'What Little Would Bear Keeping'

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify. (It always seemed important to know the names of things.) It grew, never densely, in the fields behind the house. It was taller than most grasses and weeds, spindly, with an oversized umbel (from the Latin umbella for “parasol”) that connects the numerous small white flowers to the stem, like the spokes of an umbrella. Another common name is wild carrot. Its scientific name is Daucus carota. We knew this intuitively because the plant smelled like carrots. The stems were tough, making the flowers difficult to pick. Queen Anne’s lace, though elegant, is not colorful or in any way exotic. It makes a nice emblem for rugged, homespun beauty. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem, “Portrait by a Neighbor,” which concludes: 

“Her lawn looks like a meadow,

   And if she mows the place

She leaves the clover standing

   And the Queen Anne’s lace!”

 

At The Sonneteer, Boris Dralyuk has published “Night in September,” dedicated to Millay, a sort of answer poem:

 

“A stem extends a frothy glass

    toward my face.

I recognize the brew at once

    as Queen Anne’s lace,

the pretty weed your neighbor moaned

    and groaned about—

the garden wild, the lawn unmowed.

    Here your words sprout

to mind with each belated blossom,

    dust-born rose;

beauty, you felt, was fierce, colossal

    at summer’s close—

when your mind turned to harvesting, to reaping

and laying by what little would bear keeping.”

 

Boris adds “Steepletop / Austerlitz, New York.” That’s the house Millay purchased in 1925. She lived there until her death in 1950. It’s in upstate New York, near the Massachusetts line. The setting and house are beautiful. I visited several times when living in the Capital District.

 

Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) was an Ohio-born artist who painted “Queen Anne’s Lace” in 1946. He wrote: “I never tire of drawing these exquisite flowers. From bud to full bloom, to its final closing into the cup-shaped seed baskets, the flower takes on infinitely varying shapes. Each year I find something new.”

 

I don’t remember another writer noticing the “cup-shaped seed baskets” of the Queen Anne’s lace at summer's end. They survive into winter and some remain at the top of stems even the following summer beside the next growth of blooms. Burchfield doesn’t mention the “tiny purple blemish” at the center of the flower, as observed by William Carlos Williams, but he does include it in the painting.