peaches poem theme
They are delicious, and the cadences hypnotic, as in the poem’s first description of nature:The local color is vivid and correct throughout this poem, from the coonskin cap of the speaker’s pioneer companion to the flora and fauna of the southeastern United States (scuppernong and chestnuts, speckled quail and canvasback).But as richly imagined as the first three sections are, they are Here, in the same breath, Wylie alludes to Odysseus’s fate-battered but noble adventurers, and the exodus of the Israelites to the promised land as recounted in the Bible. During a career that spanned only seven years, Wylie would ascend in a small but high-profile coterie of lyric poets that included Bogan praised this skill of Wylie’s for “fusing thought and passion into the most complex forms.” While the imagery of “Wild Peaches” is voluptuous, its prosody is genteel and well controlled, especially here in the middle two sonnets.
Physical beauty, like passion, is contingent and impermanent; we can manipulate and revel in its bounty, but it is beyond our control and will one day overwhelm our efforts. A crate of peaches straight from the farm has to be maintained,1or eaten in days. Her pious ancestors believed that worldly passions could pervert a passion for the world to come; Wylie seems to borrow their fundamentalism to understand her imagination’s lavish attention to the physical world and her urge to prune it back.
Poet and novelist Elionor Wylie was born in Somerville, New Jersey to a socially prominent family, and grew up in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. As the daughter of a...
Just when and why will the world turn “completely upside down”?
Whether or not Wylie meant to allude to this turning point in American history, it does serve to further dislocate the poem in time. About a dozen enormous peaches remained, threatening to rot.
© Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038 Why, I asked myself, do I buy so many at a time?”
After all, it is The upheaval that spurs the lover’s desire to flee is ambiguous.
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The rhythms and sounds remain languid, however, as the “squirrels in their silver fur will So the speaker is free but uneasy in this land of plenty—and she isn’t even there yet.
She mistrusts the easy sweetness of the lotus (or peach) and its power to turn the sensuous to senselessness.
Inheritance and errancy, abundance under control and then out of it again—from the start, The four Petrarchan sonnets that compose the poem are relentlessly musical, heaped with what critic Morton Dauwen Zabel called the “tray after tray of choice images” that distinguish Wylie’s work.
Nothing at Stone Mountain Park echoed my ancestry, but it’s normal for immigrants not to see themselves in landmarks. She couches her connection to her tradition in aesthetic, not spiritual terms (“I love the She then contrasts the Northern with the Southern landscape by collapsing the lush seasonal fantasia of the previous three sonnets to only four lines.
By It grows spontaneously; its discovery feels providential, a reward for one who strays from the path.
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But a peach essentially is a human creation, the product of years of rigorous cultivation.
This image of prosperity and sweet delirium is also one of self-annihilation, suggesting that some aspect of this adventure doesn’t sit well with the speaker.
The following year, she and As the poem continues to spill its bounty of sunshine, fruit, and wild game, hints of death and violence color the pastoral daydream. . On summer nights, Our story began when my parents arrived as immigrants.
She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. .
The privileged child of a high-ranking public servant, Elinor had lived in the Washington, D.C., area since she was young. The couple’s arrival on a “river-boat from Baltimore” to live among once-cultivated peach trees indicates that the mid-Atlantic has already been well settled, and the scene occurs closer to Wylie’s time than the Colonial era; whoever they are, chronologically they are more gleaners than settlers.This lack of temporal specificity tempts us to read the poem as an escape fantasy, brought on by romantic turmoil or global crisis—or both. Without spiritual conviction, her atavistic drive to pare surfaces to their essence leaves her vulnerable to natural law.
The scene is a synthesis of Wylie’s imagination and memory—the mid-Atlantic landscape as she experienced it during her youth in the late 19th century, and as a maturing poet hounded away—and forced back—to her homeland during a time of social change and personal instability.
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