"Like poppies, heavy with seed"

[Doug Alan <nessus>]

A couple weeks ago, I received a 4 page letter via U.S. Mail from Keith
Patrick DeWeese, a big Kate Bush fan in Florida.  He doesn't have a
computer account, but receives Love-Hounds on paper.  He has a bunch of
interesting things to say, so I've decided to type in some of the letter
(Thanks a lot for the letter Keith!):

	....

	Melbourne [Florida] is a vast wasteland.  And info on Kate Bush
	is rare in this land of Madonna blinded teeny-boppers.  And of
	all the stupid things to do, I let my membership in the KBC
	[Kate Bush Club] lapse (I think my excuse it good)

What's your excuse?

	so I am cut off from the late breaking news on Kate's latest
	*artistic* endeavors.

	Anyway, after I heard "Under The Ivy" (I'll never recover from
	that song),

Me neither!

	my room-mate and I did some research into the lyrics.  Here's
	what we found: the garden is symbolic of the female genitalia;
	ivy is symbolic of Dionysus and his female attendants; according
	to Hazlitt, "things spoken 'under the rose' (sub rosa) were part
	of Venus' sexual mysteries, not to be revealed to the
	unitiated."  Sounds like a secret to me.  

This is all quite interesting!  But I really find it difficult to
believe that Kate intended any of these things as symbols.  She's not
*that* scholarly.  I think they're just a description of what Kate's
back yard is like.

The rose, on the other had, I definitely think is a symbol, because it
sticks out so much as being a symbol.

	From Barbara Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and
	Secrets", the white rose or lily was a sign of the Virgin
	Goddess.

Is that only white lilies or all lilies?  If the lily is a symbol of
innocence, then the line "You crush the lily in my soul" in "Moving"
finaly makes sense to me.  "Moving" is about the dancer Lindsay Kemp,
who inspired Kate's strong interest in dance and movement.  Lindsay Kemp
is gay, though, and it appears that "Moving" is a love song to Lindsay,
who can't return her love in the same way because he is gay.

The line "You crush the lily in my soul" could then mean, "You stir
passion in me".

	Later, Christians transferred both of these symbolic flowers to
	the Virgin Mary and called her the Holy Rose.	In none of the
	sources I plowed through did I find any connection between the
	white rose and death.