Presented by the Queer Studies Research Workshop

Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia

“Had” the speaker of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” “but world enough, and time,” he would write a poem. Its subject and addressee would be his beloved, and its form would be the blazon. He would “praise” her “eyes,” “forehead,” “breast[s],” her “every part,” and then her “heart.” Such details are keyed to human morphology, but, famously, the speaker also calls the beloved in this poem his “vegetable love.” I explore the vegetable poem that Marvell’s speaker never composes in three contexts: Ovid’s story of Daphne’s transformation, the tradition of the “vegetable blazon,” and the visual jokes of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Co-sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Workshop and the Science Studies Workshop.