“The Flower” Introduction

• First published in the 1633 collection The Temple, "The Flower" is George Herbert's meditation on human pride and divine mercy. The poem's speaker reflects with wonder that, though he's been through times of hardship and darkness, God has renewed him once again, making his soul rise up like a spring flower. It's only through humbly accepting God's will and God's mercy, he observes, that people find their rightful place in the "garden" of Heaven.

• Read the full text of “The Flower”

“The Flower” Summary

• Oh God, the times when you return to me are so refreshing and lovely! They're just like when the spring flowers appear, not only bringing delight to their own season, but retroactively making winter seem less painful. Sorrow melts just like snow in May, as if it had never even existed.

  Who could have believed that my withered heart could have sprung up alive again? It had disappeared far beneath the earth, like flowers withdrawing into their bulbs after they've grown in spring. Underground, they hide out through all the chill of winter, appearing to be dead, but still secretly alive.

  These, mighty God, are your miraculous powers: you can kill and create life, flinging people down to hell or up to heaven in the space of a mere hour, turning the ring of a funeral bell to sweet music. We little humans think wrong when we believe we understand what's happening: your word is the only law, if only we knew how to read it.

  Oh, how I wish I were away from all this change, safe with you in the eternal springtime of Heaven. In my metaphorical springtimes here on earth, I often feel like I'm a flower reaching eagerly toward paradise, grunting with sheer effort to reach it. And this flower of mine never lacks for water: I cry with remorse for my sins, and my tears fall like rain.

  When I stretch upward like this, trying to reach heaven as if I already felt sure I'd make it, you get angry with me, and I fall to the ground again. No frost is as chilling as your anger; no part of the globe is anything less than Hell when you have the slightest frown on your face.

  But now that I'm old, I'm in bloom once more. I've fallen time after time, but now I'm alive and writing. I can smell the fresh dew and rainfall again, and take pleasure in writing poetry. Oh, God, my only illumination, it's hard to believe that I'm the same person who suffered through your storms all the long "night" of my earlier life.

  These, loving God, are your miracles: you teach us that we're nothing more than flowers that come and go. Once we know this and truly believe it, you prepare a garden for us to live in. Those of us who want to be bigger and better and more powerful than we are end up sacrificing their place in Heaven to their own ambitious pride.

“The Flower” Themes

• 

  Faith, Mercy, and Renewal

  The devout speaker of “The Flower” feels as if he’s going through a miraculous, spring-like rebirth in his final years. Having endured terrible times of sorrow and grief, in his “age” he feels that he’s blooming again, given a whole new breath of life by God’s overflowing mercy. Having faith, to this speaker, means learning to trust that God’s love can (and will) create new life and joy even from the darkest despair.

  The poem’s aging speaker reflects that, against all the odds, he feels like a spring “flower,” blooming anew after a hard winter. His happiness now makes the chilly “snow” of his past “grief” seem never to have existed at all: it’s “as if there were no such cold thing.” God, he feels, has restored him to life in just the way that spring restores new life to the earth every year.

  This isn’t just a miraculous renewal on its own; it’s particularly astonishing because of just how deep in despair the speaker has been. Once, he felt that his “pride”—his efforts to be self-righteously pious and “good”—had brought God’s “anger” down upon him, laying him low. In those times, the whole world might as well have been the place “where all things burn” (that is, Hell itself). Part of what’s amazing about his late-in-life contentment, the speaker thus suggests, is that it forms such a sharp contrast with the hard times he suffered before. Back then, he never could have imagined returning to the happiness and harmony he enjoys now—never believed that his “shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness.”

  But his suffering, the speaker now realizes, was all part of God’s plan, too. It’s just another of God’s “wonders” to bring people both sorrow and joy, teaching them to be humble, simple, and content—and preparing them to feel exactly the gratitude and astonishment the speaker feels now when they return to joy after sorrow. Being a person of faith, the poem suggests, means understanding that God will always ultimately be merciful and generous, bringing fresh new life from even the wildest “tempests” of misery.

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• 

  Spiritual Pride and Humility

  A lifetime of hard-earned experience has taught the speaker of “The Flower” that spiritual pride—a belief that one can weasel one’s way into God’s good books with enough piety—leads only to failure and sorrow. Striving to reach Heaven by being self-importantly holy, the speaker observes, has brought him nothing but grief; it’s only by humbly trusting in God’s plan for him (and accepting his own smallness and weakness) that he’s found true contentment and renewed joy. Piety, the poem suggests, is sometimes just a disguise for pride, a way that people try to be better than they really are. Real faith, meanwhile, means knowing that one is nothing more than one humble “flower” in God’s garden.

