Chapter 4: Poetry as Time-Lapse Photography

As their talent develops guide your pupils toward Nature--into Nature. Make them experience how a bud is born, how a tree grows, how a butterfly unfolds so that they may become just as resourceful, flexible, and determined as great Nature. Seeing is believing--is insight into the workshop of God. There, in Nature's womb, lies the secret of creation.
Paul Klee

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning.
Rainer Maria Rilke

"Every great writer," Borges has noted enigmatically in an essay on Franz Kafka, "creates his precursors" (108). But does not every new art as well? If it can be shown that time-lapse photography has contributed to poetic inspiration in our time, expanding and deepening the consciousness of poets, enriching the possibilities of metaphor, it likewise might be argued that the particular "door of perception" known as time-lapse photography may have opened long before this century and that the writers I have discussed are in fact the second generation of time-lapse poets. For the Romantics likewise seem to have possessed time-lapse consciousness, a vision which was instrumental to formulation of that organic poetics which has been their greatest legacy to modern thought. Any complete "psychic archaeology" (the phrase is Theodore Roszak's, in Where the Wasteland Ends) of time-lapse should really include them as well (though space permits here only a brief, preliminary survey).


I. The Romantics

When William Blake, in Jerusalem, imagines the emanation of the cosmos (as if foreseeing the Big Bang of Twentieth Century cosmologists), he describes it in time-lapse fashion:

The Vegetative Universe opens like a flower from the Earth's center
In which is Eternity. It expands in Stars to the Mundane Shell.
And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without. . . . (633; Plate 13, ll. 34-36)

And in Milton does not Blake suggest that all poetry is in fact the product of a new orientation in time, the transcendence of normal biological rhythms and an ordinary metabolism, made possible through poetic imagination's time-lapse photography?

Every time less than the pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period and value to Six Thousand Years.
For in this Period the Poet's Work is done. (Keynes, p. 516; Plates 28 [ll. 62-63] and 29 [l. 1]

The work, that is, of cleansing the "doors of perception" so man can see every thing "as it is, infinite."


In the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge--both his poetry and poetics and his natural philosophy--we find a vivid second example. The theory of creative imagination, for which Coleridge was a major progenitor, held (according to James Engell's authoritative study) that "it is not simply that the imagination perceives the development of nature; it generates a similar process in the self." It was grounded in the faith that the "imagination contains within itself a potential which, uniting with external influences of nature, leads the mind to a new stage of growth" (Engell 347). (Nature, as Goethe put it succinctly, is "a model of everything artistic" [quoted in Verdi 225].) And Coleridge's conception of the origin of such imagination in the individual suggest a knowledge of metamorphosis of form which (as Owen Barfield has argued in his interpretation of Romanticism's place in the evolution of consciousness) harkens back to the Greek awareness of phusis, and ahead (as I would like to suggest) to becoming as revealed in time-lapse photography.

In Biographia Literaria, for example, Coleridge writes:

They and only they can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! (Chapter XII)

In time-lapse photography's latter-day organicism, the potential and the actual--natura naturans and natura naturata (in Coleridge's terminology) are revealed intertwined: what to Coleridge are poles in man's organic relation to nature become--in a marriage enacted via technology--a living unity.


Both Wordsworth and Shelley also seem to have possessed time-lapse vision. The many "spots of time" passages in The Prelude, for example, suggest a momentous sense of the world's becoming, a becoming which seems about to engulf the poet's growing sensibility. The famous account of crossing the Alps in Book VI, with its mystical revelation of the natural world as manifesting the "workings of one mind, the features/Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;/Characters of the great Apocalypse,/The types and symbols of Eternity,/Of first and last, and midst, and without end," is a particularly striking example (269).


Is not Shelley's "Mont Blanc," in its similar depiction of a mind which "renders and receives fast influencings,/Holding an unremitting interchange/ With the clear universe of things around," a poetic precursor of time-lapse? It is, after all, a poem--redolent with images of a nature seemingly still and yet eternally active, of a world "Where waterfalls around it leap forever,/Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river/Over its rocks ceaselessly burns and raves"--which presents us with a perfect scenario for a time-lapse film. In a time-lapse medium, the essentially geological imagination of Shelley's great poem would no longer need tax the limits of language.

Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant" likewise seems a fit subject for time-lapse, though on a smaller scale. The pathetic fallacy to which the poem so often succumbs as Shelley describes the life of a garden the "lovely mind,/ Which dilating, had molded her mien and motion/Like a sea-flower unfold beneath the ocean . . ." of the lady who tends it would not seem quite so precious if we understood it to be the result of poetic diction's attempt to capture in progress an essentially invisible world of transformation. All the "sweet shapes and odours" of the garden, as Shelley tells us in the poem's closing stanza, never really pass away; for there the potential and the actual ebb and flow. And "For love, and beauty, and delight,/There is not death nor change." But men forget this fact, Shelley explains, because "their might/Exceeds our organs, which endure/No light, being themselves obscure." Time-lapse vision, poetic or photographic, lessens the obscurity and brings illumination through the imaginative enhancement of merely biological organs.


And was not Goethe's obsession--pursued in both his poetry and science--with the "metamorphosis of plants," his discovery, by means of the "exact concrete imagination" he sought to perfect, of the "Urpflanze" (the archetypal plant), a longing for and an imagining of a kind of time-lapse vision? When, in his legendary 1794 encounter with Schiller, Goethe was told by his fellow poet that the Urpflanze was not a product of experience at all (as its discoverer claimed), but only an idea, he had replied, "Well, so much the better; it means that I have ideas without knowing it, and can even see them with my eyes" (quoted by Heller, The Disinherited Mind 7). For Goethe, that "Greek born in the North" (as Schiller himself called him), phusis was evidently still a reality.


"Nature has neither core/Nor outer rind," Goethe was convinced, "Being all things at once" (from "Allerdings: Dem Physiker" ["True Enough: To the Physicist"], Selected Poems 237). This conviction lead to an awareness of metamorphosis in nature (as Erich Heller has observed) "far nearer to Aristotle's entelechy than to modern genetics." It inspired a method of approach toward the study of natural phenomena which (in his own words) did not "tackle Nature by merely dissecting and particularizing, but shows her at work and alive, manifesting herself in her wholeness in every single part of her being" (Heller 6). Unlike his contemporary Kant, who denied that the phenomenal provided access to the noumenal, Goethe (like Coleridge) found the two forever mated, and he thus never lost faith that through "our contemplation of incessantly creative nature" we might "become worthy of some intellectual participation in her creativeness" (Heller 29). Thus he could counsel, in a poem which distills the theory of organic imagination into four lines,

If it is the greatest, the highest you seek, the plant can direct you.
Strive to become through your will what, without will, it is. (The Eternal Feminine 129)

Goethe, of course, had derided the effect of microscopes and telescopes on human vision, preferring the "true illusion" of our actual, subjective experience of nature, unaided by any enhancement--save that provided by "exact, concrete imagination." But surely he would have embraced the techne of time-lapse photography as a means, at once scientific and poetic, of publicizing the Urphanomena; as a singular revelation--both idea and experience--of that "holy secret, clear as day" (from "Epirrhema,” Selected Poems 159) which his own great work had discovered and celebrated.

II. Twentieth Century Poetry

Understandably, given the ancient, primordial rapport of phusis and poiesis, it has been 20th century poetry which, it would seem, has taken time-lapse's vision of becoming most to heart, incorporating its methods and revelations into its form and substance as if the technique's enhanced revelation of phusis were "almost a remembrance."


When the French poet Cendrars first witnessed time-lapse photography in a Parisian theatre, he was moved to exclaim, flabbergasted by the experience, that "accelerated, the life of flowers is Shakespearean" (quoted by Munier, 93). In the new cinematic technique Cendrars had evidently recognized a sister art. So, too, have other Twentieth Century poets.

Like many of his contemporaries, Cendrars was inspired by what Monique Chefdor has called "the general craze" for the cinema. "The fragments of L'A B C du cinema (1926) which [Cendrars] published in various reviews in 1919," Chefdor observes, "testify to his enthusiasm for the seventh art, which he eulogized at times, to delirious heights. In his typical blending of scholarly erudition and fantasy he proclaimed with prophetic intensity that the cinematographic arts were to become the language of a race of new human beings, the Gospel of tomorrow, the fourth revolution after the three previous ones of the importation of the Phoenician alphabet by Cadmus to Greece, the discovery of printing and the invention of the radio . . ." (68).

