The transitory nature of plant life
The moment of
the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
are of equal duration.
TS Eliot, Little Gidding V
In what survives of Aztec poetry, flowers symbolize both joie de vivre and transitoriness: The flowers sprout, and bud, and grow, and glow. From your insides the stalks spring free…. Like a flower in the summertime, so does our heart take refreshment and bloom. Our body is like a flower that blossoms and quickly withers… Perish relentlessly and blossom once more, ye flowers who tremble and fall and turn to dust...
Wordsworth Dictionary of Symbolism
If you dream of withered flowers, it portends failing health, and approaching death.
Zadkiel's Dream Book, reprinted in A Handbook of Dreams and Fortune-Telling
As for a man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
Psalm 103:15-16
Cities and
Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.
Rudyard Kipling, Cities and Thrones and Powers
The
melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere;
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread;
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.
Where are
the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.
The
wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the goldenrod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.
And now,
when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
And then I
think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.
William Cullen Bryant, The Death of the Flowers
The bloomless
days are dead
Archibald Lampman, April
A silent and
forsaken brood
In that mute opening of the wood,
So shrivelled and so thin they were,
So gray, so haggard, and austere,
Not plants at all they seemed to me,
But rather some spare company
Of hermit folk, who long ago,
Wandering in bodies to and fro,
Had chanced upon this lonely way,
And rested thus, till death one day
Surprised them at their compline prayer,
And left them standing lifeless there.
Archibald Lampman, In November
So I'll
continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend
With the rainfall.
Paul Simon, Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall
Our little hour, -- how swift it flies
When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies,
Leaving us but a little while
To dream our dream, to sing our song,
To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower
Leslie Coulson, ...But a Short Time to Live
Who will take pity in his heart
And who will feed a starving sparrow?
"Not I," said the Golden Wheat,
"I would if I could but I cannot I know,
I need all my grain to prosper and grow."
And who will love a little Sparrow?
Will no one write her eulogy?
"I will," said the Earth,
"For all I've created returns unto me,
From dust were ye made and dust ye shall be."
Paul Simon, Sparrow
For one night
or the other night
Will come the Gardener in white, and
gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin.
James Elroy Flecker, Yasmin
Now that
lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you should hold it in your hands";
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse..."
TS Eliot, Portrait of a Lady
When you
destroy a blade of grass
You poison England at her roots:
Remember no man's foot can pass
Where evermore no green life shoots.
...The grass,
forerunner of life, has gone,
But plants that spring in ruins and shards
Attend until your dream is done:
I have seen hemlock in your yards.
...The middens
of your burning beasts
Shall be raked over till they yield
Last priceless slags for fashionings high,
Ploughs to wake grass in every field...
Gordon Bottomley, To Ironfounders and Others
[appropriate for MAFF at this time of Foot and Mouth culling?]