Flower Symbolism in World Poetry: A Florist Guide
Flowers have served as powerful symbols in poetry across cultures and throughout history, creating a universal language that transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. Their ephemeral beauty, seasonal cycles, diverse characteristics, and intimate connection to human emotions make them perfect metaphors for exploring the deepest aspects of human experience. From the sacred lotus of ancient Indian texts to the passionate roses of medieval European troubadours, from the melancholic cherry blossoms of Japanese haiku to the revolutionary carnations of modern political poetry, flowers have provided poets with an inexhaustible source of symbolic meaning.
This comprehensive guide explores the rich tapestry of floral symbolism in world poetry, examining how different cultures, historical periods, and individual poets have used flowers to convey complex emotions, philosophical concepts, and universal truths. We'll journey through gardens of meaning cultivated across continents and centuries, discovering how the same flower can represent divine love in one tradition and earthly passion in another, how seasonal blooms mark not just the passage of time but the evolution of human consciousness, and how the language of flowers continues to evolve in contemporary poetry.
The study of flower symbolism reveals the interconnected nature of human experience while celebrating the unique ways different cultures have interpreted the natural world. It demonstrates how poets have consistently turned to the botanical realm to express what often cannot be captured in direct language—the ineffable qualities of beauty, the mysteries of love and death, the cycles of renewal and decay, and the eternal human quest for meaning and transcendence.
Universal Themes in Floral Poetry
Beauty and Transience
The fleeting nature of flowers makes them natural symbols for the temporary nature of beauty and life itself. This theme appears consistently across cultures, manifesting in different ways but always touching on the fundamental human awareness of mortality and the preciousness of the present moment. In Japanese poetry, this concept is crystallized in the aesthetic principle of mono no aware—the bittersweet awareness of the impermanence of all things, often expressed through cherry blossom imagery.
Western poets have similarly embraced this theme, from the medieval Latin tradition of memento mori to the Romantic poets' fascination with the sublime beauty of decay. The English metaphysical poets, particularly Andrew Marvell in "To His Coy Mistress," used flower imagery to explore the tension between beauty's brevity and love's urgency. Contemporary poets continue this tradition, often with an added environmental consciousness that sees in wilting flowers a reflection of humanity's impact on the natural world.
Love and Romance
Flowers, particularly roses, have been associated with romantic love in poetry from ancient times to the present, though different cultures emphasize different aspects of this symbolism. The connection between flowers and love operates on multiple levels: the visual beauty that parallels physical attraction, the fragrance that suggests the intoxicating nature of romance, the softness of petals that evokes tender touch, and the thorns that remind us of love's potential for pain.
In the Western tradition, the rose became the supreme symbol of romantic love through the medieval tradition of courtly love, where the beloved was often addressed as a rose or compared to one. This symbolism deepened through the Renaissance sonneteers, particularly Petrarch, whose influence spread the rose-as-beloved metaphor throughout European literature. The Persian tradition developed parallel but distinct associations, where the rose often represented divine love and mystical union, as seen in the works of Hafez and Rumi.
Death and Renewal
The cycle of blooming and withering makes flowers powerful symbols for death, resurrection, and the eternal cycle of life. This symbolism operates across multiple timeframes—the daily opening and closing of certain flowers, the seasonal death and rebirth of perennial plants, and the longer cycles of growth, maturity, and decay that mirror human life stages.
Christian poetry heavily employed flower symbolism to represent resurrection and eternal life, with the Easter lily becoming a central image in religious verse. The lily's association with the Virgin Mary added layers of meaning related to purity, sacrifice, and divine love. Similarly, Buddhist poetry uses the lotus flower's emergence from muddy waters to represent the soul's journey from worldly attachment to enlightenment.
Spiritual Transcendence
Across cultures, flowers serve as bridges between the earthly and divine realms. Their beauty seems to offer glimpses of perfection that transcend ordinary experience, while their connection to reproduction and seasonal renewal suggests deeper mysteries of creation and regeneration. This spiritual dimension of flower symbolism appears in mystical poetry from multiple traditions, where specific flowers become vehicles for expressing ineffable spiritual experiences.
Major Flower Symbols by Culture
Western Poetry
The Rose
The rose stands as perhaps the most complex and multilayered symbol in Western poetry, accumulating meanings across centuries and cultural contexts. Its symbolism has evolved from ancient Greek and Roman associations with love goddesses to Christian imagery of divine love and martyrdom, from medieval courtly love poetry to modern psychological explorations of desire and beauty.
Love and Passion: The rose's association with romantic love reaches back to ancient times but was codified in medieval European poetry. The Roman de la Rose, a 13th-century French allegorical poem, established many of the rose's romantic associations that persist today. The red rose specifically came to represent passionate love, while different colors acquired distinct meanings—pink for gentle affection, white for pure love, yellow for friendship or, in some contexts, jealousy.
Beauty and Perfection: The rose's form, with its layered petals arranged in perfect symmetry, made it a natural symbol for idealized beauty. Renaissance poets frequently compared their beloveds to roses, not merely for physical beauty but for a kind of perfection that seemed to transcend the merely human. This tradition continued through the Romantic period, where poets like Robert Burns could declare his love "like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June."
Secrecy and Mystery: The phrase "sub rosa" (under the rose) gave the flower associations with confidentiality and hidden knowledge. This symbolism appears in poetry that deals with forbidden love, political intrigue, or mystical secrets. The rose's layered petals suggested hidden depths and mysteries gradually revealed.
Martyrdom and Sacrifice: In Christian symbolism, the red rose came to represent the blood of martyrs and Christ's sacrifice. This religious dimension appears in devotional poetry and influences secular works that explore themes of sacrifice for love or ideals.
Notable Examples and Analysis:
Robert Burns' "A Red, Red Rose": This Scottish ballad transforms the traditional rose metaphor by emphasizing endurance over transience, promising love that will last "till a' the seas gang dry."
William Blake's "The Sick Rose": Blake's poem subverts traditional rose symbolism, using the flower to explore themes of corruption, hidden desire, and the destructive power of repressed sexuality.
Gertrude Stein's "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose": This modernist deconstruction questions the very nature of symbolic meaning, suggesting that our layered associations might obscure rather than illuminate truth.
Dante's Divine Comedy: The rose appears as the ultimate symbol of divine love in Paradise, where the blessed are arranged in the form of a great white rose.