Cendrars' enthusiasm for time-lapse was pronounced. In a side excursion into the cinema in his autobiographical A Night in the Forest, for example, time-lapse figures prominently in his theorizing and in his metaphors. Considering the manner in which film reveals the mysteries of human character, he insists that "There's no reason today why we cannot unravel the complex skeins of a human character on the screen, in the way slow motion [sic] shows us the germination, burgeoning, budding, blooming, and death of plants." And though, he admits, we may not recognize at first the portrait of man which would thus emerge, we will come to accept our cinematic likeness as "second nature," as phylogeny and ontogeny, phusis and nature, poiesis and techne.

This thick blood, this suspended flower, this diamond ballet, this smile full of stops and starts like the traffic in a big city, this new shadow in the light, this kernel, this black eye, this dark streak, this crack in the microscopic analysis, this bean--it's you--it's you. Don't hesitate; move! You are dead; move! You are curled in a spiral; unwind! You are born into the reality of the cinema; move! Jump! and watch out for the matrix! . . .

You, yourself, you, anonymous as you are to yourself, alive, dead, living dead, wild rose, angelica, hermaphrodite, human, too human, beast, mineral vegetable, chemistry, rare butterfly, the residue in a crucible, the root of the voltaic arc, a plummet to abysmal depths, two fins, an air hole, mechanical and spiritual, full of gears and prayers, aerobic, thermogenic, winged foot, ion, god, automaton, embryo, seal with peyote in his eyes.

It is you in instaneity.
It is you in eternity.
In full becoming,
You in the flow of time.

The "future role of the cinema," Cendrars would thus prophecy, "will be to rediscover man, ourselves, to show us up, to make us accept ourselves without resentment and without disgust, such as we are, with the lives of our ancestors and our children within us, with no humbug, beyond all conventions, in all fatality, in all atavism, in full becoming, like animals, whether drunken or good or reasonable or wicked."


At about the same time in the century that time-lapse photography was being developed as a tool in the study of organic life processes, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had come to understand the poet's true task to be as witness to all acts of blossoming. In his "Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter," for example, a group of women beseech the poet, pleading with him to understand and describe their growth correctly and alluding to the burgeoning natural world of which they are inextricably a part, "Sieh, wie sich alles, aufut: so sind wir" ("Look how everything unfolds; we are like that") (quoted in Hartman 74).

Rilke's whole poetic achievement, it might be argued, was the attainment of a means for capturing such unfoldings in progress--in time-lapse, if you will. The anemone he describes in Die Sonnette an Orpheus, II, 5 (1923), a flower fully, synchronously open in tropism to "das polyphone/Licht der lauten Himmel" ("the polyphonic light of the loud skies") in a way Rilke thought man himself should be to earthly experience, was, after all, a central symbol for Rilke of true poetic consciousness.

what he wanted to learn to be a poet
allude to epigraph

Rilke's conception of time-lapse even took on evolutionary dimensions. "Alongside of the most rapid movements," he wrote in "The Young Workman's Letter,"

there will always be slow ones, such, indeed as are of so extreme a leisureliness that we shall not live to see the course they take. But that is what humanity is for, is it not, to await the realization of that which exceeds a single life-span?--From its point of view the slowest process is often the quickest, that is to say, we find that we called it slow simply because it could not be measured. (Where Silence Reigns 74-75)

We find the Irish poet and mystic AE (George Russell) thinking of his relationship to time and memory, and consequently his source of poetic inspirations, in terms of time-lapse photography. In Song and Its Fountains (1932), a book which is as much spiritual autobiography as a theory of poetry, he tells of a form of meditation he began to practice as an aid to creation, in search of the wellsprings of poetry.

I began to practice a meditation the ancient sages spoke of. In this meditation we start from where we are and go backwards through the day; and later, as we become quicker in the retracing of our way, through weeks, through years, what we are now passing into what we did or thought: and so we recall a linked medley of action, passion, imagination or thought. It is most difficult at first to retrace our way, to remember what we thought or did even an hour before. But if we persist the past surrenders to us and we can race back fleetly over days or months. The sages enjoined this meditation with the intent that we might, where we had been weak, conquer in imagination, kill the dragons which overcame us and undo what evil we might have done.

