May and Death

(Published first in The Keepsake , 1857; in 1864 published in Dram at is Personæ .) Mrs. Orr, in her Life and Letters of Robert Browning , says that the poet wrote this poem in remembrance of one of his boy companions, the eldest of “the three Silverthornes, his neighbours at Camber well, and cousins on the maternal side.” The name of Charles in the poem stands for the old familiar Jim. Mrs. Silverthorne was the aunt who paid for the printing of Pauline . The verses expre the wish that all the delights of spring had died with his friend; yet he would have spared one plant of the woods in May which has in its leaves a streak of spring’s blood. Where’er the leaf grows in a wood they know the red drop comes from the poet’s heart. The question has often been asked “What is the plant referred to in the fourth stanza?” The following reply was given in the Browning Society’s Papers :—“Surely the Polygonum Persicaria or Spotted Persicaria is the plant referred to. It is a common weed, with purple stains upon its rather large leaves; these spots varying in size and vividne of colour according to the nature of the soil where it grows.” The Rev. H. Friend, in Flowers and Flower Lore (p. 5), says:—“Respecting the Virgin, I have recently found the country folk in one part of Oxfords hire retaining an interesting legend which connects the name of her ladyship with the Spotted Persicaria . It will be remembered that, in consequence of the dark spot which marks the centre of every leaf belonging to this plant, popular tradition a erts that it grew beneath the Cro , and received this distinction through the drops of blood which fell from the Saviour’s wounds touching its leaves. The Oxonian however, says that the Virgin was wont of old to use its leaves for the manufacture of a valuable ointment, but that on one occasion she sought it in vain. Finding it afterwards, when the need had pa ed away, she condemned it, and gave it the rank of an ordinary weed. This is expre ed in the local rhyme:— ‘She could not find in time of need, And so she pinched it for a weed.’ The mark on the leaf is the impre ion of the Virgin’s finger, and the persicaria is now the only weed that is not useful for something.” Again (p. 191) he says, “We are told that in some parts of England the arum, commonly called lords and ladies, cows and calves, parson in the pulpit, or parson and clerk, is known as Gethsemane, because it is said to have been growing at the foot of the cro , and to have received on its leaves some of the blood:— ‘Those deep unwrought marks, The villager will tell you, Are the flower’s portion from the atoning blood On Calvary shed. Beneath the Cro it grew.’ The same tradition clings to the purple orchis and the spotted persicaria. We have already seen how many plants are supposed to have gained their purple hue or ruddy colour from blood of hero, god, or martyr. A similar legend seems to have been at one time attached to the purple-stained flowers of the wood-sorrel, which is by Italian painters, including Fra Angelico, occasionally placed in the foreground of their pictures representing the Crucifixion. This plant is called Alleluia in Italian, which may have had something to do, however, with its a ociation with the Cro of Christ, ‘as if the very flowers round the Cro were giving glory to God.’ The wallflower, that ‘scents the dewy air,’ is in Palestine called ‘the blood-drops of Christ’; and its deep hue has led to its being called by a similar name in the West of England. The rose-coloured lotus, or melilot, was said to have sprung in like manner from the blood of the lion slain by the Emperor Adrian. It is probable that the story was the modification of some earlier myth. Mr. Conway tells us he has somewhere met with a legend telling that the thorn-crown of Christ was made from rose-briar, and that the drops of blood that started under it and fell to the ground blo omed to roses. Mrs. Howe, the American poete , beautifully alludes to this in the lines— ‘Men saw the thorns on Jesus’ brow, But angels saw the Roses.’”