3 TO THÉODORE DE BANVILLE Chaleville, Ardennes, Auguest 15, 1871 ON THE SUBJECT OF FLOWERS: REMARKS, ADDRESSED TO THE POET
To Monsieur Théodore de Banville I There, bordering blue black skies Where wavecrests tremble gold, Lilies stimulate evening ecstasies, Enemas thrust between bardic folds. After all, times have changed: Plants now labor—aloe and rose. Lilies arranged in bunches Decorate your religious prose. Kendrel disappeared behind them In the Sonnet of eighteen thirty. Poets are buried beneath them, In amaranth and carnation flurries.
Through grassy banks and wooded ways Feast your shutterbugging eyes. What they seize on sure amazes: A monotony of pretty lies.
The real trees support
Why this mania for floral wrangling? Why does it prompt such turgid lines? Low-slung hounds with bellies dangling French poets are tickled by muddy vines.
If decadent decoratio that looms To prettify your pages question’s clear: Is this riotous, ceasel of blooms Worth a seagull’s turd
As if the lines weren’t bad enough, Consider the pictures they adjoin… A first communion? Either option’s rough: Sunflowers or Lotuses? Flip a coin.
I think I’ve made my A poet in his far-flung Draped with Persian You resolutely keep th
Can French poets resist an Ashokan ode? Can addicts resist a bag of blow? As if butterflies take the high road, To avoid shitting on daisies below.
And then describe the Of flowers, ignoring b This sort of thing—so Keep it up, and drive
All this greenery is becoming mulch. Blossoms plucked to raise the stakes. Salons bedecked like a flowery gulch Better for beetles than rattlesnakes. Grandville’s sentimental sketchings Fill margins with mawkish blooms, Caricatures of flowery retchings Evening stars the dark consumes. Saliva drooling from your pipings Is all we have for nectar: Pan now dozes. His song has become mere guttersniping About Lilies, Ashoka, Lilacs, Roses.
IV
Heard of the notion o Your efforts until now Enough of this milk-f Try describing tobacc
Why not render Pedro And the dollars his ca Let sun brown skin, y Describe the shit on s
III
Yes: the Sorrento sea But an ocean of crap Are your stanzas equip Are there hydras in th
Why, even when you bathe, Dear Sir, Your sallow-pitted gown must bloom With morning breezes: sleeves confer High above forget-me-nots in swoon.
O White Hunters: your barefoot excursions Trample the pastoral into derision; Shouldn’t your flowery poetic diversions Exhibit a modicum of botanical precision?
Thrust quatrains into And report the news Expostulate on sugar Whether pansements o
Yes: our garden gates let lilacs pass. But such candied clichés have a cost: Pollinating spit on petals looks like glass But is still spit. Our poor flowers? Lost.
You deploy Crickets and Flies indiscriminately Conflating Phylum and Genus. Rio’s gold And Rhine’s blue are switched inadvertently, Poor Norway becomes “Florida, but cold.”
Your job? Deliver trut Such as what covers Is what crowns them Lichen, or eggs from
And when you get your hands on roses, Windwhipped roses red on laurel stems, Their effect upon you one supposes Irresistible: bad verses just never end.
In the past, Dear Master, Art may have settled For the alexandrine’s hexametrical constrictions; But now, shouldn’t the stink of fallen petals Rotting, make a clean sweep of our ambitions?
O White Hunters, we You find us perfumed Nature nurtures, we g Dye trousers our infa
BANVILLE’s roses fall like snow, Their whiteness flecked with blood. A pricking feeling readers know: Incomprehension chafes and rubs.
Our botanically challenged bards forever bungle: Mahogany is “a flower found in the country”: Who could imagine that in the Guyan jungle
Lilies, lilies. So often mentioned, So seldom seen. In your verses, though They blossom like good intentions As sinners’ resolutions come and go.
II
Find flowers that loo At forest fringes dead Unpack oozing botan Ochre ointments that
Find calyxes full of fie Cooking in aestival ju