The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972). Detailed description

The title poem from Hayden’s 1972 collection includes seven new poems, meditations on the mysterious connections between art and life. For example, “Richard Hunt’s ‘Arachne’” focuses on the moment of Arachne’s transformation from human to spider—caught in Hunt’s sculpture. The description of Arachne’s change might easily be applied to the work of any artist—“godly vivisection, husking her / gutting her, cutting hubris its fat and bones away.” Good art, the reader may assume, attempts that type of change. In addition, “The Peacock Room” contemplates:

“Ars Longa Which is crueler
Vita Brevis life or art?”

That poem sketches the conflict of two men—artist and benefactor—pitted against each other in the creation of this artwork. It presents the irony that the creation has outlived the creators and the conflict itself. The poem ends by identifying art as a “portal” to the even greater mystery of life’s meaning.

As part of these meditations, the title poem of the collection focuses on the mystery of creative energy and purpose. The poet and his wife await the blooming of the cereus, which blooms only one night. The poet’s attention is directed to the powerful life force of this plant: the mystery of its blossoming, the purpose and source of its alluring scent, not intended for humans. What is the key to its mysterious timing? The cereus seems to respond solely to some deep calling of its own, a response like that of an artist.

The speaker is forcefully attracted to, yet repelled by, “the heavy bud . . . on its neck-like tube.” He charts his reactions—a mix of wonderment, uneasiness, and near-dread captured in his description of it as a “snake, eyeless bird-head, beak that would gape with grotesque life-squawk,” a birth image. One assumes art, too, in its initial phase is sometimes awkward, perhaps even off-putting. Hayden’s description of the plant’s preparatory phase, “impelled by stirrings within itself,” again evokes comparison to the workings of creativity—alien to some, even slightly disturbing.

Yet not everyone is affected in this way, even by the initial phases of art or life. The speaker notes the difference between his own reaction and that of his wife, who waits with him:

But you, my dear,
conceded less to the bizarre
than to the imminence of bloom. . . .

He waits in mild apprehension, she in anticipation.

Once the perfume announces that the cereus has bloomed, however, both “dropped trivial tasks and marveling beheld at last the achieved flower.” Yet, in the midst of their celebration, they were aware that the opening of the bloom also signaled its dying.

Lunar presence,
foredoomed, already dying,
it charged the room
with plangency

older than human
cries, ancient as prayer. . . .

So the poem confronts the mystery of all life—all creation dies. Yet this moment is preserved in art. Perhaps one purpose of art, then, as the poems in this collection suggest, is to challenge the brevity, the impermanence of life.

For Discussion or Writing
1. This poem describes waiting for the blooming of this specific plant. Find out what you can about the plant. How does Hayden’s poem convey that information? What does the poem talk about beyond that? Examples?

2. Notice the difference between the ways the two people in the poem await the blooming of this plant. Why do you think Hayden calls the reader’s attention to this difference?

3. Hayden seems to pay close attention to flowers and other natural phenomena. Select one of his other poems that also uses imagery from the plant world to compare and/or contrast the way he uses the cereus in this poem.