“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” William Shakespeare (Ward 150)
Not Rose Petals
“Our love is not rose petals
or Valentine candy –“ (Ward 150)
“ . . .it is dirt and sand”
“. . . it is the soil we roll in”
“Our love is dirt and sand
and coarse pebbles in a shallow brook.” (Ward 151)
Naming the Growth
“. . . to call a single plant from one lone seed
“love-in-a-mist,” then “devil-in- the bush” (Ward 38) repeated 4 times
“A love that’s lush is grand until we’re touched
Spring Begins in Hinckley, Ohio II
of last year’s leaves . . . I love how they love
what is used and then spoiled – how they, deep
in their wormy brains,” (Ward 78-79)
Hypothesis: The poet believes that love and all of nature and connected.
A. Love is strong like the physical world of dirt and stones or even stronger.
“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” William Shakespeare (Ward 150)
Not Rose Petals
“Our love is not rose petals
or Valentine candy –“ (Ward 150)
“ . . .it is dirt and sand”
“. . . it is the soil we roll in”
“Our love is dirt and sand
and coarse pebbles in a shallow brook.” (Ward 151)
B. Love grows from a seed (even though it may end). (birth and death)
Naming the Growth
“. . . to call a single plant from one lone seed
“love-in-a-mist,” then “devil-in- the bush” (Ward 38) repeated 4 times
“A love that’s lush is grand until we’re touched
C. Love is natural like earthworms eating old leaves. (Death)
Spring Begins in Hinckley, Ohio II
of last year’s leaves . . . I love how they love
what is used and then spoiled – how they, deep
in their wormy brains,” (Ward 78-79)
Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990-2013 by B. J. Ward
I started looking over the poems by first flipping through the book of poetry titled Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems without the slightest idea what the title might mean. I wanted to look at the titles and see some of the subjects the poet was writing about. The words ‘Valentine candy’ caught my eye, because the words before it said that our love is Not Valentine candy. “Our love is not rose petals or Valentine candy” (Ward 150). Those words surprised me. The whole world is usually screaming that love IS about roses, especially around the time of Valentine’s Day. The first two weeks of February (and the last two weeks of March) Valentine candy is everywhere. Hardened sugar in the shape of a heart with loving messages like, ‘I love u’, ‘Kiss me’, ‘you r mine’. I had a feeling that these poems were going to be more fun to read than I had expected.
Valentine candy seems to be all about love and giving roses and promising to be true to your sweetheart. So I stopped at page 150 to read Not Rose Petals. I wanted to read the poem from the beginning. Interestingly, the poem started with a quote from another poet, “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, whose action is no stronger than a flower?” by William Shakespeare (Ward 150). This did not make sense to me at first, but then I realized that since a flower is weak, a true love needs to be stronger than a flower. The Shakespeare quote helped me understand why Ward wrote that love is not “rose petals or Valentine candy” (Ward 150). He was talking about a love that was stronger than rose petals, so he needed to use a different comparison. I understood what love is not like, but not what it is like.
Ward describes what love is like by using words from the natural world, but from geology not the world of flowers. “. . . It is dirt and sand”, “. . . it is the soil we roll in” and
“Our love is dirt and sand, and coarse pebbles in a shallow brook.” (Ward 151). Dirt, sand and pebbles are definitely stronger than rose petals. And then the poet describes how water runs over dirt, sand and pebbles in a brook that I could understand that he was talking about a love that could last for a long time. The running water in the brook is like life passing, trying to move the love or change it, but love remains solid.
Naming the Growth is the title of one of the poems. The way the title has only three words and the way the words are arranged first made me think that the poem was about a tumor. But I was wrong, because in this poem the poet again uses comparisons to nature to describe love. This poem is about the birth of love from “one lone seed” (Ward 38) that in the end remains alone. In the middle there is a time when “love-in-a-mist” (Ward 38) tricks two people into thinking they are in love. But, the mist causes them to see love instead of the reality. The reality is “the devil-in-the-bush” (Ward 38). “A love that’s lush is grand until we’re touched, by grief and secede” (Ward 39).
This is a fun poem to read, because the way botanist names plants one year, and then change the names another year is the first subject that comes up. This way of changing names by botanists is how the theme of .love is introduced. It is fun to read because it is musical, there is a chorus repeated in the poem. The phrases “love-in-a-mist” and “devil-in- the bush” are repeated four times throughout the poem (Ward 38).
At one time a plant and its seed were named ‘love-in-a-mist’ and for some reason, later the name was changed to ‘devil-in-the-bush’. It is easy to agree with the poet’s confusion about how the name could change from something so nice to something frightening. The poet decided the botanist who was doing the naming was mirroring his or her own experiences at the time, by choosing a name so different from love. Next, the poet talks to someone that he once loved and asked if something similar happened to their love. “A love that’s lush is grand until we’re touched, by grief and secede” (Ward 39). The love does not die, it changes to grief and then the two “secede” (Ward 39). That indicates that there is no death but simply a parting of the ways.
The poem Spring Begins in Hinckley, Ohio is divided into three parts. Part II contains the interesting description about how earthworms far under the thawing spring’s ice “have that hunger - to blindly eat the rusting rainbow taffeta, of last year’s leaves . . . I love how they love,
what is used and then spoiled – how they, deep in their wormy brains” (Ward 78-79). The idea of earthworms with “wormy brains” (Ward 79) made me laugh. The poem is really about something serious, how life and death are very closely connected. But the style of writing and using earthworms as a subject lighten up the heaviness of the subjects. The poem is fun to read. “I love how they love” (Ward 79) is a different kind of love than the other two poems, but it is very closely linked to a natural process.
Ward uses the subject of love in many of his poems, but the lines in his poems that describe love are unique. The observations he makes about love are surprising. Many of the metaphors he uses describe love have to do with nature. Some of them make more sense than others, especially when they are taken out of the context of the poem. Luckily, sitting and focusing on one poem at a time, and reading the poem through a few times, makes his poems easy to understand. In the end I understood that sometimes love is strong like the physical world of dirt and stones or even stronger. I felt that love is a part of nature after reading his poems. I enjoy thinking about love by metaphors that are linked to nature.
Work Cited
Ward, B.J. Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems 1990 to 2013. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2013. Print.
