Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Rebecca Wolff’s "Royal Begonia" is a wry, understated meditation on transgression, class consciousness, and the quiet ways in which the personal and the political intersect. The poem traces a moment of minor theft—a woman stealing soil from the royal gardens—and transforms it into a meditation on privilege, nature, and the complex social codes that govern both action and omission. Through its restrained yet richly textured language, the poem subtly interrogates power, ownership, and the delicate balance between confession and concealment.

The opening lines establish the central act of theft: “She stole soil from the royal gardens / on her visit to the castle.” The phrasing is direct, yet the theft itself seems inconsequential—taking soil is hardly an act of grand rebellion, but the fact that it is royal soil lends it symbolic weight. The setting of a castle immediately invokes notions of power, hierarchy, and enclosure; it is a space designated for the elite, carefully maintained and controlled. That the speaker “found it pleasant, while it rained, / to sit on the bench between the rows / of glistening darlings” suggests a moment of leisure, but also of observation. The rain adds an element of natural intrusion—something outside human control that “glistens” the cultivated plants. The speaker’s position “between the rows” underscores a liminality: she is seated between the “exotics” and the “domestics,” caught in a spatial and metaphorical middle ground.

The classification of the plants—“front to the exotics, back to the domestics”—reinforces the idea of hierarchy and categorization. The garden, like the society it represents, is arranged in an orderly fashion, with the “exotics” as a spectacle, placed for admiration, while the “domestics” remain in the background. The use of “species” to describe the exotics adds a scientific or taxonomical tone, but this is immediately undercut by the whimsical observation that they all “looked like a feather duster.” This humorous reduction of the “exotic” suggests both admiration and skepticism—what is presented as rare or foreign can also be trivialized or repurposed into something mundane.

The gardener’s presence introduces another layer of class contrast. “She spoke to the gardener himself, / as he planted signs in the blistering order.” The phrase “the gardener himself” suggests that his presence carries significance, perhaps because he is a laborer within a royal space, a worker maintaining an artificial hierarchy. His role—“planting signs”—reinforces the idea of imposed order, of language and classification being embedded into the natural world. The rain, which earlier made the plants glisten, now takes on a more forceful role: it “excluded / so much even while it pumped / its blood into the display.” This paradox—of rain both nourishing and excluding—echoes the contradictions at play throughout the poem. The garden is lush, yet rigid; the rain is generous, yet selective.

The moment of near-confession follows: “She followed his path, / and in front of the bed whose load / of earth she’d lightened / she came close, / out of some noblesse oblige, / or politesse, / to telling him of the liberty / she’d taken.” The phrase “she came close” signals hesitation. The speaker feels a momentary obligation—whether out of class-based guilt (noblesse oblige) or mere social decorum (politesse)—to admit to the theft. Yet this is quickly reconsidered: “But then thought better / of it.” The theft remains unspoken, a small rebellion retained.

Instead of confession, the speaker shifts into sentimentality: “thought instead sentimentally / of the waving begonia, / maturing in parti-colored splendor / on her sooty windowsill.” The stolen soil has given life to a begonia, now thriving in an environment far removed from the carefully controlled royal garden. The contrast is striking: the begonia grows in an urban space, surrounded by soot, yet it remains beautiful, serving not just itself but “pleasuring bees / and the sun and the nearby candlestick / alike.” This anthropomorphism imbues the plant with agency; it interacts with its surroundings in a way that the rigidly maintained plants in the royal garden cannot. The plant’s capacity to give pleasure suggests an alternative model of existence—one not bound by signs, categories, or class-based decorum.

The final lines reinforce the speaker’s continued detachment from both confession and consequence: “And then she chatted blindly / of the path she’d taken in her life, / up to this day, and surreptitiously / kicked the royal earth with her royal toe.” The phrase “chatted blindly” suggests a kind of rehearsed, superficial conversation—perhaps with the gardener, or perhaps simply as an internal reflection. The “path she’d taken” mirrors the actual path she walks through the garden, implying that her personal trajectory, like the carefully arranged rows of plants, has been shaped by structures beyond her control.

The final action—“surreptitiously kicked the royal earth with her royal toe”—is a perfect encapsulation of the poem’s subtle defiance. The word “royal” is repeated ironically; the speaker is not truly royal, yet by taking the soil, she has absorbed some claim to it. Her gesture—kicking the earth—is small, almost meaningless, yet it is an act of assertion, a quiet refusal to fully submit to the order of things.

"Royal Begonia" is a poem about subtle resistance, about the ways in which power is embedded in everyday spaces, and about the quiet, almost imperceptible ways one can transgress without upheaval. The speaker’s theft is minor, her near-confession never materializes, and yet the act itself—of taking something from an ordered, hierarchical space and allowing it to thrive in a new, uncontrolled environment—becomes a statement. Through restrained language and carefully constructed imagery, Wolff critiques the artificiality of order and celebrates the unexpected beauty of displacement and quiet rebellion.

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