Read a Passage From Jonathan Galassi’s Book-Length Poem, The Vineyard

black-and-blue and purple salvia.
What makes guaranitica so special?
Does it winter over? Come on, Mac,
I thought you were a pro.
(This year’s yellow-orange crocosmia
are another story,
though they don’t show so well in the far bed.)

Vita was the greatest pro of all.
Vita Sackville-West
of Sissinghurst White Garden fame,
Virginia Woolf ’s great passion,
model for Orlando,
whose poems The Land and The Garden,
unread today, define a certain
elegiac English land-love,
prophetic of our overheating world:
“Heavy July. Too rampant and too lush;
High summer, dull, fulfilled, and satiate,
Nothing to fear, and little to await.
The very birds are hush . . .
And those aggressive indestructible
Bores, the herbaceous plants, that gladly take
Whatever’s given and make no demand
Beyond the careless favour of a stake;
Humble appeal, not arrogant command,
Like some tough spinster, doughty, duteous,
All virtue and no charm. . . .
Moderate beauty, yet insidious.
En gland, as douce as any woman’s mu!.
Where is the violence, the shrilly- voiced
Cicada of the arid plain?” (Not here,

but everywhere else, it seems, this year.)
Follow “as with steps obedient and slow
Homeward I turn, and to the tool-shed go . . .”
and laying down the law: hear, hear:
“Gardens should be romantic, but severe.”
She was the Virgil of a world
about to evanesce, a Rilke of regret
(whom Auden called
“the Santa Claus of loneliness”).
It was like Forster’s greenwoods
— or gone already, as this one will be.
(Her grandson said the gardeners
had to reset everything she planted.
She sounds like me; was Vita a black thumb?)
This will all be gone, if not in my own time,
in yours, or in another hundred years.
But don’t say that it won’t be mourned;
don’t say these views of tree and leaf
and lawn and road and field won’t live
incised on someone’s retina.
Aren’t they afterimages themselves
of something more idyllic, simpler, greener,
that imaginary bower of perfect peace,
the first garden, the Horatian rus?
We could do far worse than to heed Vita.

The greatest gardeners in these parts,
as almost everywhere, have left no trace
(that’s the way, stealth necromancy,
gelatin clouds that float above the shore
before they dissipate, or almost do).
Dwight Ripley and Rupert Barneby,

__________________________________

From The Vineyard: A Poem Copyright © 2026 by Jonathan Galassi. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.