  Sometimes, the poem’s speaker reflects, he tries to reach Heaven completely under his own steam—and it never goes well. Striving “upwards,” behaving as if Paradise were already “his own,” he always meets with a nasty shock: God’s “anger comes,” and he finds himself lost in misery, ashamed of his own “sins” and unable to enjoy life in the slightest. In this speaker’s experience, trying too hard to be a good and pious person always backfires: it’s a kind of spiritual arrogance to believe that one knows the best way to please God, or can please God by dint of sheer effort.

  The speaker thus suggests that people have to learn not to try to be “more” than they are. Being a devout person doesn’t mean trying to be a big shot in the eyes of God; it means growing as simply as a “flower,” not fighting against one’s own circumstances, one’s own nature—or the fact that one’s own life will be brief and relatively unimportant. Only by relinquishing one’s arrogant “pride,” the poem suggests, can one hope to find either contentment on earth or a place in God’s eternal “garden.”

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Flower”

• Lines 1-4

  How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean
  Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
           To which, besides their own demean,
  The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

  "The Flower" begins in the middle of an inner springtime, a period of rebirth and renewal. The poem's speaker, astonished to find himself happy again after a time of deep sorrow, makes a grateful apostrophe to God, marveling at just how "sweet and clean" God's "returns" are.

  The word "returns" here has multiple meanings. On the one hand, those "returns" might be gifts—answers to the speaker's prayers. On the other, they might be God's literal returns, times when God seems to come back after an absence. And perhaps both of these are true at once: God's return is an answer to the speaker's prayer.

  Such "returns" feel, to the speaker, as joyful as early spring, and as restorative. Listen to the speaker's simile here:

  [...] even as the flowers in spring;
  To which, besides their own demean,
  The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

  In other words, God's presence is as much a delight to the speaker as the sight of new flowers. When flowers come out in spring, the speaker observes, they don't just beautify their own season (their "demean," or domain). They make even the recent "frosts" of winter look better in retrospect. Those frosts can't have been so bad if they led to these flowers.

  These images of changing seasons thus evoke the speaker's sheer relief. If God's "returns" are like early spring, then the speaker must recently have been suffering through a long cold metaphorical winter—a time of emotional "frosts" when God seemed either not to be there, or not to be listening. Now that God is back, even that icy time seems warmed by "tributes of pleasure."

• Lines 5-7

                        Grief melts away
                        Like snow in May,
           As if there were no such cold thing.

  

  

• Lines 8-10

           Who would have thought my shriveled heart
  Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
           Quite underground;

  

  

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• Lines 10-14

  as flowers depart
  To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
                        Where they together
                        All the hard weather,
           Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

  

  

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• Lines 15-18

           These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
  Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
           And up to heaven in an hour;
  Making a chiming of a passing-bell.

  

  

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• Lines 19-21

                        We say amiss
                        This or that is:
           Thy word is all, if we could spell.

  

  

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• Lines 22-25

           Oh that I once past changing were,
  Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
           Many a spring I shoot up fair,
  Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;

  

  

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• Lines 26-28

                        Nor doth my flower
                        Want a spring shower,
           My sins and I joining together.

  

  

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• Lines 29-35

           But while I grow in a straight line,
  Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,
           Thy anger comes, and I decline:
  What frost to that? what pole is not the zone
                        Where all things burn,
                        When thou dost turn,
           And the least frown of thine is shown?

  

  

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• Lines 36-42

           And now in age I bud again,
  After so many deaths I live and write;
           I once more smell the dew and rain,
  And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
                        It cannot be
                        That I am he
           On whom thy tempests fell all night.

  

  

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• Lines 43-46

           These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
  To make us see we are but flowers that glide;
           Which when we once can find and prove,
  Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;

  

  

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• Lines 47-49

                        Who would be more,
                        Swelling through store,
           Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

  

  

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“The Flower” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Conceit

  Like a lot of metaphysical poetry, "The Flower" is built around a central conceit, a complex extended metaphor that shapes and inspires the speaker's thoughts. Here, the conceit is clear from the title: the speaker imagines himself (and every living person) as a flower in God's garden.

  Plenty of other writers have used flowers to symbolize the beauty and fragility of human life. Flowers, after all, live only briefly. They're lovely while they're around, but—in the words of another English poet—no sooner do they blossom than they "fall that very hour." Thinking of himself as a flower, the poem's speaker confronts the fact that life is as short as it's sweet. It doesn't do to get too puffed up with self-importance if one's a flower, the poem suggests; no matter how beautifully one blooms, one will soon "wither."