The Lily
The lily's symbolism in Western poetry centers primarily on concepts of purity, resurrection, and regal power, though its meanings have evolved significantly across different historical periods and cultural contexts.
Purity and Innocence: The white lily became the supreme symbol of purity in Christian art and literature, associated particularly with the Virgin Mary. This "Madonna lily" appears throughout medieval and Renaissance religious poetry as a symbol of spiritual purity and divine grace. The lily's trumpet-like shape was interpreted as a horn announcing divine messages, while its white color represented the soul unstained by sin.
Death and Resurrection: The lily's association with Easter made it a powerful symbol of resurrection and eternal life. Unlike flowers that simply fade, lilies were seen as dying back to their bulbs and returning with renewed vigor, making them natural metaphors for Christian concepts of death and rebirth. This symbolism appears prominently in funeral poetry and elegies.
Royal Power and Authority: The fleur-de-lis, stylized lily, became the royal symbol of France, and this association influenced poetic usage throughout European literature. The lily could represent legitimate authority, noble bearing, and the divine right of kings.
Feminine Virtue and Fragility: The lily's association with idealized femininity made it a complex symbol that could represent both strength (spiritual purity) and vulnerability (physical fragility). Victorian poetry particularly exploited this duality.
Notable Examples:
Christina Rossetti's religious poetry: Rossetti frequently employed lily imagery in her devotional verse, using the flower to represent both human aspiration toward purity and divine grace freely given.
Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott": The lilies floating around the Lady of Shalott's boat symbolize her purity but also her separation from worldly experience.
Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene": Lilies appear throughout as symbols of virtue and spiritual beauty, often contrasted with roses representing earthly beauty.
The Daffodil (Narcissus)
The daffodil carries a complex symbolic heritage that combines classical mythology with Christian symbolism and modern associations with renewal and remembrance.
Rebirth and New Beginnings: As one of the first flowers to bloom in spring, daffodils naturally symbolize renewal, hope, and the triumph of life over winter's death. This symbolism appears consistently in poetry celebrating seasonal change and new beginnings.
Memory and Reflection: The flower's mythological association with Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, gives it complex associations with memory, self-regard, and the relationship between inner and outer beauty. Poets have used this myth to explore themes of self-knowledge, vanity, and the nature of love itself.
Joy and Optimism: The daffodil's bright yellow color and early spring appearance made it a symbol of joy and optimistic hope, particularly in English poetry where the flower is native and beloved.
Mortality and Transience: Despite their joyful associations, daffodils also carry undertones of mortality, as their brief blooming period reminds viewers of life's fleeting nature.
Notable Examples:
William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud": Perhaps the most famous daffodil poem in English literature, this work transforms the flower into a symbol of memory's power to restore joy and overcome solitude.
Robert Herrick's "To Daffodils": This metaphysical poem uses the flower's brief life span as a meditation on human mortality and the need to embrace life's fleeting pleasures.
A.E. Housman's poetry: Housman frequently used daffodils to represent the brief flowering of youth and the melancholy awareness of time's passage.
The Violet
The violet's small size and tendency to grow in hidden places made it a natural symbol for modesty, humility, and hidden virtue, themes that resonate throughout Western poetry.
Modesty and Humility: The violet's small size and preference for shaded locations made it the perfect emblem of modesty. This symbolism was particularly popular in medieval and Renaissance poetry, where humility was considered a prime virtue.
Faithfulness and Constancy: Violets' reliable annual return and their tendency to form lasting colonies made them symbols of faithfulness in love and friendship.
Early Death and Fragility: The violet's brief blooming period and delicate appearance made it a symbol for young people who die before their time, a theme that appears in elegiac poetry.
Hidden Worth: The violet's sweet fragrance despite its modest appearance made it a symbol for virtue that doesn't seek recognition—worth that reveals itself gradually to those who take time to discover it.
Notable Examples:
Shakespeare's use throughout his works: Shakespeare employed violet imagery to suggest modesty, faithfulness, and sometimes melancholy, particularly in "Hamlet" where Ophelia distributes flowers with symbolic meanings.
Victorian "language of flowers" poetry: The elaborate Victorian system of floral meanings elevated the violet to new prominence in poetry that dealt with coded messages and unexpressed emotions.
Eastern Poetry
Cherry Blossoms (Sakura) - Japanese Poetry
Cherry blossoms hold a uniquely central place in Japanese poetry and culture, representing a complex web of meanings that encompasses aesthetic beauty, spiritual insight, and cultural identity.
Mono no Aware: This fundamental Japanese aesthetic concept—often translated as "the pathos of things" or "bittersweet awareness of impermanence"—finds its perfect expression in cherry blossom imagery. The flowers' spectacular but brief blooming (usually lasting only a week) captures the essence of beauty's transience and the melancholy pleasure of recognizing life's fleeting moments.
Beauty in Transience: Unlike Western tendencies to mourn the passing of beauty, Japanese poetry often celebrates the very transience that makes beauty poignant. The falling of cherry petals (hanafubuki or "flower blizzard") becomes as beautiful as the blooming itself, suggesting that endings can be as aesthetically powerful as beginnings.
Samurai Spirit: The cherry blossom became associated with the samurai ideal of a brief but brilliant life lived with honor. The willingness to fall at the peak of beauty rather than fade gradually became a metaphor for the honorable death of warriors.
Seasonal Awareness: Cherry blossoms mark the arrival of spring and the beginning of the Japanese calendar year, making them symbols of new beginnings, hope, and the cyclical nature of existence.
National Identity: The cherry blossom (sakura) has become so central to Japanese cultural identity that hanami (flower viewing) festivals are national celebrations, and the flower appears throughout Japanese poetry as a symbol of the nation itself.
Notable Examples:
Classical haiku masters: Bashō, Buson, and Issa all created memorable cherry blossom haiku that capture different aspects of the flower's symbolism. Bashō's haiku often emphasize the flower's connection to Buddhist concepts of impermanence, while Issa's work finds humor and humanity in cherry blossom imagery.
Contemporary tanka: Modern Japanese poets continue the cherry blossom tradition, often incorporating contemporary concerns about urbanization and environmental change.
The Tale of Genji: Murasaki Shikibu's classic novel employs cherry blossom imagery throughout to underscore themes of beauty, transience, and the poignancy of human relationships.
