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 simonfeatherstone

But space in that shadow world lengthens, its creatures

Fallback and distance takes their features;

The shadows of the flowers that lean away

Are blurred like milky nebulae;

And faint as though a ghost had risen between

The lamplight and the wall, they seem divined, not seen.^35

The household is disturbed, and the observer senses an uncanny and unmanageable
presence in the room. The ‘dying, wild chrysanthemums’ intensify their negative
presence ‘where deep|Is set on deep, and pallors keep|Their far-off stations’.
There seems to be no war here, and yet, as with the apparently casual mention
of England in the earlier poems in the collection or, indeed, of Verdun in Stein’s
‘Lifting Belly’, the meditation on chrysanthemums is troubled and informed by a
wider darkness hinted at in the phrase ‘far-off stations’. That ‘other’ world is at
once metaphysical, material, and military, the poet’s anxiety both mysterious and
urgently contemporary. Dying winter flowers summon all of these forces into the
middle-class urban drawing-room.
The poems ofShadows of Chrysanthemumsalso chart the progress of a relation-
ship. This is no Loyan sex war but, like ‘Songs to Joannes’, it is a sequence that is
attentive to the ways in which a private world, of marriage in this case, is invaded by
other ‘carnage’. Two sonnets, ‘Marriage and Death’ and ‘Love’s Immaturity’, initiate
the theme, and these are followed immediately by the first poem about motherhood,
‘The Poor Mother’. From then on a series of poems weaves together themes of
sexual and familial love. ‘A Wife’ reviews a year of marriage, with the speaker,
‘born here a second time’,^36 becoming a child even as her own time for childbirth
approaches. The characteristic quiet bliss of these love poems is offset by an equally
characteristic sense of the fragility of such connections. The first of the sequence
is called ‘Marriage and Death’, and a later sonnet, ‘Time for Sleeping’, introduces
the particular mortal threat of war for the first time. Looking down at her sleeping
husband, the speaker confesses ‘I think of war and death’, marking an invasion of
intimacy similar to that evoked by the flowers that enter and change the domestic
space in other poems. ‘Barbara’, one of the weaker poems in the collection, is an
account of a marriage stalled by war: ‘Her husband the young soldier...|(No chil-
dren till the war is over)’.^37 However, this poem of hiatus heralds the longest poem
in the collection, a set of eleven lyrics about what it means to bear a child in wartime.
‘The First Year’ is a poem that expresses the rapture of motherhood (‘I am
absorbed and clouded by a sensual love|Of one whose soul is sense and flesh
the substance of|Her spirit’).^38 In a way oddly comparable to ‘Lifting Belly’, it
insists upon the delight of intimate involvement and exclusive contact in ‘an
imaginary world|Where I speak to my baby in English words’. Implicit in this,

(^35) Scovell, ‘Shadows of Chrysanthemums’, inShadows of Chrysanthemums, 44.
(^36) Scovell, ‘A Wife’, ibid. 31.
(^37) Scovell, ‘Barbara’, ibid. 35. (^38) Scovell, ‘The First Year’, ibid. 38.