Able to see his life whole, to understand that all its seemingly disparate events are of a piece, he can thus see it as a becoming, an unfolding in time:

I found, when I had made this desire for retrospect dominant in meditation, that an impulse had been communicated to everything in my nature to go back to origins. IT BECAME OF MYSELF AS IF ONE OF THOSE MOVING PICTURES WE SEE IN THE THEATRES, WHERE IN A FEW MOMENTS A PLANT BURSTS FORTH INTO BUD, LEAF, AND BLOSSOM DWINDLING INTO THE BUD. MY MOODS BEGAN TO HURRY BACK TO THEIR FIRST FOUNTAINS. (xxx; my italics)

Could AE have conceived of his life, imagined the unity of it, in this way without time-lapse photography as the vehicle of his metaphor?

Valéry, "Man and the Sea Shell"


In Hart Crane's "Repose of Rivers" (1926), an account of the poet as he stand enraptured before the Mississippi delta--"That seething steady, leveling of the marshes"--time-lapse is again the controlling metaphor. Remembering back to an earlier time when his present visionary state--a kind of time-lapse view of geological and biological processes working their effects over great expanses of time, yet seen in the imagination as instantaneous--was an everyday occurrence for him, the poet recalls how his mystical vision of cypress trees as they "shared the noon's/Tyranny" once had the power to fascinate his innocent attention so totally that it drew him "into Hades almost." He summons up again that earlier consciousness in which he looked on possessed as "mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams/Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them/ Asunder." This difficult, surreal, drunken imagery is, of course, quintessential Crane, but "Repose of Rivers" is not merely the dregs of Crane's now legendary drinking bouts in search of inspiration. At the heart of the poem's dreamlike, vatic vision lies a time-lapse consciousness of nature, as the poem's closing lines make apparent. Lost in that "memory all things nurse," Crane equates his former vision with his present one--like AE finding his end in his beginning--and, reclaiming his lost powers as a seer, realizes that then as now he is able, in a kind of time-lapse hearing, to listen to "wind flaking sapphire. . . ./ And willows could not hold more steady sound" (xxx).


Or consider Richard Eberhardt's often anthologized "The Groundhog" (1930). If it had not been written over forty years earlier, the poem might be misjudged as a poetic plagiarism of Sean Morris' time-lapse record of a mouse's consummation. For like that film, Eberhardt's poem telescopes time (three years) to present a vivid moving picture of a small mammal's corpse eaten by maggots. But the poem is no mere recording; it is not a disinterested, scientifically valid account. It is a poet's subjective eye, not an objective, time-lapse camera, which captures the unfolding scene.

It is the poet who in mid-summer, "Half with loathing, half with a strange love . . .", bears witness to "nature ferocious in him [the groundhog]"; who detects "his maggots' might/And seething cauldron of his being . . ."; who experimentally pokes him "with an angry stick," only to see the "fever" of the maggots' meal become "a flame." It is the poet who falls to his knees, "Praying for joy in the sight of decay," his faith in the meaning of things momentarily shaken by the "senseless change" he confronts, reminded of his own mortality by this time-lapse momento mori.

It is the poet who returns in autumn to discover, in a year which has "lost its meaning," "The sap gone out of the groundhog" and only the "bony sodden hulk remaining"; who comes back to the scene, like a war veteran compulsively attracted to the spot where he lost a limb, finding only a "little hair left,/And bone bleaching in the sunlight/Beautiful as architecture."

And it is the poet who comes back once more, three years later, unable then to detect even a trace of the drama to which all along he has been the only witness.

Eberhardt's subjective, poetic, time-lapse record of the groundhog's recycling makes vivid for the reader the conjoined feelings of awe and revulsion provoked by viewing the Morris film. For Eberhardt cannot achieve the aesthetic distance necessary to find the scene beautiful, nor can the viewer of the film detach himself sufficiently to appreciate objectively the richly patterned transformation, perhaps beautiful in and of itself. Poetic time-lapse, it seems, is the product of a consciousness which is itself still within time, still embodied, still sympathetically linked in imagination with all that it perceives, still the eye and the voice of the natural world's coming-into-being, its "blooming, buzzing, confusion."


The poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose synaesthetic, hallucinatory imagery has often been called surrealistic, has a distinctly time-lapse quality. No poet of our time has been more attuned to the ongoing flow of time and its effects. In "Death Shall Have No Dominion," for example, he records a vision of the transmigration of souls which equates it with the water cycle, culminating in the return of those souls to nature, described in a powerful image:

Heads of characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down.
And death shall have no dominion. (77)

And it is a time-lapse sensibility, is it not, which allows him to see that, in the midst of the world's becoming, creation and destruction are one: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer" (10).


In Theodore Roethke's "Transplanting (1948)," the poet's vivid description of a gardener's act becomes, in Roethke's imagination, a time-lapse vision of the plant's whole burgeoning. The poem's first stanza is a careful record of a greenhouse transplanting. as careful hands make the plants "Ready for the long days under the sloped glass." But the second stanza is witnessed by no physical eye.

In yet another poetic return to time-lapse's primal scene, Roethke grows the plant, sampling moments from its "long days" in its bed:

The sun warming the fine loam,
The young horns winding and unwinding.
Creaking their thin spines,
The underleaves, the smallest buds
Breaking into nakedness,
The blossoms extending
Out into the sweet air,
The whole flower extending outward,
Stretching and reaching.

Later in the century, time-lapse poetry continued to be written. For example, when William Carlos Williams, in "Asphodel that Greeny Flower" (1955), looks back over his life, his marriage, and his career as a poet from the vantage point of his seventies and grasps for the first time their essential reciprocity, it is as if he were watching a time-lapse film of his own individuation:

As I think of it now
after a lifetime
it is as if
a sweet-scented flower
were poised
and for me did open. (182)

Underpinning W. S. Merwin's "Unchopping a Tree" (1970) is a time-lapse vision of natural growth. A prose poem, written in the form of an instruction manual intended to assist in the reassembly of a felled tree, Merwin's ironic lines explores the complexity of living systems and man's inadequacy in the face of the natural. The poem's voice is that of a Swiftian, cold-hearted expert, who speaks matter-of-factly of an infinitely complex, step-by-step process: the reattachment of each leaf and branch, the replacement of nuts (he instructs the reader to place those already opened back into their shells), the labyrinthine reconstitution of each spider web. There will, he admits, be some difficulties of course: "With spider webs, you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment." Nor, lacking "any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment," will the foliage be easily put back.

As Merwin's expert goes on to describe the rest of the tree's "resurrection"--the replacement of the bark, the gluing in of innumerable splinters, the erection of the trunk--it becomes clear that this process, which the speaker proudly calls "men's work," is in fact beyond human means. The work, we are told in understatement, may cause us to wonder "to what extent it should be described as natural, to what extent man-made."

Indeed, rechopping a tree "will lead . . . to speculations about the parentage of beauty itself, to which you will return." And at the poem's end, we learn, the process is not yet finished.

Others are waiting.
Everything is going to have to be put back.

In effect a reverse-motion time-lapse prose poem, "Unchopping a Tree" is time-lapse in an ironic mode.


Or think of May Swenson's "July 4th" (1972), a vivid description of holiday fireworks and of the reactions they provoke in an Independence Day audience, but a poem for which time-lapse photography is again clearly the vehicle. Swenson's source of inspiration is apparent in the poem's first lines:

Gradual bud and bloom and seedfall speeded up are
these mute explosions in slow motion.
From vertical shoots above the sea, the fire
flowers open, shedding their petals. (xxx)

The poem goes on to develop this analogy between the organic growth of a flower in bloom and the "fire flowers" opening-out above her.


For A. R. Ammons, a time-lapse aesthetic is central to his very concept of his art of appearance and reality, nature and culture, as is apparent in his "Poetics," one of several attempts by Ammons at an "ars poetica." "I look for the way/things will turn/out spiraling from a center," Ammons explains. Hoping to give them unselfish poetic expression, "being available/to any shape that may be/summoning itself through me/from the self not mine but ours," he seeks, without interference, for the forms

things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will unfold. . . . (61)

Like "The Groundhog," Robert Hayden's "The Night Blooming Cereus" (1972) seems almost a conscious imitation of a time-lapse film. For the poem is, like Swenson's, an account of a flower coming into bloom--a staple of the time-lapse repertoire, part of its Tudor Code. But like "Groundhog," "Cereus" is no mere record but a subjective account of a natural process as experienced by a particular human consciousness.