Lotus - Indian and Buddhist Poetry
The lotus flower carries profound spiritual significance across multiple Eastern traditions, serving as one of the most important symbols in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious poetry.
Spiritual Enlightenment: The lotus's ability to emerge pure and beautiful from muddy waters makes it the perfect metaphor for the spiritual journey from ignorance and attachment to enlightenment and liberation. This symbolism appears throughout Buddhist literature, where the lotus represents the potential for enlightenment present in all beings, regardless of their current circumstances.
Divine Beauty and Purity: In Hindu tradition, the lotus is associated with several deities, particularly Vishnu, Lakshmi, and Brahma. The flower represents divine beauty that transcends earthly concerns, as well as the purity that emerges from but remains uncontaminated by worldly experience.
Rebirth and Cyclical Existence: The lotus's daily cycle of opening and closing mirrors larger cycles of death and rebirth central to Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. The flower becomes a symbol for the eternal soul's journey through multiple incarnations.
Creative Potential: The lotus emerging from primordial waters appears in creation myths as a symbol of the universe's emergence from cosmic consciousness.
Notable Examples:
The Lotus Sutra: One of the most important Buddhist texts, using the lotus as a central metaphor for the Buddha-nature present in all beings.
Kalidasa's Sanskrit poetry: The classical Sanskrit poet frequently employed lotus imagery in works like "The Cloud Messenger" to represent both earthly and divine beauty.
Devotional hymns: Throughout Indian religious literature, lotus imagery appears in bhajans and devotional poetry dedicated to various deities.
Chrysanthemum - Chinese and Japanese Poetry
The chrysanthemum holds honored place in East Asian poetry as one of the "Four Gentlemen" (along with plum, orchid, and bamboo), representing noble character and scholarly virtues.
Longevity and Endurance: The chrysanthemum's ability to bloom in autumn when other flowers have faded makes it a symbol of longevity, endurance, and the strength to maintain beauty and dignity in life's later seasons.
Scholarly Retirement: In Chinese tradition, the chrysanthemum became associated with the scholarly ideal of retirement from worldly affairs to pursue wisdom and cultivation. The flower represents the choice to withdraw from political engagement in favor of personal and spiritual development.
Autumn Contemplation: As an autumn flower, the chrysanthemum symbolizes mature reflection, the wisdom that comes with age, and the particular beauty of life's later seasons.
Imperial Symbolism: In Japan, the chrysanthemum became the imperial symbol, representing the emperor and the continuity of the Japanese nation.
Notable Examples:
Tao Yuanming (Tao Qian): The Chinese poet's famous chrysanthemum poems established many of the flower's literary associations, particularly its connection with scholarly withdrawal and the appreciation of simple pleasures.
Chinese landscape poetry: The chrysanthemum appears throughout classical Chinese poetry as a symbol of the refined scholar who finds beauty in nature rather than worldly success.
Plum Blossom (Mei) - Chinese Poetry
The plum blossom holds special significance in Chinese poetry as a symbol of perseverance, hope, and the strength to maintain beauty under adverse conditions.
Perseverance and Courage: The plum tree's ability to bloom in winter, often while snow still covers the ground, makes it a powerful symbol for perseverance in the face of adversity. The flower represents the courage to maintain hope and beauty even in life's most difficult seasons.
Purity and Integrity: The plum blossom's ability to emerge pure and fragrant from winter's harshness symbolizes moral integrity that remains uncompromised by difficult circumstances.
Hope and Promise: As often the first flower to bloom in late winter, plum blossoms represent hope, the promise of spring's return, and faith in renewal after dark periods.
Scholarly Virtues: Like the chrysanthemum, the plum blossom became associated with scholarly virtues, particularly the ability to maintain one's principles and continue intellectual work regardless of external circumstances.
Notable Examples:
Wang Anshi: The Song dynasty poet's plum blossom poems are among the most celebrated in Chinese literature, using the flower to explore themes of political integrity and personal perseverance.
Zen poetry: Chan (Zen) Buddhism adopted the plum blossom as a symbol of sudden enlightenment emerging from the winter of ignorance.
Middle Eastern and Persian Poetry
The Rose (Gul) in Persian Poetry
Persian poetry developed perhaps the world's most sophisticated and nuanced rose symbolism, creating a complex system of meanings that influenced poetry throughout the Islamic world and beyond.
Divine Love and Mystical Union: In Sufi poetry, the rose often represents divine love or the beloved (whether human or divine) toward whom the lover's soul yearns. This symbolism reaches extraordinary heights in the works of Hafez and Rumi, where rose imagery becomes a vehicle for expressing the most profound spiritual experiences.
The Perfect Beloved: The rose in Persian poetry often represents the idealized beloved whose beauty reflects divine perfection. This beloved may be a human lover, but more often represents God or the spiritual guide who leads the soul toward union with the divine.
Spiritual Beauty: The rose's beauty in Persian poetry transcends physical appearance to represent the kind of spiritual beauty that draws the soul toward truth and enlightenment. This beauty is both attractive and transformative, changing those who truly perceive it.
The Garden of Paradise: Persian poetry frequently depicts the rose garden as an earthly reflection of paradise, where the roses represent the spiritual rewards awaiting those who follow the path of love and devotion.
Notable Examples:
Hafez's Divan: The great Persian poet's collection contains hundreds of ghazals featuring rose imagery, using the flower to explore every aspect of divine and human love. Hafez's roses are simultaneously earthly flowers, human beloveds, and symbols of divine grace.
Rumi's Masnavi: Rumi employs rose imagery throughout his mystical epic to represent spiritual transformation and the soul's journey toward union with the beloved.
Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat: Though often interpreted in secular terms, Khayyam's rose imagery carries deep philosophical weight, representing the transient beauty of life and the importance of spiritual awareness.
Sa'di's Gulistan: This classical work, whose title means "Rose Garden," uses rose imagery throughout to explore ethical and spiritual themes.
The Tulip in Persian and Ottoman Poetry
The tulip developed rich symbolic meanings in Persian poetry that later influenced Ottoman Turkish verse and eventually reached European literature.
Perfect Love and Devotion: The tulip's cup-like shape made it a symbol for the heart that opens completely to receive divine love. The flower represents perfect devotion and the soul's willingness to be filled with spiritual grace.
