Poem of the Week 2024/8

End of the Flower-World

Fear no longer for the lone gray birds

That fall beneath the world's last autumn sky,

Mourn no more the death of grass and tree.

These will be as they have ever been:

Substance of springtime; and when flower-world ends,

They will go back to earth, and wait, and be still,

Safe with the dust of birds long dead, and boughs

Turned ashes long ago, that still are straining

To leave their tombs and find the hills again,

Flourish again, mindless of the people –

The strange ones now on a leafless earth

Who seem to have no care for things in blossom.

Fear no more for trees, but mourn instead

The children of these strange, sad men: their hearts

Will hear no music but the song of death.

– Stanley Burnshaw

What is Flower-Land? When & where is it? Whatever the answer, it is ending. & it has been the subject of "our" fears & concerns, "our" meaning whomever is addressed by the poet, who opens with an imperative, & a striking word: fear. Flower-land sounds as if it should be lovely, but we're immediately told about lone gray birds – not even a flock, but lone & possibly lonely birds, & not colorful birds, but gray ones. (I once worked with a bird-watcher & I asked him about some of the little brown birds that would hang out around our tech campus. "Oh," he said, "We call those shit birds.") & these birds fall instead of fly; fall nicely reinforces autumn later in the line. But that autumn sky is the last autumn sky; is that because autumn is giving way to winter, or because autumn is going away altogether? There's a strange instability to Flower-World as presented to us.

Fear & Mourn are the key injunctions of the first stanza, & convey their mood, even as we are told we no longer need to continue fearing & mourning (so "we" must have seen the end coming for a while, & have been dreading it). The second stanza is more reassuring about Flower-World, or at least its specific elements such as grass & tree. This stanza is a little more reassuring in its clarifications: what's happening seems to be the usual giving-way of summer & harvest-time abundance to winter bareness; the flowers may be gone, but their substance remains, waiting, still, back in the earth.

But the poem turns here. Instead of assuring us, once we know that the substance of springtime is safely waiting, that therefore springtime will return on its usual schedule, we are taken deeper into the earth, into the place & time without Flower-Land. We are back in the dirt, this time with dust & ashes. The birds re-appear in the form of dust; death took them so long ago that their decay is complete. The trees re-appear in the form of their boughs, turned to ash. Ash is an interesting word here. When leaves & branches decay, they turn into dirt, not ashes; ash implies a fire – a lightning strike, perhaps, or is it from human carelessness?

We continue to get the sense that spring is delayed, or perhaps not coming at all; the dust & ashes that were birds & boughs are straining / To leave their tombs and find the hills again. Straining is such an expressive word. It makes me think of Michelangelo's unfinished Prisoner (sometimes titled Slave) sculptures, pulling out of & sinking back into the marble that traps their essence. Those sculptures were designed for the unfinished tomb of Pope Julius II, & we have a tomb here too: the earth is entombing the once-living things. Earth is often seen as a womb; here it is a tomb. There is a Biblical resonance to the language here; it makes me think of the opening of Psalm 121: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. Only here there is no help; the helpful Lord who manifests in the second line of the psalm is nowhere to be found in this poem. Instead there is strain, & a wish to find the hills again (perhaps their location has been forgotten, & a search must be undertaken).

The poet now makes clear why we should no longer fear for & mourn the inhabitants (bird, grass, trees) of Flower-Land: when & if they eventually emerge, they will flourish (such a rich, extravagant verb in this stripped-down, haunted poem). & here the poem turns again: the flourishing will occur mindless of the people. Until now, the only human presence in the poem has been the Poet-Speaker & "us", his audience. Now there are other inhabitants. Mindless is another interesting word here: it lets us know that the re-emergence of Flower-Land, if it happens, will depend on forces outside of human control; mindless also casts its penumbra of meanings over the people who have suddenly appeared: we associate them with a mindless existence.

These people are strange: not only odd or unusual, but alienated, uprooted: strangers there on the leafless earth, careless of things in blossom (blossom is the first reference in the poem to flowers, outside of the term Flower-Land, so the word takes on the power of something withheld until the poem's climax). The people seem to have no care for things in blossom: seem because who can say with certainty what is happening inside these strange, possibly hollow people. No care for: does that mean they are just uninterested in blossoming things, or that they do not tend to them in any real sense, physical as well as emotional (indicating an alienation from the natural world)? Probably both those things are in play here.

In the final stanza, fear & mourning re-appear; earlier we were told to fear & mourn no longer, but for the birds, trees, & grass: now our fear & mourning are not eliminated but redirected: strange makes a re-appearance as well, as the poem summons up again the men, this time not only strange but sad; it is not the men we mourn for, though, but their children.

What is Flower-Land? Although the poem throughout undercuts our sense of what's going on (we see no flowers; the birds & grass & trees are dying & disappearing; spring may or may not return to earth), in a way Flower-Land has been obvious all along: flowers carry great weight in poetry, signifying beauty, both simple & extravagant; renewal; color; love, both spiritual & sexual. Flowers are how plants seduce & reproduce. All these wonderful qualities, implicit in the term Flower-Land, have been removed from the world of this poem (this is probably why we see the strange, sad men, & are told they have children, but no mention is made of the women who would have to give birth to those children; even mentioning the mothers would bring in a world of sexuality & maternal care that is pointedly alien to the world being shown here).

The second line of the last stanza breaks after heart: a heart-break. It is the first mention we've had of an interior life. & the final line gives us the first sounds in this hitherto silent world: music & song enter, but the music is in the negative context of hearing none (no bird song!) except for the song of death, & death is the note that ends this poem.

It's difficult to read this poem now & not see it in the light of the increasingly urgent problem of climate change created by humanity: this is our world, a world in which birds & other species are dying off at an accelerated rate, in which whole forests of boughs are reduced to ash by wildfires, in which a leafless world with only ugly, death-filled noise is a real possibility. But this poem was written around a hundred years ago, in an America that was already industrializing. Its leftist author probably intended it as an attack on the capitalist corporate world, which alienates much of the population from the natural world (a world which will continue in some form, possibly one twisted & damaged by humanity, but able to continue without it). Although women were of course in the work force then, the standard image of an office drone at the time would be of a man, which helps explain what may seem the male-centered view of the ending.

This is a poem whose bleak warning has gained new resonance over time. I took the poem from the Library of America anthology American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 2, E.E. Cummings to May Swenson, edited by Nathaniel Mackey , Marjorie Perloff , Carolyn Kizer , John Hollander, & Robert Hass.