I'm doing a project on "The Flower". What kind of information should I present to the class? There isn't much analysis anywhere else. Help?

Once in a golden hour
    I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
    The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went
    Thro' my garden-bower,
And muttering discontent
    Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
    It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o'er the wall
    Stole the seed by night.

Sow'd it far and wide
    By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried
    `Splendid is the flower.'

Read my little fable:
    He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
    For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
    And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
    Call it but a weed.


Katie,

A little more background information might help us to help you.

Are you the class teacher or a pupil? What kind of project? What age is the class?

There must be some history on this poem, but I haven't yet tried to find it. Judging by the words alone, it could be an extended metaphor for some kind of new verse form that Tennyson invented, if he did invent one. For instance, the last stanza could well apply to limericks, but I have never heard that he invented the limerick! Of course he could have written the poem for a friend, whom he makes the speaker in the poem.

Ian

Yeah, the inconsistent stanzas themselves could be the flower. Some say it is 'freedom' that was planted, though not by Tennyson alone of course. As with all good metaphors, it could be any number of things. Merely the desire to write poetry, for example. To me, the key lines are:

Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.

That is to say, humans communicate ideas to one another. Once any given truth is known to one of us (how to make fire, or a wheel or inclined plane), it will be available to us all. When an idea is new, people have a tendency to dislike it, but can be trusted to eventually come to both accept and later embrace it.

Personally, I would get the class to pursue that line of inquiry, and disregard the stanza oddities: mostly trimeter in abab stanzas, but with the strange 'short meter' choice in the penultimate stanza (third line is tetrameter). That stanza and the last one also change the rhyme scheme.

Interested students may be encouraged to speculate on why that was done. There is no way to be sure, but I suspect Alfie did it merely for variation - relieve possible boredom from continued repetition, that is. Note he does the same thing with variations on the iambic beat, with trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic subs.

I see I wrote 'freedom' above. Perhaps Liberty were a better choice:

[www.emule.com]

This is the poem linked by Hugh's last post.

The Flower of Liberty
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

What flower is this that greets the morn,
Its hues from Heaven so freshly born?
With burning star and flaming band
It kindles all the sunset land:
Oh tell us what its name may be,--
Is this the Flower of Liberty?

It is the banner of the free,
The starry Flower of Liberty!

In savage Nature's far abode
Its tender seed our fathers sowed;
The storm-winds rocked its swelling bud,
Its opening leaves were streaked with blood,
Till lo! earth's tyrants shook to see
The full-blown Flower of Liberty!

Then hail the banner of the free,
The starry Flower of Liberty!

Behold its streaming rays unite,
One mingling flood of braided light,--
The red that fires the Southern rose,
With spotless white from Northern snows,
And, spangled o'er its azure, see
The sister Stars of Liberty!

Then hail the banner of the free,
The starry Flower of Liberty!

The blades of heroes fence it round,
Where'er it springs is holy ground;
From tower and dome its glories spread;
It waves where lonely sentries tread;
It makes the land as ocean free,
And plants an empire on the sea!

Then hail the banner of the free,
The starry Flower of Liberty!

Thy sacred leaves, fair Freedom's flower,
Shall ever float on dome and tower,
To all their heavenly colors true,
In blackening frost or crimson dew,--
And God love us as we love thee,
Thrice holy Flower of Liberty!

Then hail the banner of the free,
The starry Flower of Liberty!

Great catch of a poem to compare, Hugh! Especially, given the contemporaneity of the poets (Tennyson 1809-1892, and Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894) and the fact that the two poems were written around the same time.

According to [www.eldritchpress.org] OWT’s ‘The Flower of Liberty’ was written in 1861. According to [tinyurl.com] Tennyson’s ‘The Flower’ was first published in 1864 in a volume containing other poems of his written in the early 1860s. His last previous volume of poems was published 1855.

Probably, however, the flower metaphors in the two poems have very different meanings, and their adoption was coincidental.

1861 saw the start of the American civil war, making the freeing of the slaves a huge issue. Liberty was a buzz-word there. The ‘starry Flower of Liberty’ in OWT’s poem was the Union flag. That seems clear from the language he used in two other poems in the same year (also linked on that eldritchpress site): ‘Union and Liberty’, a paean to the flag, which he describes as ‘sprinkled with starry light’, and ‘Brother Jonathan’s Lament’ which again includes the word Liberty (with capital L) and contains the lines:

    The star-flowering banner must never be furled,
     For its blossoms of light are the hope of the world.

