Solway's The Garden

The All-Powerful Love of the Creator

Feb 25, 2009 Linda Sue Grimes

Canada's outstanding poet, David Solway, offers a lush scene of communicating plant and animal residents of a garden in spring in his poem simply titled, "The Garden."

The poem consists of six stanzas of varying lengths, each conveying a part of the puzzle regarding the “the word” that “has gone out” to the multicultural communities of the garden from the “pale lilac bush” to the “white pines.”

The epigraph following the title, “Lyke as the Culver on the bared bough,” offers a useful tidbit for orienting the reader to the theme of the poem. That epigraph is the first line of Edmund Spenser’s Sonnet 89 from Amoretti and Epithalamion. The speaker inSonnet 89 mourns the absence of his beloved sweetheart.

First Stanza: “Under the pale lilac bush”

The opening stanza of “The Garden” hints that a message is being passed from creature to creature about some news of great consequence in the garden. The lilac bush surely overhears as the “moorgrass whispers” “to the monarch-bearing milkweed,” and the “plump robin” “whistles the secret to the chickadee.“

Second Stanza: “Laden with epistles”

A bunch of blue flowers and a passel of butterflies also get in on the messaging as they carry “epistles” and “print the air,” while the stalky slender velvet plant bends and tells a whirl of bees about the latest scuttlebutt.

Third Stanza: “Even purple loosestrife”

The speaker has observed “purple loosestrife” as it “races across the lower meadow / panicked by the yellow trumpets.” The suspense grows now because the loosestrife is moving in a panic, and “the wood dove creaks with fright / for the cover of the branches.” The news must be something that causes consternation among the garden community residents.

Fourth Stanza: “Now the hummingbird”

The hummingbird has “stall[ed] in mid-maneuver” while securing nectar from the petals of “lavenders and pinks.” And the dragonfly “hovers by the spires of the bull thistle” while it is “murmuring it encyclicals / of desire and regret / for the wet and shimmering kingdom.”

Fifth Stanza: “For the news has spidered out”

The penultimate stanza states that the “the news” is out, and it has spread “to every corner of the garden.” The mystery has continued to deepen as the creatures have been seen whispering, whistling, printing the air with epistles, panicking and demonstrating fright, in the state of stunned listening, and murmuring encyclicals.

Sixth Stanza: “For the word has gone out”

What is the momentous message that has all of these creatures in such a rush? All of the garden activity has described a well-oiled machine that is a garden; unlike the best of human-manufactured machines, this garden is created through the agency of the Divine. Therefore, all of the species that live and thrive in the garden do so out of the love placed in each one of them by Divinity.

As each insect, bird, flower, and tree struggles to contribute its own unique offering, it demonstrates all of the attributes that a duality-based existence requires. The human observer/speaker, who has surveyed all of this activity, determines that those activities include fear and love. The creatures all act out of a combination of fear and love.

The bad news is, “those who love the garden / that in the radiant vacancies they inhabit / there is only the gardener / to love them back.” The good news is that that is all they need. To the human observer, the love of “the gardener” or God may seem meager, but the garden exemplifies the perpetuating power of infinite love bestowed by the Creator/Gardener upon his beloved creatures.

Another David Solway Article: December Poet – David Solway: “What Makes a Poem”

The copyright of the article Solway's The Garden in Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Solway's The Garden in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

David Solway