Wede Away
 

Wede Away
(For JMA)


Wisteria soft against a deeper blue,
and hyacinth, youth's talisman: those bright
creations filled my wakening world with light.
I miss the flowers of spring and all things new.

Fulfilment followed promise to a time
rich with the scents and ripeness spring foretold-
honeysuckle, poppy, marigold.
I miss the flowers of summer in its prime.

Sparse as the season fades towards December,
pale soldier roses, rearguard in retreat,
still blossom as they face an old defeat,
while asters linger late into November
to hurl their small defiance at the fall.
-I'll miss the flowers of autumn most of all.


Comments:
With the possible exception of orchids, roses seem to me the least military of all flowers. The poem might be more effective with only one flower to represent each season.

Wede Away

For a better understanding of the term “Wede Away” I invite you to link here:

http://www.rampantscotland.com/songs/blsongs_forest.htm

and here:

http://www.video4viet.com/watchvideo...20The%20Forest


“Wede Away” means “withered away” in Scots dialect. It is a reference to “The Flowers of the Forest,” a lament the Scots often play at the funerals of those who died early. Played on the bagpipes, it is the official lament of the Canadian Army, a tune only too frequently played in recent years since Operation Enduring Freedom began. Being a Canadian by choice, as well as a proud American by birth, and the cousin of a young man killed in Viet Nam, I read this poem (“pale soldier roses, rearguard in retreat”) as one might expect, as a sorrowful funeral dirge but also as a powerful anti-war hymn, where flags and flowers are poor comfort for those who live on.

I found that each of the flowers that are named in the poem have been assigned contradictory symbolism, depending on the source, both positive and negative, and I believe they were chosen with great care. For example, wisteria (also the first word in the poem) is a symbol both of youth and longevity as well as of memory and honor. Hyacinths are known as emblems of sports and youth, but also refer to sorrow and resignation. Poppies can mean wealth, pleasure and success, as well as eternal sleep, rest, and death. The honeysuckle, though, has one meaning only: devoted fraternal affection and love.

But it is the soldier rose that had me perplexed. As Mr. Cassity says, roses are not usual military symbols. And my symbolism dictionary contains dozens of types of roses, but no reference to the soldier rose. Finally, Wikipedia came through, with a description of the hibiscus militaris, also known as the soldier rose. The article states “These flowers require exposure to sunlight to open up properly, and then last only a single day.” Then, the plant reseeds itself and, though its stalk dies down in the winter, it grows back in the spring. This is the most significant flower of all those named in the poem.

“Wede Away” cannot leave the reader, of any age, indifferent. I chose this sonnet because it is true to the spirit of the sonnet in so many ways, not least of which is how it takes a very personal experience and transforms it into what Rossetti called “a moment’s monument, --Memorial from the Soul’s eternity/To one dead deathless hour”.

I liked this poem for its mastery of the form, but I didn't have a clue what it meant, was too stupid, too lazy, to figure it out. Thank you Cathy for your close, close reading. My only reservation is the poem's difficulty. If it defeats me, it will defeat most readers. But for those who connect with it and find every flower in its place, it must be instantly devastating. Non dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

An extremely attractive sonnet, and beautifully written. I'm a sucker for flower poems and this is very distinctive.

while asters linger late into November
to hurl their small defiance at the fall.

These two lines are magnificent. A brilliant concept is presented with melodious "Ls" and ended with soft-spoken "Fs".

I recognize the sonnet, but even if I didn’t I think I would be able to identify the poet. In my opinion, there aren’t many people writing today whose meter is as beautiful as this poet’s. The meter is so quiet and lovely and has such fine pacing. I also think the rhymes meld well with the meter. It’s a beautiful sonnet, and I liked coming out of it with an armful of flowers and not just a few.

I didn't recognize the sonnet, but I knew for sure who wrote it.

I wasn't enthralled by this one - I'm not a flower person to begin with, and I don't believe that poems should require googling to be fully appreciated - there was too much that depended on specialized knowledge.

