Drawing by Susan C. Price
Physician
By Eric Meub
Physician
By Eric Meub
Medieval garden-makers too had reigns
Of glory, like the priest who puttered at
Amboise’s house of kings and chatelaines,
Importing to the castle courtyard that
Renaissance redolent of emerald planes
Or scarlet flowerbeds, and sculpting flat
Italian patterns in the circling chains
Of boxwood (bordered by a gravel mat).
All day the colors called at windowpanes
To every dropsical aristocrat,
Entwined their minds with tonic lace, and went
With them abroad to cure a continent.
Serener nostrums wait on her who cares
For me in my distress, with something more
Elizabethan in her skill with snares
And briars than a patent metaphor.
No wonder I feel better: she repairs
Geometries which neither nature nor
Socratic creeds thought broken, and she dares
To cultivate what physic can’t restore.
A pharmacology of flowers shares
Her appetite for marble railings or
Leonardo’s gothic trinket – taking airs
On terraces above the lawns of war.
Eventually she plants her bright parterres
Of medicine within the castle’s core,
Where topiaries and bosquets of trees
Enfold this root, this troubadour’s disease.
| Copyright © 2020 by Susan C. Price & Eric Meub Eric Meub, architect, lives and practices in Pasadena, the adopted brother of the artist, Susan C. Price. They respect, in their different ways, the line. |
Help, help, some of you other readers of allusive poetry, what’s going on in that second stanza? I did look up the etymology of “physician”:
ReplyDelete(n.) early 13c., fisicien "a healer, a medical practitioner," from Old French fisiciien "physician, doctor, sage" (12c., Modern French physicien means "physicist"), from fisique "art of healing," from Latin physica "natural science" (see physic).
Also “based on Latin physica ‘things relating to nature’.”
I think I get the first stanza’s gift of Italian gardening to estates in other countries, their beauty serving to heal people privileged to live near them. Could the second stanza have shifted the scene to indoors, with potted plants, inner gardens, surrounding architecture? What single “trinket” did Leonardo bring to Amboise for his stay there? The fact that I visited the chateau in January 1966 doesn’t help me now. (Eric took notes when he was there!)
Deep. I believe here we have someone who understands how pharmacology can help us with all of our ailments if only we would cultivate a garden of plants for medicinal use. A few days ago the doctor told me he could prescribe something for me to take, but the dangers of the drug far out weigh the benefits. Needless to say I've been on a chicken and vegetable soup diet for the past few days and I'm feeling better--with lots of credit to the people peopling this excellent poem.
ReplyDeleteYou are both onto some very interesting readings. I am well into Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism." He makes it clear that the author can add nothing to what the reader gets out of a poem. The author's intention IS the poem, whether accurate or not. The only thing I might add is the following. Those of you familiar with Susan's art will have observed that she puts more of her observation into the energy of the sitter than into the form. This drawing, however, seemed to be the exception, and generated a poem that began with physical beauty, and the contrast between historical attitudes towards the female form, through the analogy of the garden (but that was only the beginning: the elements you have unearthed are equally valid). As for the gothic trinket, that refers to the chapel Leonardo designed at Amboise: it straddles the parapet on the other side of the garden from the chateau proper. I take no credit for the use of the marvelous word "trinket": I stole it from Marguerite Yourcenar’s “The Dark Brain of Piranesi” where she uses it in reference to the Château de Chenonceau. Thank you both for your avid reading!
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the realism in this drawing, as opposed to much of Susan's excellent work. I honestly did not get the analogy of beauty from the female form to a garden, so perhaps your source was wrong; you DID add something by commentary, at least to me! I got the 'physic" reference, as in, in the original usage a "physician" dealt exclusively with drugs, pills, "nostrums" and powders, while a "surgeon" did most of what we consider a physician today. I especially like "the lawns of war". Another outstanding turn of phrase in another outstanding poem sir!
ReplyDelete