See everything and see nothing, see-saw!

from lain illustrations by Yoshitoshi Abe (2006)

by Andrew Perez

I prefer H.D.’s poem because it shows an attempt at trying to leave this hopeless cycle of desperate validation both of these poems depict. Although the sea rose does not achieve a grandiose victory against the systems it ferociously rebelled against, it doesn’t need to. To have reached the ocean, to have persisted, and to have hoped for a better tomorrow, is what makes “Sea Rose” most effective in challenging the traditional symbol of the rose.

H.D. and Puente are separated by a near half-century of social change and feminist thinking that cannot be ignored by the comparison and evaluation to follow. To contemporary readers, H.D.’s poem usurps a tired cliché we have already discarded in the pencil boxes of our middle school backpacks. But to flip the metaphor of the “rose”, one which rejects the feminine objectification of Victorian society and proposes a new kind of feminist tenacity, was an incredibly novel idea for H.D.’s time. She removes the rose from its usual congregation in a garden bush to a lone existence on the tides of a beach. Caught between the “drifts” of the ocean waves battering against “the crisp sand that drives in the wind”, the speaker illustrates the transitionary period many women of the Victorian era were braving despite the various patriarchal institutions shackling them down. This struggle for independence and autonomy has left the sea rose “marred” and “thin”, but is precisely what gives it value over the patriarchal convention of the “spice-rose”. H.D.’s sea rose is beautiful because it does not aim to please the men who behold it, but instead confers a reality of conflict and suppression they have injured it with.

Puente’s “The Rose and The Poppy” feels like a mirrored continuation of H.D.’s “Sea Rose”, in which the battered subject has resigned itself to a quiet and invisible existence. She makes a comparison between the amorous passion of the rose to the sedated sleep of the poppy. “Forgotten”, “rarely chosen”, and “rotting into umber”, the speaker’s outlook on the future is colored by feelings of hopelessness and death. They no longer wish to be a vehicle of relationships and memories cherished and forgotten, but to instead expire alone in the vast expanses of nature and its many orchards. The final stage of this poppy’s life is particularly morbid: its corpse is collected and displayed at the table of all the people who have ignored it in life, eventually to be discarded once the fragrance of its “potpourri” has vanished into thin air. Thus, the sad existence of this poppy terminates as it started: unloved, unseen, and expendable.