On the other hand, there's some gutsy and admirable stuff going on with the sonics that works very well with the voice and content of the poem The meter is very loose, and difficult to pin down because of ellisions, substitutions and pronunciation variants, but there seems to be a wonderful bouquet of pentamteter and some hex, mixed with headless or trochaic lines - and it's always interesting and never clangs. Good music.

The repeats on L4, L8 and L14 were also kind of gutsy for a sonnet - throwing away two lines, in effect, to get an effect - but I think the writer got away with it. There's a mini-villanelle feeling here. Also - and this doesn't work for me - a reminder of Thomas's I See the Boys of Summer.

Without Catherine's explication, I too was mostly lost, but I was able to appreciate how the rhythmn carried the argument of the poem, masterfully so.

The title grabs me right away because, as a boy, I learned the song and always thought it beautiful. The dedication also catches my eye and I expect to be moved.

For me, it doesn't live up to that initial promise. The flower names are clever and I think the soldier rose is a fine stroke. But, finely-written as it is, the garden scene can't help being a let-down after the invocation of the haunting melody and sadness of the song. You just can't pull off a mood-switch from pipers playing over 10,000 dead boyfriends, husbands, and fathers on the moors of Flodden to horticulture.

I'm also not sure about the progression. I associate the various seasons with generations of dead soldiers: spring, the young ones, summer, the ones of intermediate age, and autumn, the older ones. So the last line seems to say that the loss of the old soldiers is sadder than the loss of the young ones, and that doesn't ring true for me.

John

This is a competently written sonnet with delightful sonics, producing an aura bright as the cornucopia of flowers referenced. The only drawback is the amount of specialist knowledge about flowers referenced it takes to fully understand the poem, especially the pivotal soldier roses. Thus, limiting the number of flowers for a better focus may not be a bad thing. And, great explication, Cathy!

Cheers,
...Alex

There's some precedent for it.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone

In Flanders Fields

"Then they stood there, in that flowered meadow
by the Scamander, an immense array,
as numerous as leaves and flowers in springtime."

For me, the title presents the greatest difficulty because I don't catch the allusion and, without it, "wede" doesn't convey much. I didn't have any trouble with "soldier roses" because I assumed it meant the last outposts of roses, soldiering on into the bad weather. If something else was intended, I didn't catch it. I did not assume any other military references in the poem, because for me the flowers seemed to represent the seasons of life--youth, prime, late middle age, and a suggestion that old age is coming soon. I did balk a bit at the association of marigolds and poppies with "scents and ripeness." Their colors are bright, but their scents are unpleasant or nonexistent (at least, that is how they seem to me). Though the progression of seasons becomes relatively predictable, I like the ending very much.

Susan

I'm puzzled that anyone would think the flower lore so esoteric here. Oh sure, there is a Language of Flowers (Victorian and otherwise) that can be quite arcanely detailed, but one needn't delve that deeply into such matters to have a visceral reaction to the bouquets here. Even if one is so divorced from the garden as not to know which flowers bloom in which season the poem comes right out and tells you. Have Google & Wiki killed poetic imagination & association entirely? Surely that language of Flowers at its most refined and complex begins in natural archetype and is accessible to all.

As for the soldier rose reference, the blood red of the classic rose seems to provide an association, even without a host of literary illusions. Wound leaps pretty quickly to my imagination when the words soldier and rose touch.

As for precedents, as Rose points out, there are many. For instance the very famous French poem by Louis Aragon, The Lilacs And The Roses in which springtime's lilacs are the flowers thrown at the soldiers marching off in hope to war, whereas roses are what greet them in retreat. As translated by Louis MacNeice, it ends thus:

Bouquets of the first day, lilacs, Flanders lilacs,
Soft cheeks of shadow rouged by death--and you,
Bouquets of the retreat, delicate roses, tinted
Like far off conflagrations: roses of Anjou.

