06/21/2019
Robert Harrison on willows and thresholds
In this episode, professor Harrison reflects on the symbolism of willows and their connection to thresholds. He includes discussions of Japanese willow stories, Algernon Blackwood, and poems by the pre-rafalite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti.
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[Music]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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It's a time of year when entitled opinions takes leave of the world
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and goes back down to the underland.
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That shadow realm where all is plutonium silence,
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whispers, and pensive intimation.
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I'd like to thank our producer, Vittoria, for the sterling job she's done to keep
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this show flourishing over the past three years.
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A lot of devoted work goes into tending this little garden of ours at his
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entitled opinions.
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We are all grateful to her devotion to this show.
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Unfortunately, this is not a goodbye since Vittoria will continue on as our
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producer. For at least another year, while she works on finishing her
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dissertation about Renaissance Rome, and it's turning into a really fascinating
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one indeed.
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One of the rituals of entitled opinions is that at seasons and your hosts
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sometimes share some parting thoughts with you.
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So here I am with Vittoria in Studio B of KZSU on a quiet day after
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commencement with the summer diaspora already underway
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to reflect on a topic that has been tugging at me of late
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don't ask me why. Sometimes thinking has a way of being called on for no
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discernible reason.
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The topic friends is, well, willows.
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That's right, willows as in weeping willows, river willows, and willow shrubs.
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I'm trying to figure out what they're doing there at the edges of my
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consciousness, swaying, beckoning, summoning.
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Why do they lure at me from the fringes of this forest of symbols we walk
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through in life?
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We exchange gazes across our interspecies divide,
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yet I'm wondering what they see in me or what I see in them.
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For the record, I don't have any sentimental or personal connection to willows.
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I've never paid special attention to them.
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Yet a few weeks ago a friend of mine, who was also a friend of this show,
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sent me a picture of an old willow tree in her neighborhood,
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whose trunk had recently cracked apart, sending its huge crown down to the ground,
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and for some reason, that image unsettled me
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and struck me as ominous somehow.
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What would the earth lose if it lost its willows?
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That's a question one should ask of any terrestrial entity in one's horizon
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of perception. What would be lost, symbolically speaking,
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if it's kind, disappeared?
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For the purposes of this show, I'm going to call myself a
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"tallurian symbolist." That's right, a "tallurian symbolist" or "symbologist"
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who believes that every natural phenomenon in this genre or kind is symbolical.
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That is to say, is a visible manifestation of the invisible inner life of the planet.
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When I say planet, I'm using a makeshift word for this unlikely and in some respects
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alien place where we find ourselves, where we find ourselves thrown for a loss,
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as it were, a place whose boundaries, whose nature, whose cosmic reaches remain largely unknown,
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may be even unknowable. What good they said of the symbolic in general
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applies to my vision of "tallurianism," I quote, "That is true symbolism
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in which the particular represents the universal, not as a dream or a shadow,
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but as a living, immediate revelation of the inscrutable."
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There you have it. That is the crucial question. What sort of living,
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immediate revelation of the inscrutable is lost when a type disappears from the earth?
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In his poem, "Destiny of Nations," Col. Ridge wrote, "All that meets the bodily sense,
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I deem symbolical one mighty alphabet to infant minds."
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Every earthly species or landscape or mineral or body of water,
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every type of wind or cloud formation is a letter of some mighty alphabet from which the
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script of our natural world is composed. When letters start to disappear, so do the words they
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render legible. Legibility is the lifeblood of our being on this earth. It's the way we have
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of domesticating our terror. Without legibility, there is no inscrutability, only blindness and
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the unestience. And that way lies oblivion. What living, immediate revelation of the inscrutable
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vanishes when the world loses its fireflies, for example? Millions, if not billions of people around
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the globe, are old enough to remember that when they were children, there were once fireflies.
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Their children, however, will know of these creatures only through images on their computers,
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which means they will never really know them at all, will never know them symbolically, that is,
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as manifestations of the planet's mysterious powers of animation.
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Back in 1975, Pierpau La Pazolini wrote that Italy had lost its fireflies, and along with them,
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it had lost the promise of spiritual regeneration. And Pazolini was right about the flies, I mean.
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I haven't seen a firefly in Italy for decades, nor in other places known to me that used to have them.
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Countless regions, the world over, lost their fireflies around the same time as Italy did.
