Poetry
The Wild Honey Suckle
Philip Freneau · 1786
Synopsis
The poet addresses a white flower of wild honeysuckle that grows hidden in a secluded spot, safe from footsteps and hands. Nature, he tells it, has clothed it in white, set it in the shade and made a murmuring stream flow beside it; its summer passes in calm. But he grieves over the fate that awaits it: the frosts and autumn will leave nothing of it, as the very flowers of Eden have vanished. Before this threatened beauty, contemplation turns to meditation.
Context
Written in Charleston in the summer of 1786, the poem appeared the same year in the press, then in the author's successive collections, almost unchanged. The flower is said to be a wild azalea, the only plant called wild honeysuckle that is both white and fragrant. Fred Lewis Pattee, who edited his poems at the beginning of the twentieth century, saw in it a nature lyricism written with the eye on the object, free of the manner of Alexander Pope; it has since been read as a harbinger of Romantic poetry.
Who it is for
Twenty-four lines, in four stanzas of six rhymed lines, in an eighteenth-century English that presents no difficulty. No French translation in the BnF catalogue.
Prizes and reception
His most frequently anthologised poem, and one of the first signs of romanticism in American poetry.
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