Flowers in paintings, whether they are displayed in baroque, towering masses, or simply, as in the image of a lone daffodil leaning in a glass of water, have held a centuries-long appeal.  Beginning with Dutch still life paintings of the 16th century, artists painted flowers for a growing middle class of patrons who wanted to display these works of art in their homes.  The verisimilitude and craft of these paintings included details down to droplets of water and tiny insects crawling on leaves.  The flowers themselves, tulips for example, could be seen as metaphors for wealth.  There were symbolic uses of certain flowers and colors as well. Flowers in paintings can be metaphors for the fleeting nature of life, for youth, love, cultural identity, female anatomy, and death. 

 

In Jane Kenyon’s poem, the memory of delphiniums and burgundy lilies conjure the warmth, movement, and sensuality of summer and relieves the reader of the colorless landscape of winter and despair.  The poet creates a visual image, much like a painter, and the flowers are a metaphor for hope.

 

February: Thinking of Flowers

 

Now wind torments the field,

turning the white surface back

on itself, back and back on itself,

like an animal licking a wound.

 

Nothing but white—the air, the light;

only one brown milkweed pod

bobbing in the gully, smallest

brown boat on the immense tide.

 

A single green sprouting thing

would restore me…

 

Then think of the tall delphinium,

swaying, or the bee when it comes

to the tongue of the burgundy lily.

 

Jane Kenyon

 

Credit: Jane Kenyon, “February: Thinking of Flowers” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press.

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