"If you sit at an open attic
window toward the end of September, you will see many a milkweed down go
sailing by on a level with you, though commonly it has lost its
freight--notwithstanding that you may not know of any of these plants
growing in your neighborhood.
...I
notice milkweed growing in hollows in the fields, as if the seed had
settled there owing to the lull of the wind in such places.
Thus,
the quietest behaved carries off the prize while exposed plains and
hills send forth violent winds to hale the seed to them. The calm
hollow, in which no wind blows, without effort recieves and harbors it.
...When
I release some seeds, the fine silky threads fly apart at once, opening
with a spring--and ray their relics
out into a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its
neighbor, and all reflecting prismatic tints. These seeds are besides
furnished with broad, thin margins or wings, which plainly keep them
steady and prevent their whirling round...
...But
not in this case is the return to earth fraught with danger, but toward
night perchance, when the air is moist and still, it descries its
promised land and settles gently down between the woods, where there is a
lull of the wind, into some strange valley--it may be by some other
brook like this--and its voyage is over. Yet it stoops to rise."
 |
Monet ~ Woman Sitting Under the Willows"
monetalia |
"Ah willow, willow, would that I always possessed they good spirits; would that I were as tenacious of life, as
withy, as quick to get over my hurts.
I do not know what they mean who call the willow the emblem of despairing love! --who tell of
'the willow worn by forlorn paramour!'
It
is rather the emblem of triumphant love and sympathy with all Nature.
It may droop, it is so lithe, but it never weeps. The willow of Babylon
blooms not the less hopefully here, though its other half is not in the
New World at all and never has been. It droops not to commemorate
David's tears, but rather to remind us how on the Euphrates once it
snatched the crown from Alexander's head.
*****
Herodotus
says that the Scythians divined by the help of willow rods, and where
could they have found any better twigs for such a purpose? I begin to be
a diviner myself at the first sight of one.
When
I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above
the sedge in some dry hollow early in December, or agove the snow in
midwinter, my spirits rise as if it were an oasis in the desert. The
very name "sallow" (salix, from the Celtic sal, "near," and lis,
"water") suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing
there. It is a divining wand that has not failed but stands with its
root in the fountain."
