The day before you died I thought I’d bring
You tulips for your bedside table, bright
Ones, pink and white, to give your gaze a place
To rest, to make your labor seem less harsh.
I told my daughter so, my four-year-old
Who’d told me I should visit you, who’d hinted:
Your work, this dying business you were in,
Was making worldly things seem flimsy, thin.
The day moved on and tulips left my mind, though,
Until I thought of you again, too late,
The night descending, bringing sleep’s regrets.
The morning came and with its obligations
Distracting me, I let my dream of tulip
Fields plow under and turned to hear the news.
Tulips for Elsie
April 27, 2012 by at 12:21 am
…your labor…
Your work, this dying business you were in…
Apt words from a fine poem.
Sorry Jonathan.
Jonathan,
Usually, gratuitious rhymes are irritating – if you have one rhyme, you really ought to have it all rhyme.
But in this case, the rhyme is a masterfully wrought emotional anchor. The movement of the poem draws to the rhyme in the first half and then like a mirror, the refelction continues, spreading out from the second half of the rhyme with a new understanding of the tulip – and other things…. More fragile and for all that more beautiful.
The same tulips which provide
your gaze a place
To rest, to make your labor seem less harsh.
become transformed in the eyes of a child because she is herself new to “this dying business,” “making worldly things seem flimsy, thin.”
So that afterwards,
I let my dream of tulip
Fields plow under and turned to hear the news.
Leaving us with an exquisite ambiguity at the end which, like dirt to the roots of a plucked tulip, allows the poem to cling to the hope of resurrection amidst the sorrow of burial.
After all… the tulip is a perennial. But you know that bettert than a botanist in this poem.
Well done!
JOB
Thanks gents, for your very kind comments and perceptive readings.