Frank Oliver Call wrote “Wild Grape” in the early twentieth century, publishing it in his 1920 collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape*. Call was a Canadian poet and professor whose work often traveled between European forms and North American landscapes. The collection’s title itself sets up the poem’s tension: the acanthus, a leaf carved into classical columns, belongs to art and empire; the wild grape, a sprawling native vine, belongs to untended growth. Written after the First World War, when images of shattered European civilization carried heavy weight, the poem turns toward a ruin and finds there not only loss but an ongoing, almost erotic embrace between nature and the broken fragments of human beauty.
The scene is visual from the first lines: a “crawling shadow” falls from a “crumbling temple to gods long-forgotten,” and the wild grape “twines amid the fragments / Of shattered pillars prone upon the ground.” What could be a simple picture of decay becomes more complicated as the vine’s dark leaves hide the broken sculptures of “faun and youth and maiden” that once stood “young, naked, beautiful.” The vine is not merely a destroyer completing the ruin; it acts as a coverer, a mourner, even a protector. It climbs over the carved acanthus leaves of the columns and “weaves a funeral wreath over their dead beauty.” That phrase is central: a funeral wreath honors the dead, but it is also made of living leaves. The poem’s central idea grows from that paradox—beauty does not vanish when a civilization falls; it changes hands, passing from the sculptor’s chisel to the vine’s tendrils, and becomes a wilder kind of art.
Call constructs the poem in free verse, with no set rhyme scheme and with line lengths that stretch and contract like the vine itself. The rhythm is loose and processional rather than architectural. In the opening lines, the heavy “crawling shadow” slows the movement; later, the sentence about the sun spilling “its amber wine from a full goblet over the thirsting hillside” runs long and liquid, so that the line itself seems to pour. Internal echoes such as “hum and buzz” and “wanton and wild” create a loose music without locking the poem into pattern. The verbs do much of the work: “twines,” “climbs,” “weaves,” “clings,” “mingles” all give the vine agency, while “shattered,” “prone,” and “crumbling” establish the ruin it embraces. The bees add a crucial sound and motion, humming among the grape-flowers “heavy with honeyed perfume” under a “drowsy noonday sun.” Life is not absent from the ruin; it is drowsily, insistently present.
The poem’s most surprising turn comes in the simile “Like an unhappy lover / Clinging to the breast of his dead mistress.” The vine becomes not just a botanical fact but a desperate, sensual presence. Words like “wanton” and “voluptuous” would elsewhere suggest excess or impropriety, but here they describe a force that will not let go of what time has killed. The “naked, pallid forms” of the broken sculptures are held in that embrace, and the poem does not soften the strangeness of the image. It is both funeral and love scene, and the vine’s wildness includes both hunger and grief.
That refusal to separate growth from decay gives the poem its significance. The vine climbs over the “carved acanthus leaves,” repeating in living tissue the very ornament that human hands once cut into stone. It is not the enemy of art; it is a rival artist, weaving a living wreath over a dead one. The final lines draw youth and age, life and death into a single phrase, “eternal beauty,” not because the ruin has been restored, but because the vine has tangled itself with it. In an era often inclined to mourn broken monuments, Call imagines survival as wild, ongoing, and inseparable from the wreckage it embraces.