Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants

 

Dictyophora. A detail of an illustration from the book Art Forms in Nature. By Ernst Haeckel. Munich, 2004. Personal archives.

Erasmus Darwin wrote about the theory of evolution, not as profundly as his grandson Charles, that is clear, and he also made a reference to the subject in his poem "The Loves of the Plants", 1789. The poem was published in several editions of the Botanic Garden, 1790. What is so captivating for me, is his romantic anthropomorphization of the stamen (male) and the pistil (female) sexual organs. He considered them as bride and groom. He also sees youths and monsters.

Here are some excerpts of his poem, you can read it all at Gutenberg project, the link is below.

65    Woo'd with long care, CURCUMA cold and shy
        Meets her fond husband with averted eye:
        _Four_ beardless youths the obdurate beauty move
        With soft attentions of Platonic love.

        With vain desires the pensive ALCEA burns,
70    And, like sad ELOISA, loves and mourns.
        The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame,
        And _three_ unjealous husbands wed the dame.
        CUPRESSUS dark disdains his dusky bride,
        _One_ dome contains them, but _two_ beds divide.
75    The proud OSYRIS flies his angry fair,
        _Two_ houses hold the fashionable pair.

With strange deformity PLANTAGO treads,
        A Monster-birth! and lifts his hundred heads;
        Yet with soft love a gentle belle he charms,
80    And clasps the beauty in his hundred arms.
        So hapless DESDEMONA, fair and young,
        Won by OTHELLO'S captivating tongue,
        Sigh'd o'er each strange and piteous tale, distress'd,
        And sunk enamour'd on his sooty breast.

85    _Two_ gentle shepherds and their sister-wives
        With thee, ANTHOXA! lead ambrosial lives;

Cristatella . A detail of an illustration from the book Art Forms in Nature. By Ernst Haeckel. Munich, 2004. Personal archives.

 REFERENCE

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10671/pg10671.html