Lilies
Lilies - meaning Summary
Longing for Self-forgetfulness
The poem considers whether a person can live with the lilies' apparent openness and freedom from self-concern. The speaker admires their unresisting exposure to weather, animals, and disappearance, but recognizes that human consciousness brings longing, ideas, and loneliness. Van Gogh becomes a contrasting example: his attention to bright fields produced urgent inner problems rather than peace. The poem ends by accepting a world where beauty is brief and creatures remain separate.
Read Complete AnalysesI have been thinking about living like the lilies that blow in the fields. They rise and fall in the edge of the wind, and have no shelter from the tongues of the cattle, and have no closets or cupboards, and have no legs. Still I would like to be as wonderful as the old idea. But if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face of the hummingbird to touch me. What I mean is, could I forget myself even in those feathery fields? When Van Gogh preached to the poor of coarse he wanted to save someone-- most of all himself. He wasn't a lily, and wandering through the bright fields only gave him more ideas it would take his life to solve. I think I will always be lonely in this world, where the cattle graze like a black and white river-- where the vanishing lilies melt, without protest, on their tongues-- where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss, just rises and floats away.
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