dark-blistered foxgloves
Geoffrey Hill
Once, before my children started school, we went on holiday to Cornwall in early June. Arriving in West Penwith, the southernmost part of the county, I was thinking of the poet W.S. Graham, who lived there for much of his life and was friendly with the artists around St. Ives.
Looking out across a sunny landscape of fields, moors, hedges and walls on our first evening, I suddenly realised what Graham meant when he spoke — in his elegy for the painter Peter Lanyon — of “foxglove summers”. A foxglove summer, I saw, was a micro-season, when the high spires of these wildflowers with their clusters of white or pinkish-purple bells were everywhere across the Penwith peninsula.
Due to climate change, the phenology — or first appearance — of wildflowers has been getting earlier across Britain since Graham was writing in the 1960s, so it may have been he thought of foxglove summer as mid-June. Possibly he also had at the back of his mind a similar seasonal coinage by Louis MacNeice from the 1940s: “snapdragon solstice”. The snapdragon lingers right across the summer, however, whereas the foxglove’s rise and fall is rapid, as this graph from Plant Atlas 2020 shows:
So when Graham writes in the next line of his elegy “the days are shortening”, it’s a subtle way of signalling his darkening mood — the moment of the poem is on the other side of foxglove summer: Lanyon died in a gliding accident on 31st August 1964.
The foxgloves I saw in Cornwall also took me to another of Graham’s elegies for another painter-friend: “Dear Bryan Wynter”. In this poem — which begins “This is only a note / To say how sorry I am / You died” — he tells Wynter how
The carn
Foxglove here on the wall
Outside your first house
Leans with me standing
In the Zennor wind.
A “carn / Foxglove” is a compound image, associating the flower with a pile of stones, often raised as memorial. The word is more often spelt “cairn”, but Wynter lived in a cottage in the village of Zennor called “The Carn”. And I wonder too if Graham is playing with the connotations of red and pink conjured by the syllable (carnation, incarnadine).
At the end of the poem , he returns to the flower, simply and apologetically:
I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.
The poem’s central symbol is not just a foxglove: it’s a foxglove growing on a wall, having seeded itself in a gap between stones. It is, in other words, a notably tall foxglove — they can grow to five feet — in an elegy that fondly recalls Wynter’s own height: “With your long legs / […] / walking / Across a place”. The flower “knows” the man who was once as tall and handsome as it.
The origin of the name “foxglove” is a controversy with its own poetry. Geoffrey Grigson declares in The Shell Country Book (1962) that it comes “from a tale that the fox wore gloves to make his approach inaudible”. The Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of Great Britain (1983), however, believes this is “unlikely”:
Far more likely is the theory that the name comes from a series of corruptions in both the spelling and pronunciation of old words. For example, glove may be derived from the Anglo-Saxon gliew — a musical instrument with many small bells — and fox could be a corruption of “folk’s”, meaning the “little folk”, or fairies. This theory is supported by the fact that in some parts of the British Isles, such as Somerset and Ireland, the plant is called “fairy bells”.
The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, feels that
the reason for the second part of the name is obvious, as the flower resembles a finger-stall in shape
— and indeed it was this visual association that led to the scientific name of digitalis (the OED defines a finger-stall as “a cover for the finger, typically resembling the finger of a glove […]; a thimble”). Over on the Oxford University Press blog, meanwhile, Anatoly Liberman rules that the “musical instrument with many small bells theory” is “sheer fantasy”:
Glew, or rather gliew (Modern Engl. glee), designated the sound of musical instruments, so that the ringing of bells should be dismissed as irrelevant
Yet there is something beautifully bell-like about how foxglove blooms hang together on one side of their stem. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s visual poem from 1994, “Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea”), is a riddle that plays on this idea by depicting the green stem of the plant as the course of a church-bell weaving its way through “purple digits”:
Compare this change-ringing annotation from the Association of Ringing Teachers:
Another visual poem, by Paula Claire, corrects all anthropocentric perspectives on the name for the foxglove with an alternative compound noun. “Beebibles” is the title of a piece from 1981, comprising the “tracings of 15 split-open foxgloves, revealing the unique coded messages inside each one, privy only to bees”, and made to mark the 15th anniversary of the Association of Little Presses. I like the implication that each splayed foxglove, with its visible and invisible spots (only bees can see the ultraviolet ones), is both a holy book and a limited-edition poetry pamphlet.