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Fireflies are not completely gone from the earth to be sure they're not completely gone from
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Italy, I'm supposing, but they definitely are on their way out. On warm summer nights,
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they no longer light up so many of the marshes, fields, courtyards, and woodlands,
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they once graced all over the planet. And we know the causes, loss of habitat through human development
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and light pollution, especially the latter. Human civilization has launched an all-out war on darkness.
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In most inhabited places on earth now, the nights are simply not dark enough for fireflies to do their
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thing, namely to seek out mates through their delicate synchronized patterns of communication.
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Light from homes, cars, stores outdoor illumination, from cities and cell phones,
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wrech havoc on the flash dances of fireflies, more wondrous in their display than the stars overhead,
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and what happens? What happens to love when its nocturnal depths get blanched out?
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What do we lose when bioluminescence no longer reveals to us the primordial sources of darkness?
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How much of the human soul can survive the eclipse of darkness? Precious little, I would say.
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Do I digress somewhat perhaps? I'm not here to propose an ode to dejection or lament the fate of
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fireflies, but to reflect on willows, and more precisely to ask why I associate willows with margins
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as well as thresholds. For that is where I find them mostly, at the limit-traffic edges of the
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world clearing. It's not only in my mind that willows symbolize a boundary or threshold or portal
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to other worlds and other dimensions of being. During the Qing Ming festival in China, which goes
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back some 3,000 years, people place willow branches on gates and front doors, hence on thresholds,
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to ward off the souls of the dead, whom the Lord of the underworld allows to return to earth
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at that time of year. Those same branches are used to sweep the tombs in cemeteries, where willows
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abound. Taoist priestesses, I'm told you small carvings made of willow wood to communicate with the
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dead. The images set across to the netherworld so that the spirits may enter it and send messages
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back to the living upon its return. In Japan, as in many western cultures, willows are associated with
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ghosts, who often appear where willows grow. In fact, a few days ago, I read a Japanese short story
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called Green Willow, quite interesting. A young samurai is sent on a mission by his Lord. After days
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of traveling on horseback in gale winds and rainstorms, exhausted, he ends up losing his way among
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un-peopleed bogs and marshes. In, I quote, "a night as black as the night of yomi, where lost souls,
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wander and cry." Suddenly, the sky clears up and the moon shines brightly, as if he had crossed
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some invisible threshold. A top of hill, he sees a thatched cottage with three green weeping willows
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in front of it. He approaches, knocks on the door, and requests food and lodging from a humble,
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yet kind, elderly woman and her husband. As he's about to enter the house, their young daughter
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appears behind him. I quote, "her garments were blown about and her long loose hair streamed out
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upon the wind. The samurai wondered how she had come there, and knew well that she was the fairest
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maiden he had ever seen. Her name, it turns out, is green willow. The samurai, whose name is
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Tomodata, leaves the next morning thinking only of green willow as he makes his way through the
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landscape. He spends the night in an abandoned shrine, and when he wakes up the next dawn and
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heads for a stream to wash up," I quote, "he was stopped upon the shrine's threshold.
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Their lay green willow, prone upon the ground. He gathers her up and off they go.
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For the next three years they lived together in an unknown city, then one day in a garden under
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the rising moon at a twilight hour, green willow begins to shake and shiver. She tells her
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lover that they have cut down her tree and asked him to say a prayer for. Then she dies,
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slipping from the samurai's arms to his feet, where he finds only her silken garments and straw
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scarlet thronged sandals. Years later, Tomodata, who has since become a monk,
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finds himself on the lonely moor where he had first met green willow in her family,
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and there he sees the stumps of three willow trees that had long since been cut down.
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In some versions, the story ends with Tomodata noticing that a chute grows from the smallest trunk.
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He decides to spend the rest of his days in that place, tending the chute until it grows into a
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sapling. One night he hears a sound of the wind and the trees whispering, "Your green willow is here
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beside you." He lays down beside the tree and soon thereafter he dies. In the place where his bones lie,
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a new chute sprouts, the two trees grow side by side, their roots and branches entwined.
