'Green As an Arbour Grew Leafy June'

I had seen the phrase before and guessed correctly at its meaning from context but still found the expression puzzling: “widow’s weeds.” It entered English in the fifteenth century and is defined, according to the OED, as “the mourning clothes or weeds of a widow.”  Weeds in isolation meant “clothing customarily worn by a widow during a period of mourning for her spouse, and traditionally comprising a black or dark-coloured dress and a veil.” Pairing the words produced memorable alliteration. The phrase stands as evidence of a faded world, what Emerson called “fossil poetry.” I happened on the phrase again in a poem by Walter de la Mare, “A Widow’s Weeds” (Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, 1913): 

“A poor old Widow in her weeds

Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;

Not too shallow, and not too deep,

And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.

Up shone May, like gold, and soon

Green as an arbour grew leafy June.

And now all summer she sits and sews

Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,

Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,

Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;

Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;

Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;

Like Oberon’s meadows her garden is

Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.

Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,

And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;

And all she has is all she needs --

A poor Old Widow in her weeds.”

 

De la Mare plays off the dual meaning of weeds (and raises the question of what distinguishes a “weed” from a “flower”) and recalls Oberon’s floral catalogue as delivered to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene 1):  

 

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:

And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes,

And make her full of hateful fantasies.”

 

True poets, Seamus Heaney said somewhere, know the names of flowers.