In a Vase on Monday: Alone and Palely Loitering

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering,
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing. John Keats
You could be forgiven for thinking that today’s vase was a bit of a cop-out, that I had spent next to no time preparing it, but you would be wrong. It took several circuits and a fair degree of thought to come up with the vase and its associated prop. It may only be a single stem in a vase, but I am more than satisfied with the combination and the title and prop.

The single stem is that of Camassia lechtlinii ‘Semiplena’, bulbs bought many years ago but not appearing until several years after planting. They now emerge every year like ghostly spectres, towering over everything else in the blue & white border and not really belonging to it, leaving me grateful for an opportunity to finally cut them down and remove their unsightly leaves once blooming is over. The vase itself, with just the slightest hint of green, is spectral in itself.

I decided to stick with the pale and lonely single stem the moment my mind dredged up memories of Keat’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, a poet and poem we studied for O-Level back in the day. A friend of mine had a young male Classics teacher at the time whom she christened, perhaps a little unkindly, ‘Alone and Palely Loitering’ due to his sad demeanour and pale complexion. For all we knew he may have been happily married but unhappily teaching ungrateful Classics students – what a mixed bag of memories we store up as we get older!

The camassia stems, although statuesque, are always a little disappointing as the florets open gradually but rarely at the same time, and those at the top invariably die off before opening, victims perhaps, like the wight (in my head he was a ‘knight’), of the beautiful but merciless woman with no mercy.

Ironically, after creating the vase, I remembered I had photographed a vase of tulips earlier in the week, culled early to make room for a summer display, to make use of on IAVOM today, so I will throw those in as a bonus. Please join us with your own vase or vases today by leaving the usual links to and from this post.