I forgot to mention sooner that Resurgence magazine did an attractive presentation of my poem "The blue flower", in its· Issue 272 • May/June 2012, with a full page image of a blue Himalayan poppy. (See below the poem posted for this year's International Poetry Day.)
Splendid though this was, it did not coincide with my own experience of the blue flower, which took place on my walk across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, hence, "the pilgrim's friend." The roadside plant which so delighted me on that walk was the common chicory with its sky-blue flower and its complex pattern of petals, so varied as almost to appear haphazard. And yet, with all that variety, as Brian Goodwin would have said, the plant "emerges" in its full identity and character.
Synchronicities being what they are, the poem was one of those which "arrive" in the mind, and I had no idea at that time about the Romantic symbolism of the blue flower, even less that the common chicory is cited as Novalis' inspiration for the dream experienced by his character Heinrich von Ofterdingen. All of this came to light afterwards. It may be said, then, that I only came to understand the poem fully some time after writing it.
There is now no doubt in my mind that the experience of the flower on my long walk on "the hard road", and its special meaning for me on that journey, were an echo of the Romantic tradition which we are, in our own times, meant to rediscover. Only some new assertion of our belonging with nature and our longing for beauty, can bring us back to our true humanity.
CJM, December 11, 2012
Cichorium intybus
This doesn't do justice to the radiant blue of the flower, but does show the complexity of the petal arrangement.