The poet tells, in a first person narrative, of how "for nights/we [the speaker and a companion] waited, hoping to see/the heavy bud [of the Cereus, a cactus] break into flower." We see that bud's "neck-like tube/hooking down from the edge/of the leaf-branch/nearly to the floor . . ." and take notice of how the Cereus, "packed/tight with its miracle swayed stiffly on breaths/ of air, moved/as though impelled by stirrings within itself"--all-in--all as accurate a picture of the Cereus as any time-lapse camera could capture, given the limits of specificity always inherent in language.

But the speaker confesses--as if about to succumb to those still-alive pressures of natural selection which teach men not to see so precisely--that, face-to-face with such becoming, he feels "repelled as much as . . . fascinated." As if before his very eyes the Cereus' shape mutates, metaphorically, into something else, and the speaker sees in the plant "snake,/eyeless bird head,/beak that would gape/with grotesque life squawk." His companion, however, more impressed than the poet with "the imminence of bloom," and ready to celebrate the "archaic mysteries" they are about to behold, redirects his attention to the "rigorous design" of the unfolding the hold of that vision of the natural grotesque which nearly possesses him.

The poet recalls recent experiments which have recorded the "secret life of plants"--a "philodendron's fear," for example, as registered on a polygraph --and realizes that he too confronts "tribal sentience/In the cactus, focused/ energy of will." But he needs no polygraph, or time-lapse camera, to capture it. For thanks to the marvelous technique of a poet's imagination, he has access to a process no technology could touch: "That belling of/tropic perfume --that signaling/not meant for us;/the darkness cloyed with summoning/ fragrance."

Waiting patiently for the precise moment (for a Cereus' bloom lasts only a very short time), the time-lapse watcher "marveling/ beheld at the last the achieved/flower." And even then, in poetry's faithful commitment to becoming, the blooming does not stop, is not terminated in freeze-frame last words; for in the poem's closing lines we learn "Its moonlight/petals were/still unfold-/ing, the spike fringe of the outer/perianth recessing/as we watched" (24-26). I can think of no better demonstration of Archibald MacLeish's contention that poetry "gives knowledge of the chaos and confusion of the world by imposing order upon it which leaves it still the chaos and confusion which it really is."


Jorie Graham's "How Morning Glories Could Bloom at Dusk" (1980) will serve as a final example of 20th century time-lapse poetry. A meditation on the reasons of the heart, Graham's poem takes the circadian rhythm of blossoming vegetation as its controlling metaphor. "Left to itself," the poem begins,

the heart continues, as the tamarind
folds it leaves every night and the mimosa,
even in perpetual darkness, opens and shuts
with the sun.

The heart, Graham explains, is patient, in sympathy with natural process, well aware (as Rilke knew) that "everything unfolds," including the self.

It is moved by such delays:
cat's eyes open at six, african marigolds, lilies
at seven, at eight the passionflower.

For Graham, the "correspondences" of heart and nature are precise; the heart's growth, the coming into bloom of the natural world are homologies, sharing a common bestiary, transpiring in a shared geography. The heart's "light awaits the souls of the living"; its "birds" long "for the branches to unfold in song";

the end of its year awaits each noon the opening
of the chicory of the meadow, and its meadows
imagine other sleepless flower beds.

Seen in time-lapse, taken to heart, the blossoming, the metamorphosis which dominant the scene satisfy her need for the miraculous, replace the need for the supernatural.

If there is another world, then this is it:
the real, the virtual, the butterfly
over the evening primrose.

In a June 13, 1871 journal entry, Hopkins would note

The Horned Violet is a pretty thing, gracefully lashed. Even in withering the flower ran through beautiful inscapes by the strewing up of the petals into straight little barrels or tubes. It is not that inscape does not govern the behavior of things in slack and decay as one can see even in the pining of the skin of the old and even in a skeleton but that horror possesses the mind, but in this case there was nothing in itself to show whether the flower were shutting or opening.