Wild peaches are wild because their farmer has abandoned them, or because a traveler has tossed one into a soil and climate favorable to it. Just when and why will the world turn “completely upside down”? . was too big to perceive on my earliest trips to the park.
Originally published in “When I started this poem, I had bought a crate of local peaches and managed to eat or can most of them but reached exhaustion before the bottom of the crate. During a career that spanned only seven years, Wylie would ascend in a small but high-profile coterie of lyric poets that included Bogan praised this skill of Wylie’s for “fusing thought and passion into the most complex forms.” While the imagery of “Wild Peaches” is voluptuous, its prosody is genteel and well controlled, especially here in the middle two sonnets. Whether or not Wylie meant to allude to this turning point in American history, it does serve to further dislocate the poem in time. Wild Peaches Poem by Elinor Morton Wylie. Why, I asked myself, do I buy so many at a time?”
The sibilance is softened by f’s and b’s and long vowels:At once haughty and self-scrutinizing, the speaker’s confession dramatizes the anxiety of an aesthete as well as a lover. Activity 1: Reading the Poem Objective: Students will identify words, images, and phrases that jump out at them in the poem, as well as the placement of the words on the page Project the poem “Peaches” from Poets.org; Ask your students to read the poem silently.
Physical beauty, like passion, is contingent and impermanent; we can manipulate and revel in its bounty, but it is beyond our control and will one day overwhelm our efforts.
The scene is a synthesis of Wylie’s imagination and memory—the mid-Atlantic landscape as she experienced it during her youth in the late 19th century, and as a maturing poet hounded away—and forced back—to her homeland during a time of social change and personal instability. By
It was a burden she shared with her modernist contemporaries.Caitlin Kimball is a poet and a reader for the Poetry Foundation's archive. “Wild Peaches” finds a lyric poet struggling to confront and transcend her inheritance in a rapidly changing landscape. She married a personally troubled local lawyer, whom she left for an older and more prominent attorney, Horace Wylie, in 1910. A crate of peaches straight from the farm has to be maintained,1or eaten in days. Inheritance and errancy, abundance under control and then out of it again—from the start, The four Petrarchan sonnets that compose the poem are relentlessly musical, heaped with what critic Morton Dauwen Zabel called the “tray after tray of choice images” that distinguish Wylie’s work. A wild peach’s sweetness is easy to savor.
Her pious ancestors believed that worldly passions could pervert a passion for the world to come; Wylie seems to borrow their fundamentalism to understand her imagination’s lavish attention to the physical world and her urge to prune it back. we raised our Cokes to the first Georgian president. 1 When the world turns completely upside down You say we'll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We'll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You'll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown While Ezra Pound was exhorting American poets to “break the pentameter” and “make it new,” Wylie instead adopted traditional lyric forms and reached back to the Romantics and late-Victorian Aesthetes to find her poetic models. She addresses the verses to him and seems to keep his point of view foremost—“The squirrels . She couches her connection to her tradition in aesthetic, not spiritual terms (“I love the She then contrasts the Northern with the Southern landscape by collapsing the lush seasonal fantasia of the previous three sonnets to only four lines. But a peach essentially is a human creation, the product of years of rigorous cultivation. Wylie’s own world certainly had turned upside down by the time she wrote “Wild Peaches” and the other poems that appeared in her first full volume in 1921. Inheritance and errancy, abundance under control and then out of it again—from the start, Elinor Wylie ’s poem provokes us to entertain these tensions. About a dozen enormous peaches remained, threatening to rot. It grows spontaneously; its discovery feels providential, a reward for one who strays from the path.
Is it private or public? The following year, she and As the poem continues to spill its bounty of sunshine, fruit, and wild game, hints of death and violence color the pastoral daydream. This image of prosperity and sweet delirium is also one of self-annihilation, suggesting that some aspect of this adventure doesn’t sit well with the speaker. .”—but it is this touch of dread at the start that reveals the reproach mixed with her devotion.