The sonnet itself is thus classic. Perhaps too much so for my taste, but it certainly maintains its own stately progress without striking a false note. Like the Aragon poem which struck an enduring chord with the French public at the time it was written, I can feel how strongly this one, in a certain context, could connect with a collective soul. The Aragon is quite site specific with its proper nouns--more so than this, which as Susan comments need not be tied to anything more particular than everyman's progression from youth to death. What it thus gains in philosophical detachment, it might lose in emotional immediacy. Although the one truly arcane reference, the wede, may tip the scale back for those who recognize it instantly. In the end, the sonnet feels firmly afloat in the grand tradition to which it quietly contributes.

Nemo

As Susan points out, this appears to be a "seasons of life" poem, and those may be predictable; but instead of tedium--which Susan implies--I sense closure and completion. I'm flower-challenged, but context
reveals sufficient necessities.

I got the ubi sunt but not the military references, reading this as Susan did. I'm probably on a par with Michael and Lance where flowers are concerned, but I found this moving and well crafted. My problem is the title, which is obviously very evocative for others. Admittedly, I may not be the ideal reader, but "Wede Away" sounds like something made by Ortho.

Frank

There are plenty of successful poems and songs that liken dying soldiers to wilting flowers, and this could be one of them. But the title is very specific to one particular song, the one in the YouTube link above. Once the words and sounds of that song leap to mind, I don't think you can switch easily to hyacinths and wisterias.

It's a peculiar title problem. If you don't get the allusion, the title does nothing. If you do, I think it overpowers the poem.

John

I have read the comments.

I did not find this sonnet too hard and only had to look up 'wede' and that I felt could easily be recast to better effect. To me, the title, rather than overpower is somewhat of a non sequitur I cannot stretch the wistful beauty of this to the horrors of that butchery.

Beautifully crafted.

This is a sonnet of sweet, poignant fragrances. I love the ellisions.. and pronunciation variants, as Michael wrote.

I was interested in Jan's comment about the difficulty of associating the images with the butchering that lies behind the poem. That's my problem too. I realise that that is the precise point of the poem.

Still it is hard to accept this gentle mourning for what need not have happened.

The beauty of the poem is undeniable. The symbols are powerful and the images and sounds are superb.

If it makes me angry that is my problem.
Janet

The rhythm, the beauty and the solemn salute do not disappoint. I would like to read something this graceful everyday. One should wish for such a tribute; this one was deeply loved.

Surrounded by the white,

Fr. RP

I share John Beaton's reservation about the use made of the seasons in this poem. The imagery is very beautiful, moving and finally somber, but the whole doesn't have the force of individual lines in it. The first line of the sestet has a metrical kink in it, at least to my ear.

When I see hyacinth, crocus, narcissus, as I have the last few days, the last thing I would think of is a dead soldier. Or dead person. The spring flowers are bursting with life and the air is bursting with sunlight.

Consequently this didn't move me as one would expect.

Terese -

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

~Hamlet

About the first line of the sestet... “Towards” is a two-syllable word in much of the English-speaking world. But if you regard it as one-syllable, it might seem like a glitch.
The word “flowers” in the fourth line is treated as a one-syllable word, as it often is in natural speech and in formal verse (in both old and new poems).

Others have mentioned the variations in this sonnet, and someone called it loose meter. The first line could be scanned as having an anapest: /ia soft/. Personally, I didn’t hear it as one because even in everyday speech wisteria is elided. In the third line, I do think there is an anapest: /ening world/. It’s not loud, however, and it’s also easy to elide the syllables.

In the second stanza, L2 has a trochee in the first foot and L3 is a headless iambic line. In combination, those lines produce a slight trochaic sound, which then is reinforced by the trochaic opening of the sestet. I think these substitutions suit the content perfectly. They create a more somber tone that goes hand in hand with autumn, the approaching winter, the last of the flowers and the ebbing away of life.

In the sestet, there is also this line:
pale soldier roses, rearguard in retreat,
What would Mr Sound-and-Sense Pope say about that? I think he would applaud. The line has so many strong stresses and even a trochaic foot within the line -- /guard in/. The result is a very heavy line that matches so well the “soldier roses” and the figurative language – the image of soldiers marching or trudging off in retreat.