Martyrdom and Sacrifice: Red tulips came to symbolize the blood of martyrs, particularly those who died for love (whether human or divine). This symbolism appears frequently in poetry dealing with the costs of spiritual and earthly passion.
Spring's Arrival and Renewal: Like many spring flowers, tulips represent renewal, hope, and the return of life after winter's death. In Persian poetry, this renewal often carries spiritual overtones, suggesting the soul's awakening to divine love.
Beauty and Perfection: The tulip's perfect form made it another symbol for idealized beauty, though with different connotations from the rose. Where the rose might represent complex, layered beauty, the tulip represents simple, pure perfection.
Notable Examples:
Classical Persian garden poetry: Many Persian poets included tulips in their descriptions of idealized gardens, using them to represent paradise on earth.
Ottoman divan poetry: Turkish poets adopted and adapted Persian tulip symbolism, eventually making the flower a central symbol of Ottoman court culture.
Mediterranean and Classical Traditions
The Poppy
The poppy's associations with sleep, death, and remembrance stem from both its physical properties (opium's sedative effects) and its mythological connections with various underworld deities.
Sleep and Death: The poppy's connection with opium made it a natural symbol for sleep, peaceful death, and the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. In Greek mythology, poppies were associated with Hypnos (Sleep) and his brother Thanatos (Death), as well as with Morpheus, the god of dreams.
Remembrance and Memory: The poppy's modern association with war remembrance, particularly following World War I, gave it new symbolic weight in contemporary poetry. The flower came to represent not just death in battle but the importance of remembering sacrifice and the cost of human conflict.
Fertility and Abundance: In ancient agricultural societies, poppies growing wild in grain fields symbolized fertility and the earth's abundance. This positive symbolism appears in classical poetry celebrating harvest and natural bounty.
Forgetfulness and Escape: The poppy's narcotic properties also made it a symbol for the desire to escape pain or difficult realities, a theme that appears in poetry dealing with trauma, loss, and the human need for respite from suffering.
Notable Examples:
Classical Greek and Roman poetry: Poets like Ovid and Virgil employed poppy imagery in pastoral poetry and in works dealing with the underworld and death.
John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields": This famous World War I poem established the poppy as the supreme symbol of war remembrance in English-speaking countries.
Contemporary war poetry: Poets continue to use poppy imagery when dealing with themes of conflict, memory, and the cost of violence.
The Myrtle
Myrtle's evergreen nature and associations with love goddesses made it a complex symbol in Mediterranean poetry, representing both earthly and eternal love.
Love and Marriage: Sacred to Aphrodite/Venus in classical mythology, myrtle became a traditional symbol for love and marriage in Mediterranean cultures. The plant's evergreen nature suggested love that endures beyond seasons and years.
Peace and Victory: Myrtle wreaths crowned victors in certain ancient competitions, and the plant came to symbolize victory achieved through peace rather than violence—triumph of love over conflict.
Immortality and Eternal Life: The myrtle's evergreen nature made it a symbol for concepts that transcend mortality—eternal love, lasting memory, and spiritual truths that survive physical death.
Sacred and Profane Love: Myrtle's dual associations with earthly love (through Aphrodite) and eternal principles allowed poets to explore the relationship between physical passion and spiritual devotion.
Notable Examples:
Classical epithalamia: Wedding songs throughout the Mediterranean world frequently featured myrtle imagery to bless marriages and celebrate enduring love.
Renaissance marriage poetry: Poets like Edmund Spenser incorporated myrtle symbolism into elaborate celebrations of matrimonial union.
Regional Variations and Cultural Adaptations
Celtic and Northern European Traditions
Celtic poetry developed its own distinctive flower symbolism, often connected to landscape, seasonal festivals, and ancient spiritual practices.
Heather: In Scottish poetry, heather represents resilience, independence, and the beauty that can flourish in harsh conditions. The plant's ability to bloom on windswept moors made it a symbol of Scottish national character and the strength to maintain beauty and dignity despite adversity. Burns and other Scottish poets used heather imagery to celebrate both landscape and cultural identity.
Shamrock: Irish poetry employs the three-leafed shamrock as a symbol of trinity (both Christian and pre-Christian), national identity, and the interconnectedness of earth, sea, and sky. The plant's humble appearance but powerful symbolic weight mirrors themes of finding spiritual significance in everyday experience.
Mistletoe: Connected to ancient Druidic traditions, mistletoe appears in Celtic poetry as a symbol of fertility, protection, and the connection between earthly and spiritual realms. Its parasitic nature, growing on host trees, made it a complex symbol for relationships that transcend normal boundaries.
Bluebells: Scottish and Irish poetry frequently features bluebells as symbols of constancy, humility, and the fairy realm. The flowers' tendency to carpet entire woodland floors made them symbols of community and shared beauty.
African Poetry
African poetry has developed rich flower symbolism that reflects the continent's diverse ecosystems and cultural traditions.
Protea: As South Africa's national flower, the protea appears in contemporary South African poetry as a symbol of diversity, transformation, and resilience. The flower's ability to survive veldt fires and emerge even stronger makes it a powerful metaphor for survival under apartheid and renewal in post-apartheid society.
Baobab Flowers: Though the baobab is primarily known for its distinctive trunk, its flowers appear in African poetry as symbols of ancient wisdom, community gathering, and the connection between generations. The tree's longevity and central role in village life make its flowers represent continuity and collective memory.
Desert Blooms: Across African poetry, flowers that bloom briefly in desert conditions symbolize hope persisting in harsh circumstances, the unexpected beauty that can emerge from difficulty, and the preciousness of life in challenging environments.
Flame Tree Flowers: The brilliant red flowers of flame trees appear throughout African poetry as symbols of passion, celebration, and the intensity of life in tropical climates.
Native American Traditions
Native American poetic traditions, both traditional and contemporary, have developed distinctive flower symbolism rooted in specific landscapes and spiritual practices.
Sunflower: In Plains tribes' traditions, the sunflower represents loyalty, adoration of the divine (as the flower follows the sun), and the connection between earth and sky. Contemporary Native American poets use sunflower imagery to explore themes of spiritual devotion and cultural continuity.
Wild Rose: The wild rose appears in Native American poetry as a symbol of the balance between beauty and protection (thorns), the importance of respecting natural defenses, and the complexity of relationships with both human and natural communities.
