Flora

Warp the wind to play in my soft highlights,

wrap a wreath, my Zephyr, around my neck,

follow the pattern of my winsome step,

my trees of magnolias, your delight,

fall in love with my wax flowers, crisp white,

berry-dotted blooms, needle leaves beckon;

in morning blue, hydrangea’s light-filled hem;

auburn—white rose circled—head of the bride.

She twines her hair, blossoming, all perfume,

till beneath grapevine and twisted hazel,

her delicate bones lie like wooden stems,

until her eyes close as wasted wet blooms

in the meadows—inside the oak’s loyal

arms she rests—still, without ash-grey blemish.

—W.E Isaacson

Poetry Analysis:

Flora uses the classical figure of the flower goddess as both a celebration of beauty and a meditation on mortality. The opening octave is lush, sensuous, and almost painterly: wind, magnolia, wax flowers, hydrangea, roses, berries, and perfume gather around Flora until she seems less like a woman standing in a landscape than the living consciousness of the landscape itself. The reference to Zephyr strengthens that mythic dimension. In J. W. Waterhouse’s Flora and the Zephyrs, Flora is surrounded and pursued by the west winds; Isaacson adapts that visual tradition by giving Flora a voice and allowing her to command the wind—“Warp the wind,” “wrap a wreath”—rather than merely appearing as the beautiful object of Zephyr’s attention. Her character is therefore both feminine and sovereign: winsome and bridal, yet possessing a quiet authority over the natural world. Even the repeated imagery of wreathing, circling, twining, and wrapping creates the sense that nature is continually adorning and enclosing her.

The poem’s decisive movement comes when this flowering body becomes mortal. Flora’s “delicate bones” resemble “wooden stems,” her closing eyes become “wasted wet blooms,” and the oak’s “loyal / arms” receive her. Beauty is not defeated so much as returned to the natural order from which it came. The bridal imagery in the octave therefore acquires a second meaning: Flora is a bride not only of Zephyr or spring, but ultimately of the earth. This places the poem near the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite traditions in which beauty and death frequently occupy the same imaginative space. There are echoes of Keats, particularly his fascination with transient beauty and the knowledge that ripeness already contains decay, while the floral womanhood recalls Christina Rossetti’s habit of using blossoms, seasonal change, and enclosure to explore mortality and spiritual transformation. Visually, too, the poem shares Waterhouse’s Pre-Raphaelite luxuriance: flowers are not decorative background but symbolic extensions of the female figure.

Philosophically, Flora also suggests the ancient memento mori idea that what blossoms must pass, although its conclusion is gentler than a conventional warning about death. The oak does not menace Flora; it holds her “loyal[ly],” and she remains “without ash-grey blemish.” There is something almost Wordsworthian in this absorption of the individual into a larger, enduring nature, yet Isaacson’s imagery is more ornate and mythological. The poem’s deepest tension is therefore between ephemerality and preservation: Flora’s physical flowering ends, but the poem preserves her within wind, wood, flower, colour, and myth. Like Waterhouse’s painted Flora, she becomes an image arrested at the threshold between vitality and disappearance—a figure whose beauty derives partly from the fact that neither spring, youth, nor human life can remain in bloom forever.

—Analysis provided by WLI