Can’t find anything written about Tennyson suggesting that he took any poetic interest in the American civil war or the star-spangled banner, or that his ‘The Flower’ was a metaphor for ‘Liberty’ in the sense lauded by OWT. Tennyson’s last stanza also seems inconsistent with that.

So what did he mean by the seed and flower metaphors in ‘The Flower’? The absence of any commentary on those (at least I haven’t found any) may be because the poem seemed slight compared to his longer poems and to his best work (though he also wrote a lot of poor stuff), or may be because commentators were put off by its tone of grievance and self-justification, which must have seemed unnecessary and unbecoming for a man who had been appointed Poet Laureate and was beginning to be lionised by the Queen.

I don’t now think those metaphors relate to any radical literary invention. I suggest there’s a clue to their meaning in these stanzas from his very long ‘In Memoriam’, which was written in fits and starts over a period of some 17 years and finally published anonymously in 1850:

    A happy lover who has come
    to look on her that loves him well,
    who 'lights and rings the gateway bell,
    and learns her gone and far from home;

    He saddens, all the magic light
    dies off at once from bower and hall,
    and all the place is dark, and all
    the chambers emptied of delight;

    So find I every pleasant spot
    in which we two were wont to meet,
    the field, the chamber, and the street,
    for all is dark where thou art not.

    Yet as that other, wandering there
    in those deserted walks, may find
    a flower beat with rain and wind
    which once she fostered up with care;

    So seems it in my deep regret,
    O my forsaken heart, with thee
    and this poor flower of poesy
    which little cared for fades not yet.

    But since it pleased a vanished eye,
    I go to plant it on his tomb,
    that if it can it there may bloom,
    or dying, there at least may die.

The phrase that catches my attention here is ‘this poor flower of poesy’; his use of ‘flower’ as a metaphor for this elegiac poem.

‘In Memoriam’ was hailed as splendid when published in full, but Tennyson’s first published poetry in the 1830s received some unfavourable reviews and he continued to be sniped at by some of his poet contemporaries. He always took it badly. Details of all this at [tennysonpoetry.home.att.net] . Thus in January 1845, Edward Fitzgerald wrote of ‘In Memoriam’ in progress: ‘A.T. has near a volume of poems – elegiac – in memory of Arthur Hallam. Don’t you think the world wants other notes than elegiac now? “Lycidas” is the utmost length an elegiac should reach.’ And in February EF went on: ‘We have surely had enough of men reporting their sorrows: especially when one is aware all the time that the poet wilfully protracts what he complains of, magnifies it in the imagination … if Tennyson had got on a horse and ridden 20 miles instead of moaning over his pipe, he would have been cured of his sorrows in half the time.’

My best guess therefore is that the ‘seed’ in ‘The Flower’ was simply Tennyson’s talent and determination to do something that was unfashionable, namely to express his grief for his friend’s untimely death by writing a very long poem in elegiac mode. What he wrote was the ‘flower’. Possibly part of what was unfashionable was writing in quatrains with an ABBA rhyme scheme.

By ‘thieves from o’er the wall’ he may have meant notional neighbours who identified him as the author; or he may have meant people who began imitating his style. I don’t know.

Neither do I know why he wrote that people were again calling his flower ‘but a weed’. Tennyson however was such a towering figure in Victorian poetry that even those contemporaries who praised him seemed impelled to qualify their praise if only to show that they weren’t completely dominated by him. Ever super-sensitive to and depressed by criticism, Tennyson may have felt that the tide of fashion was again turning against him.

These unscholarly speculations of mine may be completely astray. If so, I’d be happy to be corrected by someone who does have scholarly knowledge of the Tennysonian age. Chesil perhaps?

Of course, for class teaching purposes ‘The Flower’ may be divorced from the historical context and treated as an extended metaphor for acting creatively and courageously in the face of any kind of opposition. As Hugh said, it could be any number of things.

Ian

Yet another intriguing analysis, thanks. A separate suggestion to Katie might be to have the class try to guess the intended reference (tenor) of Tennyson's extended metaphor. No way to be sure, of course, so no one can get the answer wrong.

Here is one to toss into the mix: Darwin's Origin of the Species was published on 24 November 1859, all 1250 copies being sold that same day. Surely Lord Alfred did not DARE subscribe publicly to such heretical ideas. If he wanted to agree with Chuck Darwin, he would have been forced to do so either anonymously or by disguising his subject.

Speculation, right, but fun to guess!

(The poem also reminds me of Blake's Poison Tree, but too many dissimilarities to be overly tempting.)

I'm a high school student in English IV AP, and our project was to recite and analyze our poem for the class.