This week’s choice is “The Magic Flower” by E. Nesbit, which I have chosen to mark Valentine’s Day.
We dropped life’s joys, a garnered sheaf,
Edith Nesbit (1858—1924)
And spell-bound watched, still hour by hour,
Magic on magic, leaf by leaf,
The unfolding of our love’s white flower.
Poem 360. The Magic Flower
THROUGH many days and many days
The seed of love lay hidden close;
We walked the dusty tiresome ways
Where never a leaf or blossom grows.
And in the darkness, all the while,
The little seed its heart uncurled,
And we by many a weary mile
Travelled towards it, round the world.
To the hid centre of the maze
At last we came, and there we found—
O happy day, O day of days!
—Twin seed-leaves breaking holy ground.
We dropped life’s joys, a garnered sheaf,
And spell-bound watched, still hour by hour,
Magic on magic, leaf by leaf,
The unfolding of our love’s white flower.
This rather lovely little poem describes how love can grow secretly and unknown by the two whose hearts are growing together. Nesbit wrote a number of poems and ghost stories as well as her better known fiction.
The poem describes a couple who after journeying far afield together, discover that they are in love. Nesbit likens this to the growing of a flower from a tiny seed, concealed from all, particularly the couple concerned. Their discovery at the end of their journey is likened to reaching the centre of a maze where the flower has been growing all along and having found it, they are enraptured by it, as one might be by a strange and beautiful blossom.
Nesbit evokes the sensation of a long and tiresome journey with little or nothing to recommend it—“the dusty tiresome ways/Where never a leaf or blossom grows” makes me think of a day-to-day slog where one so rarely finds any hint of love, the “leaf or blossom” being part of her metaphor, with plants standing in for love. She suggests the tentative and fragile nature of love’s beginning by likening it to a seedling sprouting in the ground, and the wearisomeness of life without love as a fatiguing journey through a maze. Love is shown as something that grows unexpectedly out of close association—as Felix Leiter says in Diamonds are Forever, “Nothing propinks like propinquity.”
On arrival at the centre (the traditional destination for those navigating a maze), the travellers are so moved by the love they have found that they discard the other joys they have gleaned and watch, enraptured, as the bloom of love flowers. Just like the travellers enchanted by the magic flower, we may be so overtaken by love that we devote all our time to it.
I like it because Nesbit uses clever metaphors and language to express her idea.
Sadly there are no performances of this poem to be found online.