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[Music]
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Green willow is more than a ghost story, I'd say, just as his family characters are more than
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personifications, merely. Several times in the story, our samurai crosses a threshold
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between the living and the dead, between the real and the trans real, and most importantly,
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between the human and the plant. At the core of this story, I see symbolic correspondence at work
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as Tomodata enters the realm of interspecies relations of anthrop
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plant conjugation as it were. If the symbol seeks to restore a lost unity as the romantics and symbolists believed,
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then the willows here symbolize of vimal erotics of the human and the arboreal, a preformal and
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preverbal kinship that is beyond words and even beyond concepts. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas tells us
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just how difficult it is to declare love across a species divide. The force that through the green
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fuse drives the flower drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.
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And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose my youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
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That is the kind of impossible unity that the Tolerian symbol yearns for.
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Such unity is of course impossible only as long as matter remains differentiated into form.
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As soon as a human body returns to the soil in death, the sort of unity and vision at the end of
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green willow becomes an everyday biological fact. Once dead, our earthly matter, as words worth put it,
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is rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.
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The late 19th century American writer Patrick Hearn includes an English version of green willow in
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his collection, "Quaidan." Patrick Hearn went to Japan, fell in love with the country and lived
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there for the rest of his life. When he first arrived, he wrote, "Why should trees be so lovely in
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Japan? Is it that trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the gods,
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that they have acquired souls and strive to show their gratitude by making themselves more
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beautiful for man's sake?" The question makes perfect sense in Shinto, the original religion of Japan,
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where clouds, mountains, rocks, ponds, trees, and animals all possess commie power or spirit,
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allowing them to respond and correspond to one another as well as with us Tolerian symbolists.
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I'm not sure why I see in willows a symbol of limits and thresholds, maybe their long,
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loose hanging branches that sway in the wind, given impression of a curtain, a drapery,
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or even a shroud, maybe it's the way they thrive along riverbanks, creating an elemental,
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riparian barrier or fringe. When it comes to willows as harbingers of thresholds,
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we have much to learn from the early 20th century British writer and outdoorsman Algernon Blackwood.
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In a short essay published in 1910 called The Psychology of Places, Blackwood invokes a Canadian
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backwoodsman who declared, "Never pitch your camp on the edge of anything, put the tent in the
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wood or out of it but never on the borderland between the two, for the line where two sets of forces
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meet, the forces of the wood and the forces of the open is a critical threshold that invites possible
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disaster." Some three years earlier, Blackwood wrote a masterpiece of a story about thresholds
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called The Willows. The story was based on his experience of journeying in a small canoe with a
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friend of his, from the headwaters of the Dan New River in Germany to its mouth in Romania.
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It was, by the way, Lovecraft's favorite horror story. Lovecraft wrote of it that,
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"Here art and restraint, in narrative, reach their very highest development, and an impression
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of lasting poignancy is produced without a single-strained passage or a single false note."
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I have to agree, Blackwoods The Willows is beyond extolment.
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In it, the narrator describes a wild stretch of the Dan Newb halfway between its source and its
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estuary in present-day hungry. The river is in summer flood and the narrator and his Swedish
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companion, who is referred to only as the Swede, come to a region of singular loneliness and
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desolation, where ephemeral willow-covered islands grow and shrink overnight amid the rapids.
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The two of them set camp on a wind-swept island full of willows less than an acre in size.
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In the late afternoon, the narrator goes to the edge of the island facing west and feels the first
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tremor of dread, a dread that will turn to horror after the two days that they are stuck on that island.
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The wind gusts with gale force, the river is surging, the narrator says,
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"I stood there for several minutes watching the impetuous crimson flood,
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bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it
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bodily away, and then swirling by and two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to
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shake with the shock and rush while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured
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over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself had actually moved.
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Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me. It was like looking up
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the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.
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Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion,
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and as I gazed long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me.
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Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, their crept, un-bidden, and unexplained,
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a curious feeling of disquietude almost of alarm.
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A rising river perhaps always suggests something of the ominous.
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Many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning.
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This resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my
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uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt.
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Nor had it directly to do with the power of the driving wind, this shouting hurricane that might
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almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the
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landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it,
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and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement.
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Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I
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experienced that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly,
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though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance
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before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge Gohm River had something to do
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with it too. A vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental
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forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here indeed,
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they were giganticly at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.
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But my emotion so far as I could understand it seemed to attach itself more particularly to the
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willow bushes. To these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there,
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swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it,
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standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.
