Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Of asphodel, that greeny flower, like a buttercup upon its branching stem- save that it's green and wooden- I come, my sweet, to sing to you. We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers. So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell. Today I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers that we both loved, even to this poor colorless thing- I saw it when I was a child- little prized among the living but the dead see, asking among themselves: What do I remember that was shaped as this thing is shaped? while our eyes fill with tears. Of love, abiding love it will be telling though too weak a wash of crimson colors it to make it wholly credible. There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. And so with fear in my heart I drag it out and keep on talking for I dare not stop. Listen while I talk on against time. It will not be for long. I have forgot and yet I see clearly enough something central to the sky which ranges round it. An odor springs from it! A sweetest odor! Honeysuckle! And now there comes the buzzing of a bee! and a whole flood of sister memories! Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out. Give me time, time. When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forebodingly, among them. I bring you, reawakened, a memory of those flowers. They were sweet when I pressed them and retained something of their sweetness a long time. It is a curious odor, a moral odor, that brings me near to you. The color was the first to go. There had come to me a challenge, your dear self, mortal as I was, the lily's throat to the hummingbird! Endless wealth, I thought, held out its arms to me. A thousand tropics in an apple blossom. The generous earth itself gave us lief. The whole world became my garden! But the sea which no one tends is also a garden when the sun strikes it and the waves are wakened. I have seen it and so have you when it puts all flowers to shame. Too, there are the starfish stiffened by the sun and other sea wrack and weeds. We knew that along with the rest of it for we were born by the sea, knew its rose hedges to the very water's brink. There the pink mallow grows and in their season strawberries and there, later, we went to gather the wild plum. I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit. I do not like it and wanted to be in heaven. Hear me out. Do not turn away. I have learned much in my life from books and out of them about love. Death is not the end of it. There is a hierarchy which can be attained, I think, in its service. Its guerdon is a fairy flower; a cat of twenty lives. If no one came to try it the world would be the loser. It has been for you and me as one who watches a storm come in over the water. We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands. The storm unfolds. Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds. The sky to the north is placid, blue in the afterglow as the storm piles up. It is a flower that will soon reach the apex of its bloom. We danced, in our minds, and read a book together. You remember? It was a serious book. And so books entered our lives. The sea! The sea! Always when I think of the sea there comes to mind the Iliad and Helen's public fault that bred it. Were it not for that there would have been no poem but the world if we had remembered, those crimson petals spilled among the stones, would have called it simply murder. The sexual orchid that bloomed then sending so many disinterested men to their graves has left its memory to a race of fools or heroes if silence is a virtue. The sea alone with its multiplicity holds any hope. The storm has proven abortive but we remain after the thoughts it roused to re-cement our lives. It is the mind the mind that must be cured short of death's intervention, and the will becomes again a garden. The poem is complex and the place made in our lives for the poem. Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence. Begin again. It is like Homer's catalogue of ships: it fills up the time. I speak in figures, well enough, the dresses you wear are figures also, we could not meet otherwise. When I speak of flowers it is to recall that at one time we were young. All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts. My sweet, you have it also, therefore I love you and could not love you otherwise. Imagine you saw a field made up of women all silver-white. What should you do but love them? The storm bursts or fades! it is not the end of the world. Love is something else, or so I thought it, a garden which expands, though I knew you as a woman and never thought otherwise, until the whole sea has been taken up and all its gardens. It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, of animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you. I should have known, though I did not, that the lily-of-the-valley is a flower makes many ill who whiff it. We had our children, rivals in the general onslaught. I put them aside though I cared for them. as well as any man could care for his children according to my lights. You understand I had to meet you after the event and have still to meet you. Love to which you too shall bow along with me- a flower a weakest flower shall be our trust and not because we are too feeble to do otherwise but because at the height of my power I risked what I had to do, therefore to prove that we love each other while my very bones sweated that I could not cry to you in the act. Of asphodel, that greeny flower, I come, my sweet, to sing to you! My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides. ......................................... ......................................... For our wedding, too, the light was wakened and shone. The light! the light stood before us waiting! I thought the world stood still. At the altar so intent was I before my vows, so moved by your presence a girl so pale and ready to faint that I pitied and wanted to protect you. As I think of it now, after a lifetime, it is as if a sweet-scented flower were poised and for me did open. Asphodel has no odor save to the imagination but it too celebrates the light. It is late but an odor as from our wedding has revived for me and begun again to penetrate into all crevices of my world. "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" is a rather long meditative poem, divided into three books and a coda. The poet is addressing his wife, whom he has abused through his sexual and artistic pursuits. He is approaching her one last time, reviewing their life together and asking her forgiveness. Here Williams is no longer dispersing himself into a set of objects; the "I," slowly purged from his verse in the teens, now returns in the figure of a wise old man who, while aware of loss and suffering, offers advice, hope and consolation. Old age has always held its right to its opinions and Williams is now not reluctant to state his explicitly. First published in Journey to Love (1955), "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" came into existence during a time of nearly overwhelming crisis in Williams' life. Originally he thought of it as the fifth book of Paterson, gave it the working title "The River of Heaven," and planned for it to include "Everything left over that wasn't done or said--at ease." He began the poem in March 1952, on a hotel menu in New York City, and worked on it for nearly two years. During those years his health, which had begun to break with his heart attack in 1948 and strokes in 1949 and 1951, continued to deteriorate. He suffered another major stroke in August 1952, and knew that he could expect further strokes--any one of them possibly fatal--at any time from then on. His mental condition was likewise precarious. A bout with depression was exacerbated both by the recent stroke and by the injustices surrounding Williams' appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. The position was first offered, then withdrawn owing to allegations of Communist sympathizing, then offered again contingent upon further loyalty investigations, which were conducted but never evaluated, so that the year's term was up before Williams was able to serve. The situation tormented him with feelings of rage, powerlessness, and humiliation. On 21 February 1953, he was admitted to a private mental hospital in Queens, where he underwent psychiatric treatment until his release on 18 April. Most painful of all, the old uneasy balance between confession and deceit in Williams' marriage to Flossie finally gave way. During his stay in the mental hospital, threatened by death and ready at last to let Flossie truly know him, he worked on poems, including "Asphodel," and wrote letters confessing past adulteries that finally compelled Flossie's full belief. The process must have been immeasurably painful for them both. Needing his wife to hold firm now more than ever, the poet must test her by buffeting and shaking her. "Having your love / I was rich," he tells her in "Asphodel." "Thinking to have lost it / I am tortured / and cannot rest." And so, in three "Books" and a "Coda," he writes to Flossie about the flower of the Elysian fields, the flower that grows also "in hell." The flower has a central meaning: "Of love, abiding love / it will be telling." In the first two Books he speaks of their marriage, their past, shared projects, triumphs, and griefs; in Book III he begs for forgiveness, but also writes movingly of desire, giving "the steps / if it may be / by which you shall mount, / again to think well / of me." The "Coda," then, is his gift to Flossie, made possible by her forgiveness of him.