region
of his poetry. The lines recur persistently to the mind in reading the
later poem; and almost as suggestively is it haunted by one passage at
least in the “Defence,” which speaks with a sort of aerial eloquence of a
Poetry whose art it is to arrest “the vanishing apparitions which haunt
the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide.”

When one considers the rarity and the half-impalpable conditions of this
chosen realm of his poetry, and turns to THE SENSITIVE PLANT as one of
its most essential expressions, one is at first rendered half-incredulous
of the power of a kindred art to interpret effectively such a poem. But,
in fact, there is a much more concrete imagery—whether of flowers or
weeds, directly presented or definitely symbolised; or of the Lady who
haunts among them—than one at all remembers until one takes to conning
its stanzas closely with an eye to such effects.

THE SENSITIVE PLANT lends itself more readily to the art of the
symbolist, in particular, than any other of Shelley’s poems. It would be
quite possible for a critic with a turn for metaphysics, and a certain
German patience of analytic ingenuity, to read into its exquisite fable
of mortality a whole world of significance, which the poet himself had
never suspected. But the symbolic artist, if he be too, as needs be,
a symbolic poet, is saved by his art. The spirit of the poem is likely
to obsess him, and compel from him only such an interpretation as is,
allowing for the casual differences of kindred arts and sympathetic
temperaments, truly and finely accordant with its own essential qualities
and terms of expression. The true poets have that power of continuing to
enlarge the original issues and influences of their song long after its
immediate effect has died away. Shelley commands with a more than usual
lyric enchantment a sphere that, like the magic house of Merlin, can go
on enlarging itself; until one figures him, not as the sad spirit of the
garden in this poem, but as the radiant spirit of his “Hymn of Apollo”:

    “_All harmony of instrument or verse,_
      _All prophecy, all medicine are mine,_
    _All light of art or nature—to my song_
      _Victory and praise in their own right belong._”

                                                              ERNEST RHYS.



A NOTE UPON THE ILLUSTRATIONS


In one sense a beautiful poem can never be illustrated: being beautiful
it is already perfect, and, to intelligent minds, illustrates itself.
Everything that it says it says in the best possible way; within the
limits of the medium chosen, it is absolute.

If, therefore, illustration is to be an attempt to say over again what
the poet has already said perfectly, it is certain to prove itself
superfluous, and to be nothing better than a labour of tautology.
But there is a quality in all fine work which gives invitation into
the charmed circle of its influence to whatever is freshly and
sympathetically touched with the ideas it conveys. Great work tells so
differently on different minds; not by contrary but by kindred ways it
speaks freshly perhaps to each individual.

Thus, to express accurately in another medium an appreciation, an
individual sense of delight or emotion in work of finished and
constructive beauty is the only way of illustration which seems to me
profitable. The appreciation may be faulty; but in so far as it states a
personal view of its subject, it has legitimate standing ground.

I have endeavoured to make evident in my drawings the particular way
in which this poem has appealed to me. The garden, fine and elaborate,
full of artifice, opposing with an infinity of delicate labour the
random overgrowth of the wilderness which seeks jealously to encroach
on it, has perhaps this to hint concerning all forms of beauty of man’s
devising,—that, in spite of the pains entailed in their cultivation, the
fragile and conditional state of their constitution remains: over all
such things at last comes the tread of Pan, effacing, and replacing with
his own image and superscription, the parenthetic grace—so spiritual
almost in some of its suggestions—of the garden deity.

The lady of the garden, the charming sentimentalist, whom I can only
excuse for not killing the slugs and snails by believing that she wore
a crinoline and was altogether ignorant of natural laws, harmonises
exquisitely for a while with her high-clipped hedges and garden statuary.
It is an _ensemble_ to gaze into as into a picture: but the shadows of
ruin and decay cross it; it is too graceful to last. Pan is stronger than
any form of beauty that springs out of modes and fashions.

So, when she dies, she is but the forerunner of the death of the whole
garden: when she evaporates the _petite mort_ runs through all its bowers
and alleys: its apparitions rise and follow her funeral with a sense that
their own time of dissolution approaches; and the mode passes through
a period of squalor and morbid abandonment back into the hands of the
ultimate master of things earthly.

It is an unpopular thing, may be, to assert that man’s sense of beauty
is so conditional to himself and the uses he makes of it. Yet here we
are shown how, with war to the death, unsightly overthrow follows his
abandonment of his stolen pleasure-ground, and wipes out his trespassing
footprints.