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And apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my my legs,
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attacking the mind incidiously, somehow by reason of their vast numbers,
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and contriving in some way or other to represent the imagination, a new and mighty power,
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a power more over, not altogether friendly to us.
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As the two friends are collecting firewood that evening, they see what they think is a dead
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human body turning over and over in the river, eyes gleaming yellow. It takes a dive and they conclude
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that it was only an otter. Then they see a boat streaming on the river with a man standing upright,
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just stickulating at them and making a sign of the cross, a surreal apparition in that desolate place.
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Shortly after sunset, the narrator wanders to the shore, and again, he undergoes
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a feeling of presence in the willows. I felt some essence emanated from this multitude of willows
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that be seached the heart, a sense of awe awakened true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror.
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There are sari ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepen,
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moving furiously, yet softly in the wind, woken me the unwelcome suggestion that we had
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trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where
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we were not wanted, or invited to remain, where we ran grave risks perhaps. During the night,
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under moonlight, the narrator can't sleep, and he returns to the banks in order to, as he says,
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face and probe to the bottom, the vague feeling in me.
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I gazed across the waste of wild waters. I watched the whispering willows. I heard the ceaseless
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beating of the tireless wind, and one in all each in its own way stirred in me this sensation
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of a strange distress. But the willows especially, for ever they went on chattering and talking
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among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing, but what it was they made so
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much to do about, belong to the secret life of the great plane they inhabited. They made me
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think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps all
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discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched the moving bizzly together, oddly
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shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind.
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They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched by some incalculable method
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by own keen sense of the horrible. There they stood in the moonlight, like a vast army surrounding
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our camp, shaking their innumerable silver spears to finally ready for an all-out attack.
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It seemed that we had approached the frontiers of some unknown world, a spot held by dwellers in some
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outer space, a sort of peephole, once they could spy upon the earth themselves unseen,
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a point where the veil between had worn thin.
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I won't summarize the whole story, which I encourage you all to read for yourselves.
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Suffice it to say that the next day when the wind dies down,
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an eerie, unearthly sound can be heard on and around and above the island,
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which meanwhile has shrunk in size overnight. The narrator describes it as "something like the
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humming of a distant gong." The Swede, a pragmatic no-nonsense type of person, is unnerved
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| 00:26:38.720 |
enough to declare. I don't think a phonograph would show any record of it. The sound doesn't come
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| 00:26:45.040 |
by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another manner altogether and seem to be within me,
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which is exactly how a fourth-dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard.
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This transacoustical humming emanates both from within the human psyche and without.
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The Swede tells the narrator, "I could have sworn it was not outside at all, but within myself."
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Yet he also declares, "It comes off the whole swamp. It comes from everywhere at once,
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sometimes overhead, sometimes under the water." The Swede is probably right. The human psyche
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| 00:27:29.120 |
does not end where the external world begins, each reverberates within the other.
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| 00:27:35.120 |
But the psyche hears, or what it is capable of hearing, encompasses a great deal more than the
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sonic vibrations that reach the cuckclya of the human ear and register on our recording devices.
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The willows in Blackwood's story mark a point of intersection between the world as we know it,
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and what the Swede calls the fourth dimension. The narrator calls it a beyond region.
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"Never before or since have I been so attacked by the indescribable suggestions of a beyond region,
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of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human."
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He goes on to say that the lonely island was, quote, "on the frontier of another world,
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a world teneted by swillows only and the souls of willows."
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This beyond region I submit is not extraterrestrial per se, but is part of the occult inner life of the
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planet. We humans inhabit only a thin layer, only a narrowly hedged in experiential field of the
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place we find ourselves in, the place we find ourselves lost in. We are attuned to only one,
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or at most a few of the planet's many frequencies, most of which are indeed closed off to us.
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There exists beyond regions all around us which we remain wholly unaware of, and where we indeed are
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not welcome. Willows play an important role along river banks. Their deep tenacious roots
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| 00:29:23.760 |
protect the soil from the relentless flow of water. In Blackwood's story, the willows guard against
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the erosion of boundaries between dimensions, between one region and another, between one order of
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reality and another. If such boundaries did not exist, we would have no need of symbols,
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which seek to cross them as if by magic. The way those Taoist carvings of willow would,
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cross into the netherworld and return with messages inside of them.
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More on willows and the sorrows of separation coming up.
