Posies: The Flower/Writing Connection
These texts help to contextualize Pulter’s decision to think about human bodily and spiritual life by means of plants, both in this poem and in others. Many writers preceding and contemporary to Pulter link poetry and posies (or bouquets) and use flowers as analogues for human feelings, mortality, fragility, and beauty.
What is a posie?
Posie: 1a) (now archaic or historical) poesy; 1b) an emblem or emblematic device (obsolete); 2a) A small bunch of flowers, frequently for holding in the hand or wearing as an ornament; a nosegay or small bouquet (also figurative); 2b) (figurative) A collection of pleasant poetry or rhetoric. Cf. anthology (noun).
The Arte of English Poesie
There be also other like epigrams that were sent usually for new year’s gifts or to be printed or put upon their banqueting dishes of sugar plate or of marchpane [marzipan] and such other dainty meats, as by the courtesy and custom of every guest might carry from a common feast home with him to his own house, and were made for the nonce. They were called nenia or apophereta [funeral songs and favors given to guests], and never contained above one verse, or two at the most, but the shorter the better. We call them posies, and do paint them nowadays upon the backsides of our fruit trenchers of wood, or use them as devices in rings and arms and about such courtly purposes.
Critics discuss the flower/writing connection:
“The posy is the form that poetry takes in its fully material, visual mode, as it exists in its moment, at a particular site. Paradoxically, such poetry is portable (‘something to be carried away’) precisely because it has not achieved, and does not hope to achieve, the immaterial, abstracted status of the infinitely transmissible text.”
“The recurrence of flowers in Elizabethan wall paintings may thus be less ‘naturalistic’ than it seems today: the flower is a flower of rhetoric, while a collection of flowers on a wall (a posy) is a figure for a text … While today these appear as inverted metaphors or conceits, painted flowers once expressed that fusion between figure and thing that Foucault takes to be characteristic of early modern thought.”
“It is hard to spend any amount of time looking at early modern books without noticing how many are presented through their titular metaphors as well as their prefatory rhetoric as forms of vegetable material: as gardens, and orchards, or posies, and forests, to name only some among the many variations on this long-standing ligature between plants and texts.”
“I begin this book by asking … why and how early modern people might have seen–and so, in the broadest sense, have read–texts differently when volumes appeared before them veiled in the verdant atmosphere projected by such metaphors.”
Feeling with Flowers: The human/flower connection.
For thou knowest whereof we be made; thou remembrest that we are but dust. That a man in his time is but as a grass and flourisheth as a flower of the field. For as soon as the wind goes over it, it is gone, and the place thereof knoweth it no more.
- The figure of this world I can compare,
- To garden plots, and such like pleasant places.
- The world breeds men of sundry shape and share,
- As herbs in gardens, grow of sundry graces:
- Some good, some bad, some amiable faces;
- Some foul, some gentle, some of froward mind,
- Subject like bloom to blast of euery wind.
- And as you see the flow’rs fresh of hue,
- That they prove not always the wholesomest,
- So fairest men are not always found true;
- But even as withered weeds fall from the rest,
- So flatterers fall naked from their nest.
- When truth hath tried their painting tising* tale, *enticing
- They lose their gloss, and all their jests seem stale.
- Yet some do present pleasure most esteem,
- Till beams of bravery wither all their wealth;
- And some again there be can rightly deem,
- Those herbs for best, which may maintain their health.
- Considering well, that age draws on by stealth,
- And when the fairest flow’r is shrunk and gone,
- A well-grown root will stand and shift for one.
- Then thus the restless life which men here lead,
- May be resembled to the tender plant.
- In spring it sprouts, as babes in cradle breed,
- Flourish in May, like youths that wisdom want,
- In Autumn ripes and rots, least store wax scant;
- In winter shrinks and shrouds from every blast,
- Like crooked age when lusty youth is past.
- And as the ground or grass whereon it grew,
- Was fat or lean, even so by it appears,
- If barren soil, why then it changeth hue,
- It fadeth fast, it flits to fumbling years.
- But if he gathered root amongst his feeres [fears?],
- And light on land that was well mucked indeed,
- Then stands it still, or leaves increase of seed.
- As for the rest, fall sundry ways (God wote)
- Some faint like froth at every little puff;
- Some smart by sword, like herbs that serve the pot,
- And some be weeded from the finer stuff;
- Some stand by props to maintain all their ruff:
- And thus under correction (be it told)
- Hath Gascoigne gathered in his Garden mold.