That’s how I see the variations. I don't regard the sonnet as having loose meter. I think it's IP with very skillful use of metrical substitutions.

Like others, even if I had not seen this elsewhere, I would have recognised the author. Really it should not be possible to write a convincing sonnet using flower imagery and changing seasons within a lament without becoming simply derivative. Yet this is a timeless classic and it would be ungenerous to see it as simply 'textbook stuff'.

So how does the poet pluck something extraordinary from such familiar material? Partly it's got to do with how well crafted this is - on all kinds of levels. The use of repeated phrases - giving it, as others have noted, the hint of a villanelle - that's very effective. Personally I think piling up references to different flowers does not detract from this at all but adds a rich blossoming effect. It is this central contradiction between the blossoming flowers and the sense of withering, mournful loss which makes this so memorable.

Yes, of course it's been done before, but the poem does stand up well amongst its famous antecedents and that is no mean feat; moreover the illustrious ancestors mentioned - 'In Flanders Field' et al, are not sonnets and I cannot bring to mind an actual sonnet covers this territory quite as well as this. That being said, I'm not sure it is quite fair of Mary to post a passage from Hamlet as a comparative example!

Alan

I object to objections to "towards." I pronounce it as one syllable generally, but it is clear what the meter wants me to do, and rather than be intransigent, I oblige. Everyone should be like me.

I read this without recognizing or worrying too much about the title, and I found it a nice poem about getting old, in the vein (if not the league) of 'that time of year thou mayst in me behold.' (I'm not hugely fond of lines 5-6, which seem competent but unexceptional.) I also didn't worry about the flowers, though from Catherine's careful explication, I see that I missed a lot. But I thought it was perfectly comprehensible without all that. The explication adds layers, but it is unnecessary to basic understanding.

It's baffling that the meter has garnered so much discussion. The poem is metrically FINE, even accomplished. But all the meter chat feels like the old days, when this place was more about coloring in the lines than it has since become.

The poem is pretty, and good. Doesn't set me on fire, but so much the worse for me.

Chris

I stand with Alan and Rob on this. Well put, Gentlemen. Author, cross the lane and blow a kiss for Tim to the grave of you know whom.

I'm puzzled by the quibbles about the difficuty of this poem. Anything that is discernible from standard reference sources is fair game. To be unaware of the native fauna and flora, moreover, is to be a stranger in one's own land. The appreciation of this poem is more than worth the perceived difficulties.

Beautifully written and well-crafted, but it somehow did not grab me. By L4 I had a good idea where this was going, and by L8 I was sure what L14 would be. I don't know enough about flowers to get any subtle references that may have been hidden in them, and I had to take N's word for the seasonal appropriteness of many of them. Meanwhile, I simply didn't connect with it, which is likely no fault of the poem.

David R.

I would have to say that so far this seems to me head and shoulders above the rest.

Perhaps a little mannered at the beginning, this has a lovely song-like quality that wins you over. I could imagine its being set to music.

I think N, in his autumn years, is mourning his losses, both past and anticipated. The imminent losses are the hardest to bear: so brave, and so few are left.
The title implies untimely loss, since the Scots reserve that lament for the funerals of those who die early.
N is also grieving for himself, I suppose.

I'm grateful to everybody for their encouraging and insightful comments. Especial thanks to Cathy for her careful and brilliant exegesis.

Best regards,

David

David, here's a quote from Wiki on "Flowers Of The Forest":

I learned that song in my bedroom from a tartan-clad book of Scottish songs given to a relative of my mother's, according to the inscription, in 1906. So I was titularly hard on this poem.

But I included it in my top three anyway because it's beautiful. Cathy's commentary really brought it to life. Especially on "soldier roses". That's the sort of touch that makes a poem a poem.

Good poetry has no borders. May your garden flourish.

John

John,
These kind of responses make me brave this place.
Thanks.

Thanks John,
That was indeed the reason I chose the title.
I don't usually comment on the interpretation of my poems, since they must speak for themselves; but I thought on this occasion an author perspective might be of interest.
Best regards,
David