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The angelic Julie Cruz, that ghostly voice, calls us away from the wilds of the Danube into the
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twilight grove of willow wood. Willow wood is the title of a sonnet sequence by the pre-Raphialite
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painter and poet Dante Gabriela Rosetti. Composed in 1868, the four willow wood sonnets formed the
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core of Rosetti's finest poetry collection called the House of Life. They were written six
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years after the death of Lizzie Siddall, his wife, his muse, his Beatrice figure who modeled for some
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of Rosetti's most famous and gorgeous paintings including Bayata Bayatics. An excellent pain for
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herself, Lizzie died at the age of 32, most likely from her addiction to Loudenham, which she relied on
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heavily in the last month or two of her life when she suspected that Rosetti had fallen under the
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spell of Jane Morris, another beautiful model, and the wife of Rosetti's friend and fellow
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pre-Raphialite William Morris. Lizzie left behind several sketches of herself in Rosetti looking into
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water, pools and fountains, and he wrote numerous poems using that as an image. I'll be reading
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Willow wood which has a central image of two lovers whose images are reflected in the water.
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The sequence has a lot to do with Rosetti's grief as well as guilt over the death of his wife a few
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years earlier. So first let me say something about Rosetti's grief in the aftermath of Lizzie's death.
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In particular, Rosetti sought repeatedly to communicate with her through spiritualism.
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Spiritualism was big business in England at the time, and Rosetti had become familiar with some of
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the best-known mediums including Anna Mary Howett. There's a distinctly spiritualistic element at
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work in the willows on it's I'm going to read, which depict a trance-like state as the poet seeks
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contact with his lost or dead lover. The sonnets stage a drama that unfolds in a willow grove
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around a well, called it a pond, told in first-person narrative the three main characters in the
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drama are the poet or narrator, the lost love or at least his vision of a lost love, and love personified.
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Rosetti borrows the personified figure of love from Dante's Vithanwova, a book he was very fond of
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and which he translated into English. Quite beautifully I might add, a book that is similarly
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centered on the narrator's pining for a lost love, Beatrice herself, who had died when Dante wrote
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the Vithanwova. The first sonnet of Willowwood opens with the poet sitting with love by a wood-side well.
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The well becomes the sight of the poet's encounter with his lost love. As I read the poem aloud,
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you'll see how when love touches his lute, the poet recalls the voice of his lost love and begins to
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weep. His tears fall into the well and the rippling of the water creates a vision. The vision of his
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lost love rises to meet him and the poet leans down to touch his lips to hers on the surface of
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the water. I sat with love upon a wood-side well leaning across the water, I and he, nor ever did he
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speak nor looked at me, but touched his lute wherein was audible the certain secret thing he had to
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tell. Only our mirrored eyes met silently in the low wave, and that sound came to be the passion
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at voice I knew, and my tears fell. And at their fall his eyes beneath grew hers, and with his foot
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and with his wing feathers he swept the spring that watered my heart's droughth. Then the dark ripples
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spread to waving hair, and as I stooped her own lips rising there, bubbled with brimming kisses at
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my mouth. The sonnet describes two trans-like visions, first of love whose eyes he meets in the
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water below, and second of the lost love whose image merges with love's reflected eyes in the
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water. Both visions as they mingle suggests that we are at a threshold here between the physical
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and the spiritual domains, and that these two domains touch one another as the poet leans down and
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lays his lips on his lost love's image in the water. The willow trees, though never mentioned
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explicitly, haunt the scene lateingly, or let's say immigestically, for example when the poet
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leans across the water and weeps. Love sweeps the surface of the water with his wing feathers,
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the way the swaying branched tips of the overhanging crown of a willow tree might do. Then there's that
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waving hair the poet sees in the water suggesting that the willow has enabled this encounter
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across the life and death divide. Earlier I mentioned that in Japan ghosts often appear where willows
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grow. This is exactly what happens in the second sonnet of willow wood, which opens with the words
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and now love sang. We don't hear what love sang until the next sonnet, but here the poet describes
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how the song conjured up a host of ghosts, one by every tree. These ghosts are multiplied versions
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of eye and she, poet and lover, called forth from the nether world by the song as well as the water
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kiss. And now love sang, but his was such a song so meshed with half remembrance, hard to free,
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as souls disused in death's sterility, may sing when the new birthday terries long.
