OK, Josh, don't leave us hanging. What are you up to with that ending?
Also I don't quite understand your observation about regularity, since Blake is often very regular, especially in the Songs of Innocence and Experience, upon which this poem is modelled. Consider our discussion of "A Poison Tree" on an adjoining thread.
Kate, I think you underestimate the irony in Hope's work...this poem depicts a poisoned (if not a poison) tree, and is more akin to the songs of experience than innocence.
Here is another Hope poem which aptly illustrates the point:
Imperial Adam
Imperial Adam, naked in the dew,
Felt his brown flanks and found the rib was gone
Puzzled he turned and saw where, two by two,
The mighty spoor of Jahweh marked the lawn.
Then he remembered the mysterious sleep,
The surgeon fingers probing at the bone,
The voice so far away, so rich and deep:
"It is not good for him to live alone."
Turing once more, he found Man's counterpart
In tender parody breathing at his side.
He knew her at first sight, he knew by heart
Her allegory of sense unsatisfied.
The pawpaw drooped its golden breasts above
Less generous than the honey of her flesh;
The innocent sunlight showed the place of love;
The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.
This plump gourd severed from his virile root
She promised on the turf of Paradise
Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;
Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs,
And waking, smiled up at him from the grass;
Her breasts rose softly and he heard her sigh.
From all the beasts whose pleasant task it was
In Eden to increase and multiply
Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:
Her took her in his arms and there and then,
Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind,
Began in joy to found the breed of men.
Then from the spurt of seed within her broke
Her terrible and triumphant female cry,
Split upward by the sexual lightning stroke.
It was the beasts now who stood watching by:
The gravid elephant, the calving hind,
The breeding bitch, the she-ape big with young
Were the first gentle midwives of mankind;
The teeming lioness rasped her with her tongue;
The proud vicuna nuzzled her as she slept
Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too
Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept,
The great pod of her belly swelled and grew,
And saw its water break, and saw, in fear,
Its quaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.
---A. D. Hope
[This message has been edited by Alan Sullivan (edited 11-15-2000).]
|