Judith Harris

I like to think of nature as a schoolhouse for the emotions and that we want to find, among the many things of this world, a way to body forth our feeling.  The inner world is revealed in terms of the outer world—revealed in terms of things, and their relationship to one another. I’ve often noted that nature “has the look of being looked at” and that we “read” nature subjectively, according to mood or affect, as Dickinson did, and there are revelations in the poetical study of plants in which we encounter something unexpected, strange, and wonderful.

There's the pleasure of the thing itself, and somehow that works against the sadness in a poem like “October Day Among the Roses." By inviting melancholy or grief and "researching" it introspectively, the right understanding comes to it, turning it “up” like a leaf shooting through loam.  And like most elegiac poems, “October Day Among the Roses” comes out of a desire to defend against mutability and to arrest time, while contemplating the memory of memory. But it was also based on an everyday observation of three roses in different stages of growth on a single bush, and their simultaneity.

On the other hand, “Poem” explores the darker side of human nature, when pain only relents because it understands its own inception, so that poet and flowers stand together on the edge of suffering, sharing it. Through nature, the writer can break through isolation and despair, recognizing and affirming the beauty of valued objects that claim their own emotionally magnetic field. In the end, the flowers overshadow the sadness of a breakdown with the promise of the blooms.