If you watch a foxglove for a little while on a sunny day, you’ll almost certainly see a bee visiting its blooms, crawling snugly up inside each one, and getting dusted with pollen in the process. Northumbrian poet Lilian Bowes Lyon, in one of her more Emily Dickinson-ish moments, calls the foxglove bell a “close-fitting house of velvet”, within which “my heart […] might live at ease”. The poem ends, mournfully:
But heart and spirit are roving, hiveless bees
A more complexly linguistic version of this sentiment informs Zaffar Kunial’s widely-admired “Foxglove Country”, from his second collection, England’s Green (2022):
Sometimes I like to hide in the word
foxgloves — in the middle of foxgloves.
The xgl is hard to say, out of the England
of its harbouring word.
[…]Xgl
a place with a locked beginning
then a snag, a gl
like the little Englands of my grief,[…]
gul
says “rose” in my fatherland.
Meanwhile, in the motherland, the xg
is almost the thumb of a lost mitten
As Carol Rumens commented when she made this her “Poem of the Week”:
Most adults can remember the frustration of trying to pronounce words their mouths simply couldn’t get right, though the words they managed to utter were actually more difficult to pronounce. There’s a deeper and more insistent kind of exclusion, though, lurking in the phrase “little Englands”.
[…]
Both words “fatherland” and “motherland” are beautifully rediscovered here, newly flowering in the marriage-knot of countries the poet inherits from his parents, his mother’s England and his father’s Pakistan.
A maternal image for the foxglove flower seems to be tucked into the “thumb of a lost mitten”. We can imagine a child whose mitten fell off because he wasn’t able to put it on properly, since the thumb, like the xg in “foxglove”, was pushed askew and flattened inside the mitt.
Rumens explanation of the lost-mitten image is plausible but perhaps over-ingenious. The whole poem is shadowed by the idea of a child seeking comfort (“I like to hide”) and considers the various sounds of the word it hides in as having some vocalised meaning. “Xg”, however, can hardly be said: it stays stuck in the throat, like the gulping sound a crying child makes when calming down.
The three little kittens, they lost their mittens,
And they began to cry
as the nursery rhyme goes. The poem has already mentioned “grief”, and will go on, in its final lines, to evoke “the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip / that goes before love”. To find the thumb of the lost mitten — as the poet “almost” does — is to go from the “gulf” of loss to the security of “grip”, to calm the grief, as the poem moves from the middle of its word towards its end.
NOTES
You can read Anatoly Liberman’s discussion of the etymology of foxglove here:
https://blog.oup.com/2010/11/foxglove/
You can read W.S. Graham’s two foxglove elegies here:
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/thermal-stair/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55096/dear-bryan-wynter
I can’t quote Zaffar Kunial on one of the peaceful pleasures of summer in Britain right now without linking to his latest poem, which responds profoundly to — and is about responding to — the massacres happening in Gaza:
https://twitter.com/ZaffarKunial/status/1795478032154546361
Thanks for this fascinating post. Meeting up with poet Brendan Cleary after his escape from a prolonged hospital stay, I find him reading W. S. Graham's 'New Collected Poems', edited by Matthew Francis (Faber, 2004) and he highlights for me this moving poem, both robust and gentle. You can find it on the Scottish Poetry Library website here too: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/alexander-graham/
Like Brendan, who has a new collection out from Tall Lighthouse with the ironic title 'Last Poems?', Graham sets a wonderful example. I was also struck by the Cornish connections. I'm working on a book about Rowena Cade, The Minack Theatre and her family. It's said that Rowena would take the digitalis prescribed for her dogs – if it was good enough for them it would be good enough for her. For background and context I've recently enjoyed reading 'Zennor - Spirit of Place' by Bob Osborne (a.k.a. Rebel Not Taken).
I was thinking of WS Graham’s Dear Bryan Wynter very recently when a rogue foxglove sprouted up, and up, against the wall in my own garden. The seed must have been dropped by a bird. I like the spiky intervention so much I’m going to harvest the seeds and plant foxgloves in my garden intentionally. I kept meaning to buy Zaffar Kunial’s collection and your post has finally nudged me into ordering it. Thank you.