Human Flower Project

Thursday, November 15, 2007

A Yellow Rose for Marianne Moore

Superioress of American modernism, Marianne Moore (b. November 15, 1887) challenged the Language of Flowers.

Marianne Moore, 1952
Photo: Univ. of Pennsylvania

Marianne Moore, born in Missouri, settled in New York City with her mother at an exciting time, the 1920s. She worked at the city’s public library and became literary editor of the Dial, a hub of America’s literary avant-garde, publishing Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens….

The mirror of Victorianism had shattered—and 19th century Europe’s cultural conventions, cracked, began to glimmer with distortions peculiar and new.  In poetry, the old lines broke off and chunky stanzas bent into strange polyhedrons. Mythology with its winged sandals and all those Pre-Raphaelite women wearing drapery began to look rather silly under bombs, a war in the trenches.

In 1915, Marianne Moore published a poem in Egoist: 

If yellow betokens infidelity
  I am an infidel.
    I could not plant white roses on a hill
    Because books said buff petals boded ill
  White promised well….  

Moore made her poem (later entitled “Injudicious Gardening”) after reading the love letters of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barret Browning. In their correspondence, Elizabeth recalls that her suitor’s first flowers to her were yellow roses; after checking in The Language of Flowers, a popular source in Victorian England that allegedly decoded the secret meanings of flowers, she chides Robert for selecting a bloom that signifies “infidelity.” He answers her, saying he’s just planted a dozen white rose trees “to take away the yellow-rose approach.”

The Language of Flowers was just the sort of tripe that the Modernists would chop to the ground. Symbols? Cymbals! Can’t a yellow rose be a yellow rose, completely? (From the perspective of 2007, Moore’s own language may seem stilted, tentative, arcane, but that’s another mirror…)

In the spring of 1938, ee cummings gave his painting of a yellow rose to Moore. She wrote to him April 12, “After studying this very noble rose,—the turquoise under-leaf and touch of red reflected back even to the petals, I can surmise why botanical gardens and over-flowered shops do not abound in yellow roses. Yet they might, and still lack this one.”

Gloire de Dijon
Photo: Poldiri

For Moore, all yellow roses didn’t mean anything; it was each yellow rose that warranted precise consideration—“study.” Her contemporary William Carlos Williams wrote that Moore could see “the vastness of the particular”—in a rose, in a gift, in a creative effort. She went on to thank cummings, “I try not to think of your loss in the fact of my having the painting. We say what a man has done, he can do again, but can he? An affect is got once. But another awaits him.”

We tried unsuccessfully to find a reproduction of cummings’s painting. But if you’re in Philadelphia, you can see it for yourself at the Rosenbach Museum. There, Moore’s Greenwich Village living room has been exactly recreated, with the yellow rose on the wall.