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And I was made aware of a dumb throng that stood aloof, one form by every tree,
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all mournful forms, for each was eye or she, the shades of those are days that had no tongue.
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They looked on us and knew us and were known, while fast together, alive from the abyss,
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| 00:39:35.440 |
clung the soul-run, implacable, close kiss, and pity of self through all made broken moan,
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which said, for once, for once, for once alone, and still love sang, and what he sang was this.
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So before we hear what love sings, let me mention here that Rosetti believed or at least wanted
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to believe in reincarnation. This is important because these ghosts appear here in a kind of
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suspended limbo state, not quite dead and not yet re-embodied, disused in death's sterility,
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as the poet says, while the new birthday terries long, I'm assuming that the new birthday refers
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to reincarnation, although it may refer to the general resurrection at the end of time,
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in any case, these mournful forms emerge from the wood and in them the poet recognizes his and his
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dead lovers' former selves, the shades of those are days that had no tongue. Be they memories or
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shadows of past selves, these shades appear in the same moment as the kiss upon the water,
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and they moan and longing for a physical reunion, for once, for once alone.
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So what love actually sings at that moment, we hear in the third sonnet,
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O ye, all ye that walk in willow wood, that walk with hollow faces burning white,
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What fathom depth of soul-struck widowhood, what long, what longer hours, one life-long night,
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| 00:41:25.280 |
air ye again, who so in vain have wooed your last hope lost, who so in vain invite your lips to that
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they're unforgotten food, air ye, air ye again shall see the light.
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Alas, the bitter banks in willow wood, with tear spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red,
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Alas, if ever such a pillow could steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead,
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better all life forget her than this thing that willow wood should hold her wandering.
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The willow wood holds those wandering souls, be they living or dead who have not or cannot surrender
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their emotional and libidinal attachments to the loved ones whom death has rendered untenable
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or inaccessible. This is the psychic state of the undead, after all.
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Grief itself is such a state. Love song and sonnet three contains an austere message for the undead.
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It is fruitless to pine for lost love. Such longing only brings more pain,
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| 00:42:44.640 |
the dead again are untenable, they cannot be held. Relations between the living and the dead cannot
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| 00:42:52.640 |
be of the order of life. They require a transfiguration of the bonds that once united and now divide
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the loved ones. I've already remarked that willows are preservational that they're often found on
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| 00:43:10.000 |
river banks where their deep roots prevent soil erosion. The well in Rosetti's poem gestures to
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| 00:43:18.080 |
the willows material as well as spiritual association with water. I've also remarked that in many
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| 00:43:25.200 |
world cultures willows figure as guardians that they're frequently planted around cemeteries to keep
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spirits on their side of the divide. Such apartheid is relevant to sonnet number two where the shades come
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| 00:43:39.920 |
forth, each one next to a tree, yet notice how they keep their distance and do not approach the
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action of the scene as if held in place by the willow wood itself. Let me point out something else
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that the willow is also an ancient medicinal plant. The bark and leaves are rich in
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| 00:44:02.800 |
salison, a natural glucoside akin to the active ingredient in aspirin. Sonnet number three mentions
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| 00:44:10.880 |
tear spurge wan with bloodwort burning red. Spurge is a toxic invasive plant that consumes and takes
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| 00:44:19.680 |
over whatever it takes root and bloodwort was used medicinally to induce vomiting.
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These plants and their symbolic guys further love's message about the bitter nature of longing for
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the impossible. When love's song laments that one cannot steep deep the soul in sleep till she
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| 00:44:42.080 |
were dead, it's hard not to think of lizzy siddall who steeped herself in sleep with loddenum
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and then died from it. The closing lines of the third sonnet warn the poet that he cannot be
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reunited with his lost love, at least not in this intermediate willow region of mournful yearning,
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where those in soul struck widowhood have as he puts it hollow faces burning bright,
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| 00:45:10.240 |
and vainly try to apply those lips to their un-forgotten food, which is a direct reference
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| 00:45:18.960 |
to the poet's action of kissing the vision in the well. The fourth sonnet of the sequence reads
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as follows, "So sang he, and as meeting rows and rows together cling through the winds well away,
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| 00:45:34.480 |
nor change at once, yet near the end of day the leaves drop loosened where the heart
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| 00:45:40.480 |
stained glows, so when the song died did the kiss unclothes, and her face fell back to drowned,
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| 00:45:48.960 |
and it was as gray as its gray eyes, and if it ever may meet mine again, I know not if love knows.
