The Storm in the Garden: Literary Nature inThe Floure and the Leafe

Abstract

The anonymous fifteenth-century poem The Floure and the Leafe intensifies its conventional borrowings into literary nature: literary references that are simultaneously natural description. The poem estranges the courtly commonplace of the flower versus the leaf, presenting the two groups to the narrator as categories in the process of formation. As a result, the poem reveals the imaginative potential of poetry to interrogate the nascent coalescence of natural and literary conventions, allowing the narrator to decide how she will live her life based on her recursive observation of and participation in the poem’s literary nature. Crucially, she learns how to read the events she witnesses partly through their sudden end: the courtly play of the Companies of the Flower and the Leaf is disrupted by a sudden storm, a day-ruining catastrophe in miniature that only the Leaves prove able to endure. In response to devastation, The Floure and the Leafe presents poetry as a shared and participatory tradition: a carefully maintained garden from which to gather the natural and literary resources that can ameliorate damage to both people and the environment.

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