  Similarly, the idea of flowers as a symbol of new life is a familiar one. As he imagines himself miraculously recovering his "greenness" in his old age—the traditional "winter" of life—the speaker suggests that God has revived him the way that spring revives the earth, melting all the frosts of "grief." Here, the flower conceit offers an image of eternal renewal and hope.

  But down in the poem's roots, there's a rich and novel idea of what else flowers might mean. If the speaker's life has taught him his life is as brief, fragile, and humble as one flower's among many, it has also taught him how such flowers behave. Flowers, he observes, don't strain toward the sun, "groaning" with effort. Rather, they just grow, guided not by their own efforts, but by the order of nature—and thus, in this speaker's view, by the will of God.

  In other words: being a flower doesn't just mean being chastened by the thought that life is short and you're not that special—or made hopeful by the thought that, with the help of a merciful God, joy always returns after sorrow. It means learning to humbly accept God's plan, and discovering in that plan the permanent joy of the "garden" of Paradise.

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• Metaphor

  

  
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• Apostrophe

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

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• Parallelism

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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• Consonance

  

  

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"The Flower" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Returns
• Demean
• Late-past
• Tributes
• Mother-root
• Blown
• Quickening
• Passing-bell
• Amiss
• Fast
• Offering
• Want
• Bent
• Least
• Versing
• Tempests
• Where to bide
• Swelling through store
• Forfeit

• Here, this word might mean both "times when you come back" and "gifts, blessings."

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Flower”

• Form

  "The Flower" doesn't use any standard form, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. Instead, it invents its own shape, one that perfectly fits its philosophy.

  The poem is broken into seven septets, stanzas of seven lines apiece. In other words:

  • Each stanza is built from seven lines;
  • And the poem itself is built from seven stanzas.

  This form cleverly reflects the speaker's faith that God's overarching plan shapes everything, from the coming of the spring to the workings of the human heart. Each seven-part stanza is a kind of microcosm of the whole seven-part poem!

  It's a characteristic George Herbert move to precisely match a poem's form to its subject matter; see his famous concrete poem "Easter Wings" for one particularly clear example.

• Meter

  Like many of the 17th-century British writers known as the metaphysical poets, Herbert liked to play innovative games with his meter. Instead of choosing one sturdy rhythm and sticking to it, this poem uses varied, flowing metrical patterns to create music and drama.

  Most of the meter here is iambic. That means that lines are built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:

  How fresh, | oh Lord, | how sweet | and clean

  A lot of spoken English falls naturally into an iambic rhythm, so it's a good choice for a speaker who wants to strike a natural, thoughtful, humble tone.

  But in this poem, the number of iambs in a line varies. Readers might divide each seven-line stanza into two parts:

  • A four-line passage that alternates between iambic tetrameter (four iambs in a row) and iambic pentameter (five iambs in a row);
  • And a three-line passage that uses two lines of iambic dimeter (two iambs) followed by another line of iambic tetrameter (again, four iambs).

  That sounds like a mouthful. But all it really means is that each stanza begins with a longer, slower, more reflective passage, and ends with a short, punchy capper, as in lines 40-42:

  It can- | not be
  That I | am he
  On whom | thy temp- | ests fell | all night.

  These closing passages always deliver a powerful declaration or a dramatic question—and the change in meter makes them striking both to the eye and to the ear. By playing around with the number of feet in a line, the speaker asks the reader to sit up and pay special attention.

  That effect gets even stronger when the speaker introduces a variation in the steady iambic rhythm, as in lines 19-20:

  We say | amiss
  This or | that is:

  Line 20 here starts with a trochee (the opposite foot of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm) and ends with a whipcrack of a spondee (a foot with a DUM-DUM rhythm). All those strong, up-front stresses conjure the speaker's impatience: he's well and truly fed up with the way that humanity (himself very much included!) puffs itself up.

• Rhyme Scheme

  The intricate rhyme scheme of "The Flower" runs like this:

  ABABCCB

  This musical pattern perfectly reflects the speaker's thoughts on the nature of God. The first four lines of each stanza set up what feels like a regular, predictable alternating pattern. But then, a surprise comes along: the C rhymes, in a punchy couplet that breaks right through that pattern's walls. In the end, though, the B rhyme returns, making the C rhymes feel like part of the pattern after all.

  This movement from harmony to surprise to harmony again feels a lot like the speaker's emotional experience of God. Sometimes, he feels he's climbing up to "Heaven" when he feels suddenly struck down by God's anger; sometimes, he's in the depths of despair and then finds himself "bud[ding] again," full of new life and joy.

