Wild violets
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, 'Sonnet'
Love opens the poet's eyes and makes her see things that she had completely taken for granted in new ways.
Now read on:
I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists' shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made,—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now—unwittingly, you've made me dream
Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.
What we love about this passage...
Lots of sonnets talk about love in terms of flowers, but this modern one plays with that convention and reinvents the form itself. We love the way Dunbar-Nelson subtly varies the expected metre and rhyme schemes, and the way she puts the humble violet centre stage --then takes it further by linking true love to the wild form of the violet, not its domestic version.
Violets are a special flower for Dunbar-Nelson. Violets and Other Tales is the title of her first published collection (1895), back when she was Alice Ruth Moore, before her first (difficult) marriage to fellow writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. The story "Violets", which gives that collection its title, contains a letter that says the following about them: "Violets, you know, are my favorite flowers. Dear, little, human-faced things! They seem always as if about to whisper a love-word". Violets also have a more secret meaning in the poem, as they were often used as a sign of same-sex love between women, just as green carnations signaled male homosexuality (Oscar Wilde famously sported one at the opening performance of his play The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895).
About the author
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was an American author originally from New Orleans who wrote in many forms, including poetry, short fiction, essays, and diaries. She drew on her mixed-race heritage (African American, Creole, Anglo, and Native American) to address a range of themes involving gender, race, and ethnicity, and was active in the suffrage movement as well as serving for many years as a teacher. This poem was published a hundred years ago, in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).
To read alongside...
Hannah Lowe's The Kids (2021) also reimagines what the sonnet form can do. The book is a collection of sonnets drawing on her years as a teacher. It just won the 2021 Costa Book of the Year award.
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