Garden of Self: H.D. and Jamaal May

I love when I instantly resonate with a song and I can (and will) listen to it on repeat for hours. H.D.’s poetry brings that same joy as each poem speaks with clear emotion. When reading “Oread” I feel desire and even desperation as the speaker asks for what seems impossible. I spent most of my time reading and rereading the retold narrative “Eurydice,” reliving the speaker's growth from bitterness to defiance. The first and second sections are filled with angry question about the desperate situation of being left in hades:

why did you turn?

why did you glance back?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth,

above my face?

(I)

The speaker comes to embrace her fate not with anger or peace, but with strength:

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervour of myself for a presence

and my own spirit of light;

(VII)

In addition to Greek mythology, H.D. uses a lot of nature imagery—specifically garden and botanical elements. She sometimes writes just simply about “flowers,” but also often uses specific images of “blue crocuses” and “the very golden hears of the first saffron” As to what these images are doing I cannot say. In the poem, there seems two realms of nature—hades and upper earth—and then the speaker’s own nature making a display towards the end of the poem.  The speaker’s flowers seem a foundation, an place of assurance and self-dependence.

Jamaal May also explores themes of growth through botanical imagery. The speaker in “I Have This Way of Being” is less of a dialogue than H.D.’s poem. In contrast to the strong self seen in “Eurydice,” the speaker in May’s poem uses the garden as a metaphor for discovery and evolution of the self. May's poem also seems syntactically relate to the imagiste form. I wonder what emotions would develop if May had chosen to make the poem longer. Would a long poem reveal a change in the speaker's feeling about his or her identity? Or would it be an elongated discourse of the same emotion? I enjoy poetry that deals intensely with on emotion. However, as I spend more time with modern poetry, I find myself developing a taste for the long poem and what it can do. 

I Have This Way of Being

Jamaal May

I have this, and this isn’t a mouth
           full of the names of odd flowers

I’ve grown in secret.
           I know none of these by name

but have this garden now,
           and pastel somethings bloom

near the others and others.
           I have this trowel, these overalls,

this ridiculous hat now.
           This isn’t a lung full of air.

Not a fist full of weeds that rise
           yellow then white then windswept.

This is little more than a way
           to kneel and fill gloves with sweat,

so that the trowel in my hand
           will have something to push against,

rather, something to push
           against that it knows will bend

and give and return as sprout
           and petal and sepal and bloom.