ABSTRACT
It was, Penelope Fitzgerald told Newsday’s Sylvia Brownrigg, her early reading of D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Fox” that led her, in time, “to the German romantic poet Novalis,”1 the connection being not only an interest in a blue flower (“meconopsis baileyii, the blue poppy”2), but also the fact of their Romantic dispositions. In the first instance, Fitzgerald already had, before reading either Lawrence or Novalis, the experience of having seen, and having been struck by the ineffable beauty of, the blue poppy, convincing her that “[o]nce you’ve seen it you have to think of it as one supreme blue flower.”3 For Fitzgerald, the blue flower spoke of all those things one longs for yet that remain just out of one’s reach, the “things you’ve always wanted to know about or find out about,” even while mindful “that time will run out or even is running out.”4 For Fitzgerald, the blue flower spoke not only of what one longs for but also of the precariousness of this longing, a sense of things that she felt Lawrence had captured near his story’s end. “The more you reached,” Lawrence wrote,
after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you became aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit, if you reach any farther. You pluck flower after flower-it is never THE flower.5