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| 00:45:58.240 |
Only I know that I learned low and drank a long drought from the water where she sank,
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| 00:46:05.840 |
her breath and all her tears, and all her soul, and as I leaned, I know I felt love's face pressed
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on my neck with moan of pity and grace till both our heads were in his oriel."
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| 00:46:19.920 |
I'm not sure what to make of the last sonnet, so I'll leave it uncommented.
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| 00:46:27.120 |
Instead, by way of conclusion, I'm going to leave you who have made it this far into my monologue,
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| 00:46:34.640 |
with two poems by Christina Dante Rosetti. She was Dante Gabriela Rosetti's sister and was in many ways
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| 00:46:43.120 |
a better poet than him. The first poem is called an echo of Willow Wood. Here, Christina echoes
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| 00:46:50.880 |
very audibly her brother's Willow Wood sonnets, as well as love's message that mournful
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| 00:46:57.200 |
yearning is indeed bitter. An echo from Willow Wood, its epigraph is O.E. all ye that walk in Willow
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| 00:47:06.880 |
Wood, and we know who those are. They're those undead ghosts of departed souls, as well as the
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| 00:47:16.880 |
living soul of the person who is wrapped up and trapped in a kind of impossible grief and yearning.
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| 00:47:25.200 |
Two gaze into a pool he gazed and she, not hand in hand yet heart in heart, I think, pale and reluctant
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| 00:47:36.720 |
on the water's brink as on the brink of parting which must be. Each eye, the others aspect,
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| 00:47:44.640 |
she and he, each felt one hungering heart leap up and sink. Each tasted bitterness, which both
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| 00:47:53.120 |
must drink there on the brink of life's dividing sea. Lilies upon the surface deep below,
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| 00:48:01.600 |
two wisful faces craving each for each, resolute and reluctant without speech.
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| 00:48:08.720 |
A sudden ripple made the faces flow, one moment joined to vanish out of reach. So those hearts
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| 00:48:17.920 |
joined and ah, were parted so. So flow below, they all rhyme with Willow, and I still see the
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| 00:48:30.880 |
willows there on the edge at the threshold beckoning and denying, as cholourian symbols do.
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| 00:48:38.160 |
If there's not something unattainable or out of reach in the symbol, it's not a real symbol,
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| 00:48:46.640 |
It's no doubt true or at least empirically correct, between a shade and a living person,
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| 00:48:53.200 |
there exists a divide that cannot be crossed. Yet it's also true that we humans can't help but
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| 00:49:00.080 |
desire to reach the other side of things, that thresholds, when we encounter them, stir in us
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| 00:49:07.600 |
and urge to cross them. Christina Rosetti may have understood love's message and her brother's
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| 00:49:14.240 |
sonnet, and she certainly echoed it in her own poem Echo from Willowwood. Yet her most beautiful poem,
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| 00:49:22.240 |
at least in my opinion it's her most beautiful poem, shows how the human heart cannot be deterred
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| 00:49:29.360 |
from loving beyond the threshold, cannot be swayed from approaching the willows curtain and drawing it
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| 00:49:36.800 |
aside. The poem I have in mind is called Echo, itself an echo of her own echo from Willowwood.
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| 00:49:44.640 |
Here too the title of the poem, as well as its concluding rhyme words, Echo, the wondrous word
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| 00:49:53.440 |
Willow. Come to me in the silence of the night, come in the speaking silence of a dream,
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| 00:50:01.920 |
come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright as sunlight on a stream,
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| 00:50:07.520 |
come back in tears, oh memory, hope, love of finished years.
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| 00:50:13.520 |
Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, whose awakening should have been in paradise,
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| 00:50:21.840 |
where souls brimful of love abide and meet, where thirsting longing eyes watch the slow door,
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| 00:50:31.120 |
that opening, letting in, let's out no more. Yet come to me in dreams that I may live my very life again,
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| 00:50:41.200 |
though cold and death, come back to me in dreams that I may give pulse for pulse, breath for breath.
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| 00:50:49.280 |
Speak low, lean low, as long ago my love, how long ago.
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| 00:50:59.120 |
This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, thanks for listening.
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