Man’s sense of beauty is his own: it is not Nature’s. The aim of all
art is to restrict Nature, and teach her that her place is not in the
high places of men; and we only admire Nature because in the present
strength of our civilisation we are strong enough to pet her. Hannibal
was a better judge of the true unsightliness of Alpine scenery than we
ourselves.

I should have preferred to add nothing to what I have drawn: but an
explanation of my unkind view of the rival claims of Pan and the
Garden-god has been wrung from me.

For the present the genius of civilisation, numerating duration into
hours and years and centuries for man’s convenience, overrides the
slow-crawling tortoise of Time: but it will not always be so; and earth
will come at last to be altogether rid of us and that superfluous “sense
of beauty” which has so long yoked her back, and hedged her wastes and
furrowed her fields.

                                                         LAURENCE HOUSMAN.

[Illustration]



THE SENSITIVE PLANT



FIRST PART


I

    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.


II

    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.


III

    But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
    In the garden, the field, and the wilderness,
    Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want,
    As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

[Illustration]


IV

    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.


V

    Then the pied windflowers 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;


VI

    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;


VII

    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;

[Illustration]


VIII

    And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest,
    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:


IX

    And the wand-like lily, which lifted up
    As a Mænad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
    Till the fiery star, which is its eye
    Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;


X

    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.


XI

    And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
    Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom,
    With golden and green light, slanting through
    Their heaven of many a tangled hue,


XII

    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.


XIII

    And the sinuous paths of lawn and 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,


XIV

    Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
    As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
    And flowrets which drooping as day drooped too,
    Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
    To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.


XV

    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),

[Illustration]


XVI

    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;


XVII

    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.


XVIII

    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,


XIX

    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!


XX

    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;


XXI

    The plumèd 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;


XXII

    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;


XXIII

    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;

[Illustration]


XXIV

    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.


XXV

    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,


XXVI

    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;


XXVII

    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.


XXVIII

    The Sensitive Plant was the earliest
    Up-gathered into the bosom of rest;
    A sweet child weary of its delight,
    The feeblest and yet the favourite
    Cradled within the embrace of night.



SECOND PART


XXIX

    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.

[Illustration]


XXX

    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,


XXXI

    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!


XXXII

    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:


XXXIII

    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.


XXXIV

    Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest;
    You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
    That the coming and going of the wind
    Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.


XXXV

    And wherever her airy 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.


XXXVI

    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.


XXXVII

    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.

[Illustration]


XXXVIII

    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.


XXXIX

    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,


XL

    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.


XLI

    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.

[Illustration]


XLII

    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.


XLIII

    This fairest creature from earliest spring
    Thus moved through the garden ministering
    All the sweet season of summer tide,
    And ere the first leaf looked brown—she died!



THIRD PART


XLIV

    Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
    Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,
    Or the waves of Baiæ, ere luminous
    She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.


XLV

    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;


XLVI

    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;


XLVII

    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.


XLVIII

    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.


XLIX

    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.


L

    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.


LI

    And Indian plants, of scent and hue
    The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
    Leaf after leaf, day after day,
    Were massed into the common clay.


LII

    And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red,
    And white with the whiteness of what is dead,
    Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past;
    Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.

[Illustration]


LIII

    And the gusty winds waked the wingèd 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.


LIV

    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.


LV

    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.


LVI

    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.

[Illustration]


LVII

    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.


LVIII

    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.


LIX

    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!


LX

    Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake,
    Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake,
    Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
    Infecting the winds that wander by.


LXI

    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.


LXII

    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.


LXIII

    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.


LXIV

    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.

[Illustration]


LXV

    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.


LXVI

    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.


LXVII

    His breath was a chain which without a sound
    The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
    He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne
    By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone


LXVIII

    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!


LXIX

    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.


LXX

    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;


LXXI

    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.


LXXII

    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


LXXIII

    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.


LXXIV

    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,


LXXV

    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,


LXXVI

    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.


LXXVII

    That garden sweet, that lady fair,
    And all sweet shapes and odours there,
    In truth have never past away:
    ’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.


LXXVIII

    For love, and beauty, and delight,
    There is no death nor change: their might
    Exceeds our organs, which endure
    No light, being themselves obscure.


                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
                            London & Edinburgh



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