insnared with flowers

I am, as some of you may have noticed, a few days behind on poems. I often hit a fatigue point in late April, and this year I also have the post-vacation blues; it's been hard to concentrate on much this week. But it's the weekend, the weather is glorious, and it's time to catch up on poetry! I'm going to post a few separate poems today, starting with one for April 22, which was Earth Day. This poem is also a little bit for my mood today—I took a long walk through the park this morning and saw many flowers and flowering trees—because I get hit with the metaphysicals in spring and start thinking about tree sex. And it's been a few years since I posted anything by my bro Andrew Marvell.

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays;
And their uncessant labours see
Crowned from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow vergèd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flow’rs and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous 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! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passions' heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that 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.

What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two Paradises ’twere in one
To live in Paradise alone.

How well the skillful gard’ner drew
Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flow’rs!

—Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), "The Garden," around 1668 or earlier. First published in print in 1681. Traditionally, this poem is seen as a product of Marvell's "period of retirement" from 1650-1652 at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, where he wrote "Upon Appleton House," as well as other poems in which characters walk around in gardens and have metaphysical sex with trees. But according to the notes in my edition of Marvell, a strong case has been made to date the poem during the Restoration because of the influence of Katherine Philips, which I personally like as an argument because Philips was pretty baller. My favorite piece of my own marginalia on this poem is not "(tree sex)" written under the line about the nectarine and the curious peach, but the note at the very end of the poem where I wrote, somewhat inexplicably, "well, but, BEES," underlined twice.