Sage Flowers: Though sage is primarily valued for its leaves, its flowers appear in Native poetry as symbols of purification, wisdom gained through experience, and the connection between physical and spiritual healing.
Corn Silk: While technically flowers, corn silks appear in Native American agricultural poetry as symbols of fertility, the connection between human communities and cultivated plants, and the sacred relationship between people and the foods that sustain them.
Latin American Poetry
Latin American poetry has developed flower symbolism that reflects the region's tropical abundance, indigenous traditions, and colonial history.
Marigold (Cempasúchil): Central to Day of the Dead celebrations, marigolds in Mexican and Central American poetry represent the connection between worlds of living and dead, the continuity of memory beyond death, and the transformation of grief into celebration.
Jacaranda: The jacaranda's spectacular purple blooms appear throughout Latin American poetry as symbols of tropical abundance, seasonal transformation, and the overwhelming beauty that can emerge suddenly and dramatically.
Passion Flower: Named for its supposed resemblance to symbols of Christ's passion, the passion flower appears in Latin American religious poetry as a symbol of spiritual suffering transformed into beauty, and in secular poetry as a symbol of intense, transformative love.
Bird of Paradise: This exotic flower appears in Caribbean and South American poetry as a symbol of freedom, exotic beauty, and the desire to transcend ordinary experience through art and passion.
Coffee Blossoms: In regions where coffee is central to the economy, coffee blossoms appear in poetry as symbols of economic hope, the connection between landscape and livelihood, and the transformation of simple beauty into sustenance.
Poetic Techniques and Flower Symbolism
Metaphor and Extended Metaphor
Flowers serve as vehicles for complex metaphorical constructions, allowing poets to explore abstract concepts through concrete imagery. The effectiveness of floral metaphors stems from their ability to engage multiple senses simultaneously while carrying cultural associations that resonate with readers' experiences and expectations.
Extended metaphors using flowers can sustain entire poems or major sections of longer works. Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") uses the comparison between human beauty and natural beauty to explore themes of mortality and art's power to preserve what time destroys. Similarly, Blake's "The Sick Rose" creates an extended metaphor that works on multiple levels—as a description of a diseased plant, as an exploration of corrupted innocence, and as a critique of repressed sexuality.
Contemporary poets often create innovative extended metaphors by combining traditional flower symbolism with modern contexts. For example, a poet might use rose imagery to explore not just romantic love but the complexities of online relationships, or employ cherry blossom symbolism to examine urban development's impact on traditional communities.
Personification and Apostrophe
Flowers are frequently given human characteristics, enabling poets to explore human nature through natural imagery. This technique allows poets to examine emotions and behaviors from new perspectives while maintaining emotional distance that can make difficult subjects more approachable.
Personified flowers can serve as confidants, mirrors, or alternative selves that allow poets to examine their own experiences indirectly. When Wordsworth's daffodils "dance" and provide companionship to the solitary speaker, they become externalized representations of the joy and community that memory can provide.
Apostrophe—direct address to flowers—appears frequently in flower poetry, allowing poets to create intimate, conversational tones while exploring philosophical or emotional themes. Burns's address to a daisy he has accidentally destroyed with his plow becomes a meditation on social class, vulnerability, and the unintended consequences of human action.
Seasonal Symbolism and Temporal Structure
The timing of different blooms creates opportunities for poets to explore themes of aging, renewal, and life cycles. Seasonal flower imagery often structures entire poems or collections, providing natural progressions that mirror human development or historical processes.
Spring flowers (daffodils, tulips, cherry blossoms) typically represent youth, hope, new love, and fresh beginnings. Summer flowers (roses, lilies, sunflowers) often symbolize maturity, fulfilled love, and the peak of life's experiences. Autumn flowers (chrysanthemums, asters) suggest wisdom, reflection, and the beauty that comes with age and experience. Winter bloomers (hellebores, winter jasmine) represent perseverance, hope in darkness, and the strength to maintain beauty under adverse conditions.
Poets often use seasonal flower progressions to structure entire works, creating temporal frameworks that allow exploration of change, growth, and the cyclical nature of experience. This technique appears in everything from medieval allegories to contemporary sequences exploring personal or historical transformation.
Color Symbolism and Sensory Appeal
The various colors of flowers add layers of meaning that poets can manipulate to create complex emotional and symbolic effects:
Red flowers carry associations with passion, love, anger, sacrifice, and vitality. Red roses suggest romantic passion, while red poppies might evoke blood sacrifice or martyrdom. The intensity of red can represent overwhelming emotion or the life force itself.
White flowers symbolize purity, innocence, death, spirituality, and new beginnings. White lilies suggest spiritual purity, while white roses might represent pure love or the peace of death. White flowers can also represent emptiness, blankness, or the state before experience begins.
Yellow flowers evoke joy, friendship, jealousy, cowardice, and intellectual clarity. Yellow daffodils suggest springtime joy, while yellow roses traditionally indicate friendship rather than romantic love. In some contexts, yellow flowers can represent the sun's life-giving power.
Purple flowers represent royalty, luxury, mystery, spirituality, and transformation. Purple violets suggest modesty despite their royal color, while purple iris might indicate messages between divine and human realms.
Blue flowers symbolize peace, tranquility, sadness, loyalty, and the infinite. Blue flowers are relatively rare in nature, making them symbols for the unusual, the mystical, or the longed-for but unattainable.
Pink flowers suggest gentle love, gratitude, grace, and femininity. Pink roses indicate appreciation and admiration, while pink cherry blossoms might represent the gentle aspect of transient beauty.
Synesthetic and Multi-Sensory Imagery
Effective flower poetry often engages multiple senses, creating rich sensory experiences that enhance symbolic meanings. The visual beauty of flowers combines with their fragrances, the texture of petals, the sound of wind through blossoms, and sometimes even taste to create complete sensory worlds within poems.
Synesthetic imagery—describing one sense in terms of another—appears frequently in flower poetry. Poets might describe colors as fragrant, scents as musical, or textures as bright. This technique creates unusual and memorable images while suggesting the interconnectedness of sensory experience.
Historical Evolution of Flower Symbolism
Ancient and Classical Periods
The roots of Western flower symbolism trace back to ancient Greek and Roman literature, where flowers were primarily associated with mythological figures and religious practices. Early flower symbolism was relatively straightforward, often connected to specific deities or seasonal festivals.
