Chamanthi is Telugu for Chrysanthemum.

Thomas Hardy wrote “The Last Chrysanthemum” when his wife was on the brink of death. He was estranged from his wife for almost the entirety of their marriage but felt a rekindling connection during her last months. Hardy’s feelings, like the last Chrysanthemum that blooms too late in the poem, arrived at the eleventh hour when they couldn’t be put to much use.

Or so everyone thinks.

Why should this flower delay so long
To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
When flowers are in their tombs.
 
Through the slow summer, when the sun
Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
Why did it not uncurl?
 
It must have felt that fervid call
Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
And saps all retrocede.
 
Too late its beauty, lonely thing,
The season's shine is spent,
Nothing remains for it but shivering
In tempests turbulent.
 
Had it a reason for delay,
Dreaming in witlessness
That for a bloom so delicately gay
Winter would stay its stress?
 
- I talk as if the thing were born
With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
By the Great Face behind.

This poem, like most of Hardy’s work, is widely understood as a melancholy meditation on the transience of life, nature’s will and a pessimistic view of fate. But the brief, surprising wonder lies in stanza 5, where Hardy speculates whether the flower had any reason for its tardiness, perhaps naively dreaming that its delicate beauty could somehow delay the harshness of winter.

The wonder is this fearless dreaming, this risky hoping that Hardy indulges in, even if it is for a second, that the Chrysanthemum might be equipped with an unknown purpose for blooming at such a contrasting hour. Perhaps, it is here to soften the winter.

One does not pray for rain when it is raining. One does not pray for flowers during spring. One does not pray for light during the day. A Chrysanthemum is best arrived in the bleak mid-winter.

I imagine the Chrysanthemum that tickled Hardy’s heart soon bloomed through his pores as he sat at his wife’s bedside, and made for a soft pillow for her to snuggle her last words into.

“It is never too late…” - Mary Ann Evans

The stories that sustain my spirit almost always appear like this Last Chrysanthemum. Soft, tender, enticing like an invisible Siren’s song. At a challenging hour, as if to test my will. Whether I embrace their arrival, despite the odd timing and my freezing heart, decides the mystery purpose of their outlandish blooming. At the end of the day, I suppose it is all about faith.

Hope is contagious. Hope is risky.

Chamanthi Dreams attempts to be a wordy carrier of this contagion, seducing you into taking some risks.

Hoping a Chrysanthemum tickles you today,

Shreya