One day, when I was six years old, I was poking around in a rocky vacant lot near our house, and I thought it would be nice to pick some flowers for my mother. Some of them were the soft pinkish-purple clover blossoms, and there were probably a couple of dandelions too, and, what I liked the most, blue chicory flowers — though at the time I didn’t know what they were. Later on I called them cornflowers, because they had the same color as the crayon did that was labeled with that name, from the Crayola company. Their big factory was down the road, 25 miles away, and I think I remember once in a while the fragrance of wax and pigments in the air, not unpleasant. As I mentioned when I was talking about folk names for flowers for our latest Word of the Week, the commonest flowers often have some charming names, and this one’s no exception. Cornflower is one of the local names for the flower, but also blue sailor, horseflower, bunk, and coffeeweed. The last name is apt, because it is, after all, a kind of chicory, and you can make an eye-opening drink from it. The whole plant is edible, too. Anyway, I liked them a lot. But when I gave them to Mom, she said, “Tony, where did you get all these weeds from?” Oh well!
I’ve often thought that we ought to take some care to show to our children the beautiful and fascinating things that are right in our midst, but we take them for granted because they’re common, or we don’t notice them in the first place. Here in New England we don’t have birds of paradise, or quetzals, or toucans, or wild peafowl, but some of our most common birds are quite striking: for example, the cardinal, the blue jay, the bluebird, and even the robin. He’s a thrush, by the way, and all the thrushes are excellent singers. In the evening, you’ll often hear the robins chirping loudly from their low perches in the trees. We have, around our house, three or four varieties of woodpecker, including the mysterious pileated woodpecker, made famous in the United States by the old Woody Woodpecker cartoon, because he’s got a loud resounding call that sounds like a big bird laughing.
And it’s all the more urgent, to teach our children about these common things, because human beings have never before lived lives so removed from the rest of created reality. I think there were two sounds I liked best when I was walking past the wet wooded area that used to be — used to be — across from where Debra’s parents lived in Pennsylvania. Those were the wood thrush when he was singing, and the quiet between one song and another. And I have never heard more ethereal and other-worldly music from the birds, or more beautiful; not even from my favorites otherwise, the mockingbird and the oriole. Bring this music to your children and grandchildren. Bring them the world.
In our Poem of the Week, our old friend Robert Browning, living in Italy in these very months of April and May, in 1845, muses about what it’s like now back in England. His thoughts turn to the birds and the flowers, and the weather, so much rainier than in Italy, a cooler and damper climate, but for him, a more cheerful one too. Imagine that you’re in southern California in early May, and you wish you were instead on the Alaskan panhandle! Or that you’re in Rio de Janeiro, but you wish you were back in the Falkland Islands. Try to get past what we’re taught by commercials and tourist advertisements, and see beauties of their own sorts, where they are. The best poets and artists have done so. Wordsworth doesn’t have to go to a botanical garden. He can just wander among the downs of Grasmere. J. M. W. Turner painted Newcastle harbor at night, with a full moon peering from a misty sky, and the workmen loading coal onto the ships, the great glowing fires contrasting with the blue of the sea. As the poet Hopkins puts it, “These things, these things were here and but the beholder / Wanting.” So then — let’s behold what is here before our eyes.
I like also that Browning favors England over Italy. Not that I do so — but why shouldn’t an Englishman love England? And Browning did love Italy too. The very next year, he would marry the poet Elizabeth Barrett and rescue her from her father, who tyrannized over her and her siblings. She was always in frail health, so Robert took her to Italy, where they lived till she died in 1861. That’s where they met the Hawthornes, by the way, and became very close friends; we have letters between them, because Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of Nathanael and his wife Sophia, saved her parents’ letters and published a collection of them. Rose, by the way, became a Catholic and, after her husband died, she founded an order of sisters devoted to the care of persons with incurable cancer. They take not one dime from the government, and they themselves own nothing. The town of Hawthorne, New York, the site of their first home, was named in her honor. But in this poem, Browning calls Italy a “gaudy melon flower,” and though I’m Italian, that’s all right with me too! Those melon flowers, I’ll add, are tasty. You can buy them at the grocer’s, and people simply call them “fiori,” meaning, “flowers.” They have a mild flavor, like saffron, and my cousin’s wife would fry some up for me, dipped in batter — just great, for a lunch with some cheese and Italian bread. The melon he’s talking about? What we call zucchini!
Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower —Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
We think of our archive as a little treasure trove. Our paid subscribers have on demand access to the entire of Word & Song, many hundreds of entries. For everyone else, there’s always plenty to see here, as well. We hope that all of our readers will revisit and share our posts with others as we continue our mission of reclaiming — one thing at a time — the good, the beautiful, and the true.