- Haud ictus sapio. [stricken, I learn nothing] 1
1. Mary Thomas Crane, points out that the tagline “curiously, defeats the purpose of this volume by admitting that he has not learned from his troubles. Although we might expect his posies to present conventional moral judgments on the experience recounted in the poems, they do not do so. Instead, they tend to express continued immersion in experience and an inability to gather definite lessons from it” (Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England [Princeton University Press, 1993], p. 178).
Like Pulter’s “View But This Tulip” and other poems, especially The Garden12, this sonnet uses the close observation of flowers and plants as a trigger for broader reflections on human life and longing. This sonnet also shares the “if then” structure of Pulter’s “View but this Tulip.” Here the teleology is secular: if we always find sweet tempered with sour in the botanical world, the speaker asks him or her self, then why should I mind the pain suffered in pursuit of the “endless pleasure” of love? Spenser presents a kind of logical proof of how one might think through an emotional puzzle, as Pulter will later do. Other Spenser sonnets can be found in “Pulter and the English Blazon” in Explorations.
- SWEET is the rose, but grows upon a briar;
- Sweet is the juniper, but sharp his bough;
- Sweet is the eglantine, but pricketh near;
- Sweet is the fir-bloom, but his branch rough.
- Sweet is the cypress, but his rind is tough;
- Sweet is the nut, but bitter is his pill;
- Sweet is the broom-flow’r, but yet sour enough;
- And sweet is moly, but his root is ill.
- So every sweet with sour is tempered, still
- That maketh it be coveted the more:
- For easy things, that may be got at will,
- Most sorts of men do set but little store.
- Why then should I account of little pain,
- That endless pleasure shall unto me gain?
The debate between Perdita and Polixenes in A Winter’s Tale.
- Perdita [To Polixenes]
- Sir, welcome.
- It is my father’s will I should take on me
- The hostess-ship o’ th’ 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 savor 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’ th’ season
- Are our carnations and streaked 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, savory, marjoram;
- The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ th’ 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.
- If as a flower doth spread and die,
- Thou wouldst extend me to some good,
- Before I were by frost’s extremity
- Nipped in the bud;
- The sweetness and the praise were thine;
- But the extension and the room,
- Which in thy garland I should fill, were mine
- At thy great doom.
- For as thou dost impart thy grace,
- The greater shall our glory be.
- The measure of our joys is in this place,
- The stuff with thee.
- Let me not languish then, and spend
- A life as barren to thy praise,
- As is the dust, to which that life doth tend,
- But with delays.
- All things are busy. Only I
- Neither bring honey with the bees,
- Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry
- To water these.
- I am no link of thy great chain,
- But all my company is a weed.
- Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain
- To my poore reed.
- How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean
- Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
- To which, besides their own demean,
- The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
- Grief melts away
- Like snow in May,
- As if there were no such cold thing.
- Who would have thought my shriveled heart
- Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
- Quite underground, as flowers depart
- To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
- Where they together
- All the hard weather,
- Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
- These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
- Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
- And up to heaven in an hour;
- Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
- We say amiss
- This or that is:
- Thy word is all, if we could spell.
- Oh that I once past changing were,
- Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
- Many a spring I shoot up fair,
- Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;
- Nor doth my flower
- Want a spring shower,
- My sins and I joining together.
- But while I grow in a straight line,
- Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,
- Thy anger comes, and I decline:
- What frost to that? what pole is not the zone
- Where all things burn,
- When thou dost turn,
- And the least frown of thine is shown?
- And now in age I bud again.
- After so many deaths I live and write;
- I once more smell the dew and rain,
- And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
- It cannot be
- That I am he
- On whom thy tempests fell all night.
- These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
- To make us see we are but flowers that glide,
- Which when we once can find and prove,
- Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;
- Who would be more,
- Swelling through store,
- Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
- The various colours, figures, powers of these
- Are their Creator’s growing witnesses;
- Their glories emblems are wherein we see
- How frail our human lives and beauties be:
- Even like those flowers which at the sunrise spread
- Their gaudy leaves, and are at evening dead,
- Yet while they in their native lustre shine,
- The eastern monarchs are not half so fine.
- In richer robes God clothes the dirty soil
- Than men can purchase by their sin and toil.
- Then rather fields than painted courts admire,
- Yet seeing both, think both must feed the fire:
- Only God’s works have roots and seeds, from whence
- They spring again in grace and excellence,
- But men’s have none: like hasty lightning they
- Flash out, and so forever pass away.