The Field Pansy by Amy Clampitt
I read this poem, though I sometimes don’t like the rambling style, I was intrigued by the extensive vocabulary. It’s rare I actually have to look up a word, but insouciance got me. I put in links to some of the less commonly used words, but if you already know what they mean, more power to you!
The Field Pansy
By Amy Clampitt
Yesterday, just before the first frost of the season,
I discovered a violet in bloom on the lawn—a white one,
with a mesh of faint purple pencil marks above the hollow
at the throat, where the petals join: an irregular, a waif,
out of sync with the ubiquity of the asters of New England,
or indeed with the johnny-jump-ups I stopped to look at,
last week, in a plot by the sidewalk: weedily prolific
common garden perennial whose lineage goes back to
the bi- or tri-colored native field pansy of Europe:
ancestor of the cloned ocher and aubergine, the cream-white,
the masked motley, the immaculate lilac-blue of the pansies
that thrive in the tended winter plots of tidewater Virginia,
where in spring the cutover fields at the timber’s edge,
away from the boxwood and magnolia alleys, are populous
with an indigenous, white, just faintly suffused-with-violet
first cousin: a link with what, among the hollows of the
great dunes of Holland, out of reach of the slide and hurl
of the North Sea breakers, I found growing a summer ago—a
field pansy tinged not violet but pink, sometimes approaching
the hue of the bell of a foxglove: a gathering, a proliferation
on a scale that, for all its unobtrusiveness, seems to be
worldwide, of what I don’t know how to read except as an
urge to give pleasure: a scale that may, for all our fazed
dubiety, indeed be universal. I know I’m leaving something out
when I write of this omnipresence of something like eagerness,
this gushing insouciance that appears at the same time capable
of an all but infinite particularity: sedulous, patient, though
in the end (so far as anyone can see) without consequence.
What is consequence? What difference to the minutiae
of that seeming inconsequence that’s called beauty
add up to? Life was hard in the hinterland, where spring arrived
with a gush of violets, sky-blue out of the ground of the woodlot,
but where a woman was praised by others of her sex for being
Practical, and by men not at all, other than in a slow reddening
about the neck, a callowly surreptitious wolf-whistle: where the mode
was stoic, and embarrassment stood in the way of affect:
a mother having been alarmingly seen in tears, once only
we brought her a fistful of johnny-jump-ups from the garden,
“because you were crying”—and saw we’d done the wrong thing.