Greek pastoral poetry established many enduring associations between flowers and emotional states, landscape and inner experience. Poets like Theocritus created connections between specific flowers and particular moods or situations that influenced centuries of subsequent poetry.
Roman poets, particularly Ovid, developed more complex flower symbolism, especially in the Metamorphoses, where humans transformed into flowers carry their human characteristics into their new forms. These transformation myths created symbolic connections that persist in modern poetry—Narcissus becoming the daffodil, Hyacinthus becoming the hyacinth, Adonis becoming the anemone.
Medieval Period
Medieval poetry significantly expanded flower symbolism, primarily through Christian allegorical traditions and the development of courtly love poetry. The medieval period saw the creation of elaborate symbolic systems where specific flowers carried precise meanings that educated readers were expected to recognize and interpret.
Christian symbolism dominated much medieval flower poetry, with the lily becoming the supreme symbol of the Virgin Mary's purity, the rose representing both earthly and divine love, and various other flowers acquiring specific religious meanings. Medieval bestiaries and herbals created detailed correspondences between flowers and virtues, sins, and spiritual states.
The tradition of courtly love, particularly as developed in French and Provençal poetry, created new symbolic uses for flowers, especially roses. The beloved became identified with the rose not just for beauty but for the combination of allure and danger (thorns), accessibility and distance, that characterized courtly love relationships.
Renaissance and Early Modern Period
The Renaissance brought new sophistication to flower symbolism, influenced by renewed interest in classical literature, expanded global trade that introduced new flowers to European consciousness, and the development of more complex poetic forms that could support elaborate symbolic structures.
Renaissance poets like Edmund Spenser created intricate allegorical gardens where each flower carried multiple layers of meaning. The Faerie Queene presents flowers that simultaneously represent moral virtues, political figures, and aesthetic ideals, creating a symbolic complexity that demands careful reading and interpretation.
The development of the sonnet form provided perfect structure for exploring flower symbolism, with the traditional division into octave and sestet allowing poets to establish symbolic meanings and then complicate or transform them. Shakespeare's sonnets demonstrate masterful manipulation of flower imagery, using traditional symbols in unexpected ways to create new meanings.
Romantic Period
Romanticism revolutionized flower symbolism by emphasizing personal emotional response over traditional allegorical meanings. Romantic poets maintained awareness of conventional flower symbolism but felt free to adapt, modify, or even reject traditional meanings in favor of individual emotional truth.
Wordsworth's poetry demonstrates this shift, using flowers like daffodils not primarily for their traditional symbolic meanings but for their capacity to evoke specific emotional memories and connections with nature. The Romantic emphasis on spontaneous emotional response allowed flowers to become vehicles for exploring individual psychology rather than universal truths.
The Romantic period also saw increased interest in exotic flowers as global exploration brought new species to European attention. Poets began incorporating flowers from around the world into their work, sometimes maintaining their original cultural meanings and sometimes adapting them to European symbolic systems.
Victorian Era
The Victorian period created perhaps the most elaborate system of flower symbolism in Western culture, developing detailed "language of flowers" codes that assigned specific meanings to dozens of different flowers, colors, and even the ways flowers were presented or worn.
This floriography allowed for complex communication through flower arrangements, where every bloom carried specific meaning. Poetry of this period often assumes readers' familiarity with these codes, creating layers of meaning accessible only to those versed in Victorian flower symbolism.
Victorian flower symbolism reflected the period's concerns with propriety, hidden emotion, and coded communication. Flowers provided a socially acceptable way to express feelings that direct statement might make inappropriate, particularly in romantic contexts where explicit declaration might violate social norms.
Modernist Period
Modernist poets simultaneously embraced and rejected traditional flower symbolism, using familiar flowers in unexpected contexts to create new meanings or questioning the very basis of symbolic meaning itself.
Poets like T.S. Eliot employed flower imagery that draws on traditional associations while subverting expected meanings. The hyacinth garden in "The Waste Land" evokes classical mythology and Christian symbolism while creating a distinctly modern sense of spiritual emptiness and fragmented meaning.
Imagist poets like H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) created flower poetry that emphasized precise visual description and immediate emotional impact over traditional symbolic meanings. This approach sought to let flowers speak for themselves rather than serving as vehicles for predetermined symbolic content.
Contemporary Period
Contemporary poetry continues to evolve flower symbolism, often combining traditional meanings with modern concerns about environmental destruction, globalization, and cultural change. Modern poets frequently use flower imagery to explore themes of loss, preservation, and the relationship between human communities and natural systems.
Environmental poetry has given flower symbolism new urgency, with flowers often representing what is threatened or lost in a changing world. Contemporary poets use traditional flower symbols to lament environmental destruction while creating new symbolic meanings related to conservation, sustainability, and human responsibility for natural systems.
Postcolonial poetry has reclaimed indigenous flower symbolism, challenging European interpretations and asserting alternative meanings rooted in local cultures and traditions. This has enriched global flower symbolism by introducing new flowers and new ways of interpreting familiar ones.
Cross-Cultural Influences and Exchange
Silk Road and Medieval Trade
The historic Silk Road and medieval trade routes facilitated not just the exchange of goods but also the transmission of symbolic meanings across cultures. Flowers and their symbolic associations traveled along these trade routes, leading to fascinating hybridizations of meaning.
Persian rose symbolism, for example, influenced both Chinese and European poetry through trade connections. Chinese poets began incorporating Persian rose imagery alongside their traditional chrysanthemum and plum blossom symbolism, creating new synthetic meanings that combined Eastern and Western traditions.
Similarly, European contact with Islamic culture through trade and the Crusades introduced new ways of thinking about familiar flowers. The elaborate garden symbolism of Persian and Arabic poetry influenced European allegorical traditions, contributing to works like the Roman de la Rose.
Colonial Period Exchanges
The colonial period created complex patterns of cultural exchange that significantly affected flower symbolism in poetry. European colonizers encountered new flowers in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, while indigenous populations were exposed to European flowers and their associated meanings.
This exchange was rarely equal—European meanings often displaced indigenous symbolism—but it also created new hybrid traditions. In the Americas, European settlers incorporated indigenous flowers like sunflowers and passion flowers into their poetry while often maintaining European symbolic frameworks.
Indigenous poets and writers, when they began writing in European languages, sometimes preserved traditional flower meanings within European poetic forms, creating works that operated simultaneously within indigenous and colonial symbolic systems.
