Une Fleur du Mal? Swinburne's "The Sundew" and Darwin's Insectivorous Plants

Abstract

IN 1884 ARTICLE FOR THE CORNHILL ENTITLED QUEER FLOWERS, A SURVEY of some of extraordinary discoveries in recent botany, popular science writer and novelist Grant Allen opened his discussion of insect-eating plants with a description of cultural importance of most common English species, sundew: On most English peaty patches there grows a little reddish-leaved odd-looking plant, known as sundew. It is but an inconspicuous small weed, and yet literary and scientific honours have been heaped upon its head to an extent almost unknown in case of any other member of British floral commonwealth. Mr. Swinburne has addressed an ode to it, and Mr. Darwin has written a learned book about it. Its portrait has been sketched by innumerable artists, and its biography narrated by numerous authors. And all this attention has been showered upon it, not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest, or retiring, but simply and solely because it is and deliberately wicked.... It owes its vogue entirely to its propensities. in fact, is best known and most easily accessible of carnivorous and insectivorous plants. (1) Allen refers to Swinburne's Sundew, originally published in The Spectator on July 26, 1862, but revised four years later for Poems and Ballads, and Charles Darwin's Insectivorous Plants (1875). As passage makes clear, both Swinburne's poem and Darwin's book were prominent elements in a cultural fascination with sundew that extended from 1860s well into 1880s. Appearing before Darwin's work definitively confirmed plant's murderous propensities, Sundew is nonetheless haunted by that possibility, a possibility that brings poem into closer relation with more notorious pieces in Swinburne's scandalous collection. While this relation was overlooked or unappreciated at time of Poems and Ballads, it soon became apparent with publication and popularization of Darwin's work. Suddenly Sundew could be read in context of Darwin's discovery and anxieties raised by plant's atrociously and deliberately wicked ways. While judgments about Darwin's book and S winbume's poem differed, in aftermath of Insectivorous Plants potentially subversive moral and cultural implications of Sundew became more difficult to ignore. The common English sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) inhabits boggy, marshy, or peaty areas throughout Britain. It can be encountered near three places Swinburne knew well: his boyhood homes on Isle of Wight; Swinburne family's country seat in Northumberland, Capheaton Hall; and Ashburnham Place in Sussex, a residence of fourth Earl of Ashburnham, his maternal uncle. (2) While Darwin launched his own investigations of sundew on a Sussex heath in summer of 1860, Swinburne associated most closely with Northumbrian landscape. Although he calls it a marsh plant in his poem, Swinburne clearly depicts a north-country moor rather than a low-lying bog. The black water protecting sundew is faint. Heather and blown grass surround it. Moorhen and cattle that have strayed up to it are its visitors. Years later, Swinburne referred to subject of his poem as the little 'sundew' of borders, and it appears again in Winter in Northumberland. (3) Each has just a handful of small, round leaves that generally extend horizontally. The upper surface of leaf is covered with hairs or filaments; short filaments at center of leaf stand upright and are green, while longer ones closer to edge extend outwards and are red. Each filament has a gland at end that secretes a large drop of a thick, sticky liquid. These drops of liquid, glittering in sun, give its common name. They also trap insects, primarily flies, that alight on leaf. In early 1860s, when Swinburne was composing his poem and Darwin's work was in its early stages, sundew's identity as a fly-trap was common knowledge. …