Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from
Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)
'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'
- D. H. Lawrence
Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.
And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.
An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".
But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:
And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.
An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".
But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:
"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."
Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.
In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864).
In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864).