Modern Globalization
Contemporary globalization has accelerated the exchange of flower symbolism across cultures, creating both opportunities for enriched meaning and challenges to cultural specificity. Modern poets have access to flower traditions from around the world, leading to poetry that combines symbols from multiple cultures.
This global access has created both synthetic works that successfully merge different traditions and confused works that employ symbols without understanding their cultural contexts. The most successful contemporary poets using cross-cultural flower symbolism demonstrate deep understanding of the traditions they're drawing from.
Psychological and Archetypal Dimensions
Jungian Interpretations
Carl Jung's analytical psychology offers frameworks for understanding flower symbolism that transcend specific cultural traditions. Jung's concept of archetypes—universal symbols that appear across cultures—applies readily to flower imagery in poetry.
The flower as archetype represents growth, development, and the unfolding of potential. The seed-to-bloom progression mirrors psychological development from unconscious potential to conscious realization. This archetypal dimension explains why flower imagery appears so consistently across cultures and historical periods.
Jung's concept of the anima—the feminine aspect of the masculine psyche—often manifests in flower imagery, particularly in poetry by male writers. Flowers become vehicles for exploring relationships with femininity, creativity, and emotional expression that might otherwise remain unconscious.
Freudian Symbolism
Freudian psychoanalytic theory offers alternative interpretations of flower symbolism, particularly focusing on sexual symbolism and repressed desires. The flower's reproductive function makes it a natural symbol for sexuality, while its beauty and fragrance suggest sublimated sexual attraction.
Freudian interpretation pays particular attention to flower imagery in poetry dealing with desire, repression, and the relationship between conscious and unconscious motivations. Blake's "The Sick Rose," for example, becomes a meditation on repressed sexuality and its destructive consequences.
The Victorian emphasis on flower symbolism takes on new meaning from a Freudian perspective, with the elaborate language of flowers serving as a mechanism for expressing sexual and romantic desires that social norms prohibited from direct expression.
Developmental Psychology
Developmental psychology offers insights into how flower symbolism functions in poetry dealing with growth, maturation, and life transitions. The flower's life cycle—from seed through bloom to decay—provides natural metaphors for human development stages.
Childhood poetry often features spring flowers like daffodils and tulips, emphasizing themes of new growth and unlimited potential. Adolescent poetry frequently employs roses and other sexually symbolic flowers to explore themes of awakening desire and romantic longing.
Adult poetry uses summer flowers to explore themes of fulfillment, responsibility, and the complexity of mature relationships. Poetry of aging often features autumn flowers like chrysanthemums, emphasizing themes of wisdom, reflection, and acceptance of mortality.
Gender and Flower Symbolism
Traditional Gender Associations
Traditional flower symbolism has often reflected and reinforced gender stereotypes, with flowers typically associated with femininity, passivity, and decorative beauty rather than strength or agency. This gendering of flower imagery has created both opportunities and limitations for poets of all genders.
Female poets have sometimes embraced flower imagery as a way of claiming traditionally feminine symbols and investing them with new power and meaning. Poets like Emily Dickinson used flower imagery extensively but often subverted traditional passive meanings, creating flowers that are active, mysterious, and even threatening.
Male poets have traditionally used flower imagery to represent feminine beauty, often from a distanced, objectifying perspective. However, many male poets have also used flower imagery to explore their own relationships with beauty, emotion, and vulnerability.
Feminist Reinterpretations
Contemporary feminist poets have undertaken systematic reexamination of traditional flower symbolism, challenging passive associations and creating new meanings that emphasize agency, strength, and complexity. This reinterpretation often involves maintaining the beauty of flower imagery while rejecting implications of fragility or decorative purposelessness.
Adrienne Rich's poetry, for example, uses flower imagery to explore women's relationships with their own bodies, with nature, and with social expectations. Her flowers are neither purely beautiful nor simply symbolic—they are complex living entities that mirror the complexity of women's experiences.
Contemporary feminist poets also reclaim flowers associated with female sexuality, transforming symbols that traditionally objectified women into expressions of female agency and desire. Georgia O'Keeffe's influence on poetry demonstrates how flower imagery can celebrate rather than diminish female sexuality.
Queer Interpretations
Queer poets have found in flower symbolism opportunities to explore non-normative sexualities and gender identities, often using the fluidity of floral reproduction (many flowers are hermaphroditic) to challenge binary thinking about gender and sexuality.
The Victorian tradition of coded flower communication has particular resonance for queer poets, who understand the necessity of communicating desire and identity through indirect means. Contemporary queer poets often employ flower symbolism to explore themes of hidden identity, coded communication, and the beauty of what society might reject.
Environmental and Ecological Dimensions
Climate Change Poetry
Contemporary poetry increasingly uses flower symbolism to address environmental crisis and climate change. Traditional flower imagery gains new poignancy when viewed through the lens of environmental destruction and species extinction.
Poets use changing blooming seasons, disappearing native flowers, and the replacement of wild flowers with cultivated varieties to explore humanity's impact on natural systems. The traditional symbolism of renewal and seasonal return becomes complicated when seasons themselves are changing unpredictably.
Cherry blossom poetry, for example, takes on new meaning in an era when climate change affects blooming times and threatens the traditional festivals that celebrate these flowers. Contemporary Japanese poets address these changes directly, using traditional forms to explore very contemporary anxieties.
Urban vs. Wild Flowers
Modern poetry often contrasts cultivated urban flowers with wild varieties, using this distinction to explore themes of authenticity, human control over nature, and the costs of civilization. Garden flowers represent human attempts to control and improve nature, while wild flowers symbolize untamed natural forces.
Urban flower imagery in contemporary poetry often carries undertones of artificiality, control, and disconnection from natural processes. City gardens become symbols of humanity's attempt to maintain connection with nature while fundamentally altering it.
Conversely, wild flowers in contemporary poetry often represent authenticity, resilience, and the persistence of natural forces despite human interference. Weeds growing through concrete become powerful symbols of nature's ability to survive and thrive despite human attempts at control.
Indigenous Ecological Knowledge
Contemporary poetry increasingly incorporates indigenous perspectives on flowers and their ecological relationships, challenging European-derived symbolism with knowledge systems that emphasize flowers' roles within complex ecological communities rather than as isolated symbols.
