The Language of Flowers: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101907959 ISBN 13: 9781101907955

Publisher: Everyman's Library USA, 2017

Synopsis

A uniquely international anthology--in a beautiful pocket-sized hardcover--that explores the richly symbolic expressiveness of flowers through poems from around the world and through the ages. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.

Floral symbols adorn the earliest poetry, and over the centuries they became increasingly entwined with myth and legend, with religious symbolism, and with herbal folklore. By the early nineteenth century the "Language of Flora" was an elaborately refined system, especially in England and America, where books listing flower meanings and illustrating them with verse were perennial bestsellers.

Transcending the charm of its Victorian predecessors, this anthology creates an extended, updated, and more robust floral anthology for the twenty-first century, presenting poets through the ages from Sappho, Shakespeare, and Shelley to Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver, and Louise Glück, and across the world from Cuba to Korea, Russia to Zimbabwe. Eastern cultures, rich in flower associations, are well represented: Tang poems celebrating chrysanthemums and peonies, Zen poems about orchids and lotus flowers, poems about jasmine and marigolds from India, and roses and narcissi from Persia, the Ottoman empire, and the Arabic world. The most timeless human emotions and concepts--love, hope, despair, fidelity, grief, beauty, and mortality--find colorful expression in The Language of Flowers.

About this title

About the Author

JANE HOLLOWAY has been a senior editor at Everyman's Library in the UK since its revival in 1991. She lives in Seaford, East Sussex.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all the Summer through
And Winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In their close room, nor missed the sun and showers.
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,
Here’s ivy! – take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colors true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806–61)



‘A ROSE HAS THORNS AS WELL AS HONEY’

A rose has thorns as well as honey,
I’ll not have her for love or money;
An iris grows so straight and fine,
That she shall be no friend of mine;
Snowdrops like the snow would chill me;
Nightshade would caress and kill me;
Crocus like a spear would fright me;
Love-lies-bleeding makes me sad;
And poppy-juice would drive me mad: –
But give me holly, bold and jolly,
Honest, prickly, shining holly;
Pluck me holly leaf and berry
For the day when I make merry.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830–94)

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library USA
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1101907959
• ISBN 13: 9781101907955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Holloway Jane