`Small Swales Of Hope'

Milkweed is a northern plant I miss in Houston. A beguilingly humble weed, it grows along fences and in clumps in fields, and is the diet of choice for the larvae of monarch butterflies. I’ve never seen the Texas species, Asclepias texana. Judging from photographs, it’s un-Texas-like in its scrawniness, with jarringly white flowers. The blossoms of the familiar northern species, Asclepias syriaca, or common milkweed, are lavender or dusty pink. As kids, we favored milkweed because we smeared other kids with the sticky, white, bitter-tasting sap that gives the plant its name, and because when they ripened in the fall a good smack would burst the pods and release a cloud of silk-tufted seeds that blew away on the slightest breeze. The tufts resemble corn silk but are finer and white not yellow. Among the uncollected poems collected in Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems, by Eric Ormsby, is “Milkweed”:

“The milkweed with its stringent silk
Erect in October when the long blades lie
Burnished to glistening under a dwindling sky,
And the trees have the accents of things about to die,
Startled my glance, the way the tressed and milk-
Bright strands of its hidden diadem
Peep from the knobbed and gathered pods.
A field of milkweed, where each black stem
Juts from the cold earth, catches the sun
At its palest declination. Spun
Inside themselves, concealed in the husk
Of their future, the folds of the seeds
Are pleated upon themselves, are wounds
The way a woman wraps a shawl at dusk
Over her shoulders. The weeds
Are populous. The column neglected ground.
Tassel and toss the smudged air of the fall.
And from a little distance the stalks grow tall
And shattered, porch and peristyle
Of some yet undiscovered ruin. Meanwhile,
At the breeze’s twitch, the seeds rise
Upon the air, are lofted, puffed, they float
In the sunset, flitter like white butterflies
And inhabit all your sight. With no note
Struck they lilt on the wind, speckle the slope,
Already winter-darkened, with small swales of hope.”

Word for word the poem is a marvel, but I particularly prize the finish, culminating in “small swales of hope.” “Swale” inevitably echoes with “sail” and “whale,” in a way recalls Gershwin’s “’S Wonderful.” The Oxford English Dictionary dates Ormsby’s sense of the word from Shakespeare’s time, and defines it as “a hollow, low place; esp. U.S., a moist or marshy depression in a tract of land, esp. in the midst of rolling prairie.” The alternation of “winter-darkened” swells and white-tufted swales is memorable, suggesting a cross between a Grant Wood landscape and a piano keyboard.

In a Sept. 24, 1851, journal entry, Thoreau describes the pods of Asclepias syriaca. Typically, he picks the pods and squeezes them, and reaches conclusions similar to Ormsby’s:

“They are already bursting. I release some seeds with the long fine silk attached – the fine threads fly apart open with a spring as soon as released --& then ray themselves out into a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its neighbor & all reflecting prismatic tints. The seeds besides are winged, I let one go and it rises slowly & uncertainly at first now driven this was then that, by airs which I cannot perceive --& I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood – but no, as it approaches it – it surely rises above it & then feeling the strong north wind it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction – ever rising higher & higher --& tossing & heaved about with every commotion – till at a hundred feet in the air & 50 rods off steering south I loose sight of it. How many myriads go sailing away at this season over hill & meadow & river – to plant their race in new localities – on various tacks until the wind lulls – who can say how many miles. And for this end these silken streamers have been perfecting all summer, snugly packed in this light chest – a perfect adaptation to this end – a prophecy of the fall & of future springs. Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer while one Milkweed with faith matured its seeds!”

Both Ormsby and Thoreau celebrate the milkweed as a herald of hope – “swales of hope” and “a prophecy of the fall & of future springs.”

In the final sentence, Thoreau pokes fun at William Miller (1782-1849), the American Baptist preacher who calculated from his reading of the Bible that the world would end in 1843. Specifically, he used Daniel 8:14: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” For Miller and his followers, a Biblical day represented one year. Thus, Christ’s Second Coming was predicted for a non-specified day in 1843, though when pushed by his followers he set the target somewhere between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When nothing happened, Miller revised the date to April 18, 1844. Further adjustments were made, but Miller and his thousands of followers, the Millerites, experienced what came to be called the Great Disappointment. Like Thoreau, Miller was a native of Massachusetts and lived all his life in New England. Oddly, the final phrase from the journal entry – “one Milkweed with faith matured its seeds!” – echoes the title of a “new” volume of Thoreau’s scientific writing, published 132 years after his death, in 1994: Faith in a Seed.