Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Of the Flower of Love and the Wandering Horses" by Robert Desnos is a vivid tapestry of surreal imagery, where the natural world becomes a metaphor for the complexities of love, decay, transformation, and rebirth. Through a narrative that blends the fantastical with the existential, Desnos crafts a poem that explores themes of mortality, desire, and the cyclical nature of life.

The poem opens with the image of a giant flower in the forest, loved to a potentially destructive degree by the trees around her. This flower, more radiant and sad than the love between the sea and the moon or the dried sand at the whim of the waves, symbolizes an overpowering force of attraction and beauty that threatens to consume everything around it. The love of the trees for the flower is so intense that it leads to their own demise, yet this very decay feeds the flower, allowing it to thrive. This cycle of attraction, consumption, and renewal serves as a powerful metaphor for the destructive and regenerative powers of love.

Desnos's narrative then shifts to the personal, as the speaker identifies with the flower, claiming a shared essence with it. This connection suggests a deeper reflection on the nature of identity and the recognition of oneself in the other, highlighting the poem's exploration of love as both a unifying and isolating force.

The poem is replete with transitions between scenes of natural beauty and decay, life and death, all underscored by a sense of longing and existential search. The "wandering horses" that appear throughout the poem serve as a recurring motif representing freedom, untamed nature, and perhaps the uncontrollable aspects of human desire and ambition. Their passage through towns, fields, and past the flower signifies the inevitable march of time and change, leaving only memories and relics, like "a strange fossil," in their wake.

Desnos skillfully weaves together images of a heart stopping, towns sprouting, and the landscape being reshaped by the forces of nature and civilization, creating a sense of the world as a living, breathing entity that is constantly in flux. The juxtaposition of the eternal, unblemished flower with the transient lives of the trees and the wandering horses raises questions about permanence and impermanence, about what endures and what fades away.

The poem's conclusion, with its invocation of volcanoes, the sky falling in, and the appearance of the wandering horses in moments of death, loss, and waiting, imbues the narrative with a sense of apocalyptic beauty. It suggests that in moments of profound change or ending, there is also the possibility of renewal and wonder, as embodied by the enduring flower and the majestic, untamable horses.

"Of the Flower of Love and the Wandering Horses" is a mesmerizing journey through a world where the boundaries between reality and imagination are blurred, where love and death intertwine, and where the natural and the mystical coexist. Through his rich, evocative imagery and his exploration of deep, universal themes, Desnos offers a meditation on the beauty and tragedy of existence, on the forces that bind us and the desires that drive us, and on the enduring mysteries of the natural world and the human heart.

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