Flowers serve as symbols in literature

Spring is here, and with it comes the renewal and rebirth that flowers so beautifully represent. However, flowers aren’t just pretty things we see in the garden – they have long been a symbol of nature’s cycle to renew and transform. Even in literature, flowers often hold deeper meanings, serving as metaphors for everything from love and beauty to decay and destruction.

Spring, with its promise of rebirth, is the perfect season to explore the symbolic presence that flowers hold in literary works. So, let’s take a look at how flowers have been used in literature to convey these big ideas, using three classic works: William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Emily Dickinson’s “The Daisy Follows Soft the Sun” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

Let’s start with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In this play, flowers are used as mystical symbols of magic and love. The enchanted love-in-idleness (pansy), a key element in the play, is used by fairy king Oberon to cast a spell on Titania and the four lovers. The flower’s juice causes individuals to fall in love with the first person they see, and its use demonstrates the unpredictable nature of love. It can be sweet and beautiful, but it can also be completely irrational.

Shakespeare uses flowers to show that love, much like nature, is wild, uncontrollable and subject to all kinds of strange forces. Flowers in this play symbolize the chaotic beauty of romance – something that can change in the blink of an eye, just like the shift from one flower blooming to the next.

Now, let’s switch gears and talk about Emily Dickinson. Her poem, “The Daisy Follows Soft the Sun,” gives us a totally different perspective on flowers. The daisy, in this case, represents something simple and pure. The flower follows the sun, day after day, as a small act of devotion. It’s not about magic or chaos – it’s about the steady, reliable rhythm of nature.

Dickinson’s daisy is a symbol of renewal, but in a much more grounded way. The daisy’s simple journey through life reflects the cycles of nature that continue, even when everything else feels uncertain. It’s almost like Dickinson is implying life keeps going, and beauty keeps coming no matter how small or simple it may seem.

However, not every depiction of flowers in literature is all sunshine and roses. In T.S. Eliot’s, “The Waste Land,” flowers are far from a symbol of hope. Eliot opens the poem with the famous line “April is the cruelest month,” going against the typical association of spring with new beginnings.

For Eliot, spring isn’t a time of joy and renewal – it’s a reminder of all that has been lost and destroyed. To him, rebirth doesn’t feel hopeful, but rather it feels forced in a cruel and tortuous way. It’s a major contrast to the beauty and optimism that flowers usually bring to mind.

When we look at these three works, we see how flowers in literature take on so many different meanings. Whether it’s the magical chaos of love, peaceful hope or of painful rebirth, flowers are much more than just pretty symbols of spring. They may be small, but in art they’re complex little representations of life, love, loss, beauty and everything in between.