  Either way, in the end, he feels that all of his experiences form a mysterious part of God's plan: they all help to bring him into the harmony of God's heavenly "garden." The rhyme scheme here thus turns the speaker's complex emotional life to music, helping readers to hear what it feels like to be the speaker.

“The Flower” Speaker

• The poem's passionate, witty speaker—like the speaker in most of Herbert's poetry—might well be imagined as Herbert himself. A devout English clergyman, Herbert often wrote first-person poetry about his relationship with God.

  Herbert or not, the speaker is a person of deep feeling and deep faith. A lifetime of hard-earned wisdom has taught this speaker that it's no good to try to control one's own fate too much. Rather, the speaker has learned to trust in a merciful God who will always revive him, even when he's been in the darkest "winter" of despair and grief. In "age," the speaker has discovered a kind of joyful humility.

“The Flower” Setting

• There's no clear setting in this poem—but there is a vivid metaphorical landscape. Depicting sorrow and joy as winter and spring, the poem's speaker helps readers to imagine those emotions with their whole bodies, feeling the awful "frost" of God's anger and smelling the "sweet" air of simple happiness.

  But the poem also gives readers a tiny, charming taste of the speaker's literal surroundings. As the speaker describes the "dew and rain" that he "once more smell[s]" in his newfound contentment, the reader gets the sense that this is a person who has learned to find delight just by sticking his nose out his own humble front door. Perhaps, too, the reader imagines that the speaker's metaphorical spring has arrived in the literal spring, when mild showers make the whole world smell fresh.

Literary and Historical Context of “The Flower”

• Literary Context

  George Herbert (1593-1633) was one of a group of 17th-century British writers later known as the "Metaphysical Poets"; John Donne and Andrew Marvell were some of his notable contemporaries. These writers shared a few distinctive qualities: an elegant wit, a fondness for intricate metaphorical conceits, and a passionate religious devotion. The human intellect, to the metaphysical poets, was a stepladder to the divine (or should be, if put to good use).

  Herbert, like Donne, worked as an Anglican clergyman, and much of his poetry deals with his relationship to God—a relationship marked both by struggle and by enormous beauty. The Temple (1633), his lone poetry collection, was published posthumously; Herbert left the manuscript to his friend Nicholas Farrar, instructing him only to share it if he felt it would do some "dejected poor soul" some good. Farrar (correctly) thought it would, and it became a widely read and beloved book, influencing later poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to T.S. Eliot.

  In The Temple, Herbert imagines God as a master, a bridegroom, and a friend, and builds concrete poems in the shape of altars and wings. The subtle shape of "The Flower," which uses its seven stanzas of seven lines to suggest the way God's plan attends to both the great sweep of the cosmos and the tiniest intricacies of the human heart, is just one example of the way Herbert married technical brilliance to deep thought and feeling.

  Historical Context

  George Herbert lived and wrote during an unsettled period of British history. During Herbert's childhood, Britain was enjoying a golden age. The powerful Elizabeth I was on the throne, and Britain was both a formidable military power and a literary treasure house, boasting writers like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe. But the great "Virgin Queen" died without children in 1603, and her successor, James VI and I of Scotland and England, was not quite such a unifying figure. Many of his people were either skeptical of him or downright hostile to his rule. (The infamous Guy Fawkes, who was executed for trying to blow up James's Parliament, is one vivid example.)

  The anti-monarchist plots James grappled with would eventually feed into an unprecedented uprising. By the time that George Herbert died in 1633, James's son Charles I was on the throne—but he wouldn't stay there for long. In 1649, a rebellion led by Oliver Cromwell would depose Charles and publicly behead him, a world-shaking event that upended old certainties about monarchy, hierarchy, and even God's will.

  Though Herbert didn't live to see Charles's fall, he was still one of a generation of writers grappling with dramatic change and loss, reaching out to God for strength and consolation.

More “The Flower” Resources

• External Resources

  • A Brief Biography — Visit the Poetry Foundation to learn more about Herbert's life and work.

  • An Appreciation — Read contemporary poet Wendy Cope's essay on what George Herbert's work means to her.

  • Herbert's "Temple" — Learn more about "The Temple," the posthumous collection in which "The Flower" first appeared.

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to Professor Iain McGilchrist reading the poem aloud and discussing what it means to him.

  • The Herbert Museum — Visit a website dedicated to Herbert and the church where he lived and worked.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by George Herbert

  • Easter Wings

  • Love (III)

  • Redemption

  • The Altar

  • The Collar

  • The Pulley