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Motion and Stasis
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Kew Gardens, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
“Kew Gardens” paints a picture of an afternoon with remarkable attention to detail; it doesn’t just focus upon the actions of the men and women who walk through the gardens, but it also illuminates things as small as a snail and as delicate as the walls of a raindrop. In Kew Gardens—a piece of the natural world within the bustling city of London, preserved for human enjoyment—nature and civilization necessarily encounter one another, and the story doesn’t present this as a negative. Rather, it suggests that the human and the natural are intertwined and inextricable, and that their interweaving creates an even greater beauty than any lone entity can do. The story is littered with moments that emphasize this idea. Both the older man and the stout woman, for instance, stop to stare at flowers with rapt attention and awe, at once soothed and prompted into internal reflection. Most strikingly of all, the first and last paragraphs of the story demonstrate the connection between humanity and nature in Kew. The opening paragraph’s focus on the intricate dance of colored light as it falls upon the earth, a pebble, a snail, a raindrop, a leaf, and finally upon the human cast of characters speaks volumes: the men and women who walk through the gardens are only one piece of a larger living picture. By the final paragraph, the natural and human worlds overlap within the garden so much as to become nearly indistinguishable. Birds hop as if “mechanical,” the butterflies converge into the shape of a marble column, and the palm trees look like “a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas.” As the natural and the human merge, the “voices” of the city, the garden, and the people within it all come together into an amalgam of color, light, and sound.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Nature and Humanity ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Nature and Humanity appears in each chapter of Kew Gardens. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Kew Gardens
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Nature and Humanity Quotes in Kew Gardens
Below you will find the important quotes in Kew Gardens related to the theme of Nature and Humanity.
Kew Gardens Quotes
The light fell either upon the smooth, grey surface of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear.
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“And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that… if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say ‘Yes’ at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhere—of course not, happily not, or I shouldn’t be walking here with Eleanor and the children…”
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[The snail] appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennae trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction.
The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression. She saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers.
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Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere.
It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled on the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly…
But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.