Native American poets, for example, use flower imagery that emphasizes relationships between plants, animals, and human communities rather than individual symbolic meanings. Flowers appear as participants in complex ecological webs rather than as isolated objects of contemplation.
This ecological approach to flower symbolism creates poetry that is simultaneously more specific (rooted in particular landscapes and ecosystems) and more universal (acknowledging the interconnectedness of all living systems).
Therapeutic and Healing Dimensions
Bibliotherapy and Flower Poetry
Flower poetry has long been recognized for its therapeutic potential, offering readers opportunities to explore difficult emotions through beautiful imagery. The combination of natural beauty and symbolic meaning provides safe frameworks for confronting pain, loss, and other challenging experiences.
Poetry therapy practitioners often use flower poems to help clients explore themes of growth, change, and renewal. The flower's life cycle provides natural metaphors for recovery processes, while the beauty of flower imagery can make difficult therapeutic work more accessible.
Different flowers serve different therapeutic purposes: rose poetry for exploring love and relationships, daffodil poetry for addressing depression and finding hope, lily poetry for confronting death and spiritual questions, cherry blossom poetry for accepting transience and finding beauty in impermanence.
Memorial and Grief Poetry
Flowers play central roles in poetry dealing with death, loss, and memory. The tradition of bringing flowers to graves creates natural associations between flowers and remembrance, while the flower's own life cycle mirrors human mortality.
Different cultural traditions use different flowers for memorial purposes, creating rich traditions of grief poetry. Mexican marigolds for Day of the Dead, white lilies for Christian funerals, cherry blossoms for honoring fallen warriors—each tradition creates specific poetic conventions for exploring loss.
Contemporary memorial poetry often combines traditional flower symbolism with personal memory, creating works that are both universally accessible and deeply individual. These poems help both writers and readers process grief while celebrating the continuing presence of the deceased in memory and influence.
Florist insights
Flower symbolism in world poetry represents one of humanity's most enduring and universal forms of artistic expression, creating a global language that transcends cultural boundaries while celebrating unique cultural perspectives. From the cherry blossoms of Japanese haiku to the roses of Persian ghazals, from the daffodils of English Romanticism to the lotus flowers of Sanskrit verse, from the indigenous wildflowers of Native American oral traditions to the protest carnations of contemporary political poetry, these natural symbols continue to provide poets with rich material for exploring the deepest aspects of human experience.
The evolution of flower symbolism reflects broader changes in human consciousness, from ancient religious and mythological associations through medieval allegorical systems, Renaissance complexity, Romantic individualism, Victorian elaboration, Modernist fragmentation, and contemporary environmental awareness. Each era has added new layers of meaning while preserving essential symbolic connections that link contemporary readers with thousands of years of poetic tradition.
Understanding floral symbolism enhances our appreciation of poetry across cultures and time periods, revealing both the universal human experiences that connect all people and the unique ways different cultures have interpreted the natural world. The rose that represents divine love in Persian mystical poetry and romantic passion in European sonnets speaks to both shared human experiences of love and the different ways cultures understand and express that love.
Contemporary developments in flower symbolism reflect our current global moment—environmental crisis has given traditional symbols of renewal new urgency, globalization has created opportunities for cross-cultural symbolic synthesis, feminist and queer interpretations have challenged traditional gender associations, and postcolonial poets have reclaimed indigenous meanings from colonial appropriation.
The therapeutic dimensions of flower poetry demonstrate its continued relevance for individual healing and community building. Whether used in formal poetry therapy or simply read for personal comfort and insight, flower poems provide frameworks for exploring difficult emotions, processing life transitions, and finding beauty in challenging circumstances.
The ecological dimensions of contemporary flower poetry point toward future directions for the tradition, as poets increasingly recognize flowers not as isolated symbols but as participants in complex environmental systems threatened by human activity. This ecological awareness creates opportunities for flower symbolism that is simultaneously more scientifically informed and more spiritually profound than traditional approaches.
Cross-cultural influences continue to enrich flower symbolism as poets gain access to traditions from around the world. The most successful contemporary flower poetry demonstrates deep understanding of multiple traditions while creating genuinely new synthetic meanings that speak to contemporary global consciousness.
The psychological and archetypal dimensions of flower symbolism ensure its continued relevance across cultures and historical periods. The flower as archetype—representing growth, beauty, transience, and renewal—speaks to fundamental human experiences that transcend specific cultural contexts while remaining open to endless cultural variation and individual interpretation.
Gender interpretations of flower symbolism continue to evolve as contemporary poets challenge traditional associations while finding new ways to celebrate beauty, growth, and the complex relationships between human communities and natural systems. The feminist reclamation of flower imagery and queer reinterpretations of floral reproduction create new possibilities for using traditional symbols in revolutionary ways.
The future of flower symbolism in poetry appears secure precisely because it combines universal human experiences with endless possibilities for individual and cultural variation. As long as flowers bloom and humans write poetry, these natural symbols will continue to provide poets with vehicles for exploring love, beauty, mortality, renewal, and the profound connections between human consciousness and the natural world that sustains it.
The garden of world poetry continues to bloom with new varieties of meaning, each flower a doorway to understanding both the particular cultural moment that created it and the eternal human concerns it expresses. In an era of rapid global change, flower symbolism provides both continuity with tradition and flexibility for addressing contemporary concerns. Whether celebrating the return of spring, mourning the loss of love, contemplating mortality, or advocating for environmental protection, poets continue to find in flowers the perfect combination of beauty and meaning that makes poetry itself possible.
As we face an uncertain environmental future, flower symbolism in poetry takes on new significance as both celebration of natural beauty and urgent reminder of what we stand to lose. The flowers that have provided poets with symbols for millennia now need poetry's power to advocate for their preservation and the preservation of the natural systems that sustain both flowers and human communities. In this way, flower symbolism comes full circle, from representing human experiences through natural imagery to representing natural systems that require human understanding and protection for their survival.
The study of flower symbolism ultimately reveals poetry's power to create meaning that transcends individual experience while remaining deeply personal, to connect readers across cultures and centuries while speaking to immediate contemporary concerns, and to find in the natural world metaphors profound enough to illuminate the full complexity of human consciousness. In gardens both real and metaphorical, in wild meadows and urban window boxes, in ancient verses and contemporary blogs, flowers continue to bloom with meaning that enriches both poetry and the human experience it seeks to express and understand.
