Anthologists: The Flower-Gatherers

Michael Loveday

Edward Lear, Arkady, March 1849

Orchids and roses—lifting up their heads in chorus.

Two grinning schoolboys in a playing field,

we’re assembling mounds of wild anemones,

narcissus flowers. Greece becomes a sumptuous room

possessed by mingled blues and pinks embellishing

the floor for miles, miles, miles, uncountable, as if

guests’ feet should never touch the ground. My heart

won’t settle for the uniforms of chore and habit:

Lushington and I accumulate more blooms, more stems,

before the memories can darken or grow dim, and badge

our jackets, hats, and scampering horses with them—

we whirl, we madden our brains with smudges of new colour.

In the autumn of 1848 and spring of 1849, the landscape painter and poet Edward Lear travelled through Albania and Greece, in search of vivid landscapes for his watercolour sketches. At one point in his Balkan tour, Lear’s travelling companion was Frank Lushington, younger brother of the chief secretary to the Government in Malta. Lear, whose sexual orientation was not always fixed or certain, fell in love with Frank. Lear’s unrequited attachment was not revealed in his published record of his experiences, one of the most celebrated travel books of the 19th century: Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c. (1851).

MICHAEL LOVEDAY lives in Hertfordshire, England. He is the author of two books and two chapbooks. www.michaelloveday.com