women’s poetry of the two world wars rapture that characterizes Scovell’s work, evoking the flower as it ‘draws to itself
thesparse|World-wide light’ before rendering it back, ‘a fountain, to the dark’.^32
Like Edward Thomas’s ‘Lad’s Love’ or ‘The Path’, perhaps the only kind of ‘male’
war poetry with which Scovell’s work has anything in common, ‘The Azalea by the
Window’ complicates the immediate observation of the natural world, developing a
kind of tense metaphysics through its syntax. The household flower is transformed
by the poem into a strange and powerful force (‘enhanced,|Possessed’) which itself
‘holds like a cup’ a moment of tension and darkening. As with Thomas’s poetry,
though with even more reticence, only gradually does this intense privacy of vision
begin to accrue a distinct, if distant, political reference. The ‘World-wide light’
intimates the way in which Scovell’s interiors will be asked to hold greater meanings
as the loosely chronological sequence of poems progresses to wartime. This becomes
clear a few pages later, in ‘A Room at Nightfall’. Here another scene of dusk and
flowers, where the ‘narcissus-white’ table lamp represents the flower that is ‘Last
to bloom|Of all lights’,^33 is located more precisely. The poem begins with the
clause ‘As England’s earth moves into dark’, the previously implied Englishness of
place now being made overt. A potentially cosy domestic scene is later destabilized
as the perspective shifts from interior to exterior. ‘We inside’, she writes, ‘Seem
to hang in a domed pearl where light with shadow,|Shadow is interfused with
light.’ The personal safety of the couple in the lighted room becomes fragile, the
domestic place suspended in darkness rather than illuminating the night outside.
That fragility, it is implied by reference back to the first line, is national as well as
personal.
The tentative politics of these early interiors is developed in two poems in the
second half of the collection. ‘Mid-Winter Flowers’ again establishes a national as
well as a local setting in ‘curtained English rooms’ where ‘[f]lowers brought out
of darkness’ bloom.^34 The jonquils, hyacinths, and freesias once more emphasize
the fragility of a room poised in light against mid-winter snow and darkness. They
‘tell our year’s midnight|And turn our thoughts to east with scent and cold of
dawn’, Scovell again allowing a domestic environment to register national unease
at eastward dangers with a dawn that offers little relief. The title-poem, also the
final poem in the collection, concludes this sequence of still lives. ‘Shadows of
Chrysanthemums’ explores the imagery of darkness and light through a detailed
observation of flowers at dusk. Here, though, the shadows of the chrysanthemums
achieve an intensity that ‘outshine[s]’ the actual flowers. In the second stanza, the
poet evokes a half-world of ghosts, stars, and unfathomable distance as, once more,
the domestic interior is opened up and made strange by the natural world that has
been brought inside:
(^32) E. J. Scovell, ‘The Azalea by the Window’, inShadows of Chrysanthemums(London: Routledge,
1944), 21. 33
Scovell, ‘A Room at Nightfall’, ibid. 23.^34 Scovell, ‘Mid-Winter Flowers’, ibid. 29.