Venus-Plants
i.
(Dionaea Muscipula)
A Venus-flytrap is a vampire-plant –
A carnivore – designed so cunningly
It seems as innocently generous
In free, luxuriant profligacy
As any nectar-yielding source could be.
How openly it offers-up itself;
Its leaves – spread broadly bare and welcoming –
Mellifluous, exuding ichor, (sweet
To taste and censing pleasant pheromones),
Attractive to small insects foraging
In search of something ripe to drink or eat.
Arriving at a leaf, each insect sups
The moist intoxicant contentedly,
(Like some debauchee deeply in his cups,
Oblivious of environmental space),
Until it touches, inadvertently,
One of the bristles scattered randomly
About the surface of that drinking-place.
At once the sugared source snaps firmly shut,
Imprisoning the victim in a trap
From which there’s no escaping certain doom,
Although it struggle to the last behind
The spine-barred window of that living tomb.
From each small death the Venus-plant sucks life
For its own benefit; consuming flesh
To resupply itself with nutrients.
Then sometimes, (strange as any miracle),
Appears a lovely blossom – delicate
And faintly smelling of rare-perfumed scents –
Which flourishes a brief while, then expels
Minute seed-spores to propagate afresh
Its ancient species in unchanging state.
ii.
(Homo Sapiens Poeticus)
Don’t poets, like the Venus-plant, adopt
Such subtle dispositions?.
Honeyed words
Attract the fascinated interest
Of minds in search of sensory rewards;
Their mellow phrases inundate held hearts,
Drown inhibitions and intoxicate
Profound absorption into disregard
For all except the pleasures they donate
In seeming liberality.
But those
Unfortunates who find themselves seduced
And overwhelmed by such devised delights
Of variegated verbal artistry
Into abandoned ecstasies, soon find
Themselves ensnared, unable to break free.
They squander their concerns on these induced
Desires – to satisfy their need for more
Ambrosia which, like morphia, now binds
Them in addictive thrall.
Those poet-minds
That first attracted them towards their source
Now feed upon their captives’ inner selves
Voraciously.
Unable to escape
Such all-consuming, self-sustaining force –
Predaceous, vampiric, vicarious –
Their victims are abstracted out of sense.
Sensivore poets, absorbing the strength
Derived from such inalienable ties,
Put out fresh blossoms of rare poetry
That, in their potency, engender seeds
To guarantee the continuity
Of their own ancient species – which still breeds
Unchanged, as it has done through history –
Gaining their nourishment from others’ needs.
iii.
I pose this parallel because I seem to see
(In plants and poets both), Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry’.
