Paratextual Cross-pollination (...?)

            The footnotes in “The Love of the Plants” seemed rather intriguing, at least to me, in terms of their randomness and the way they resisted my expectations (expectations I would argue that the text itself initially solicits).  At the beginning of the poem, the footnotes seem to function solely as scientific glosses, providing taxonomic identification and expanded descriptions of the plants themselves as they have been studied in nature.  By page 6, however, the attention of these notes begins to wander startlingly (though perhaps even these random digressions become regulated, because of their very proliferation, by the end of the text).  Suddenly, we as readers are informed that the Melissa plant, which is troped as a courtly lady in two lines it occupies in the poem, is “delightful to cats,” a move that prefigures further intrusions of the bestial into this solely “botanical” piece (whales are mentioned later on).  Even the integrity of the scientific glosses begin to break down in these notes, as the “uncommon beauty” of the Meadia flower is invoked and channeled into an extended meditation on the potential “vegetable storgé” that the plant may suffer in “preserving its offspring.”  This moment is particularly fascinating in that it does not merely suggest the personification of plants so central in the poetry itself, but it toys with assigning affect and emotional consciousness to “vegetation” itself.  Arguably, this move only seems radical because it comes in the footnotes, which seem to be presented as authorized, scientifically speaking, in a way that the poetry is not.  (As a side note: I realize that up until this point I’ve been discussing the notes and lines of poetry as entirely separate textual entities, which is problematically reductive.  I can see how they interact and complement, or perhaps undermine and complicate, one another, but I can’t yet seem to arrive at a more synthetic treatment.  The same argument holds, less problematically, at least for me, for the illustrations.)