LINES TO A SKUNK CABBAGE.
Reading edition
Oh, life grotesque! How, whence did spring The thought that gave thee blossoming? How comes thy strange offensive bloom Near knolls that give sweet violets room? Sweet violets, which fill the air With perfumed incense of a prayer That, floating to the world above Calls blessings from the soul of Love. But thou, mephitic bloom! thou hast A thought in thee of ages past, When songs of love were all unknown, Ere earth had into beauty grown, Ere rippling brook and soughing pine Had turned her prose hills into rhyme; When all was dark, and cold, and bare, Thou hadst, perhaps, a mission there; And that is why, ’neath spring-time snows Thy curious spathe so early grows. Hast thou no mission now, strange flower, Happier to make spring’s early hour? Hark! from thy close-wrapped heart doth come The working bee’s glad, soundful hum, Where loads of pollen he doth find His waxen honey cells to bind. So, thou hast place in fields of use, And vain are now words of abuse— Giving the best thy heart doth hold To help the workers of the world. And giving thus, with patient grace, Doth baser qualities efface, And in a better, higher sphere Thine inner beauty doth appear, And thy developed soul shall be Violet-sweet eternally. —Beth Max.
These lines were suggested by a spathe of the skunk cabbage sent me by my brother, W. S. Ripley, of Wakefield, Mass., who mentioned in his letter to me when the specimen was sent that he stopped “to watch the bees go in at the aperture on one side of the spathe, and listened to their loud humming inside, as they laid on their load of pollen.” In Thoreau’s “Early Spring in Massachusetts,” page 172, in writing of this plant he says: “All along under that bank I heard the hum of honey bees in the air, attracted by this flower. Especially the hum of one within a spathe sounds deep and loud.”