William Blake’s sunflower, the best known of its tribe in English poetry, appears in a poem that has almost nothing about it that is conventionally “descriptive”:
Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
This sunflower is less individual than emblem, employed here for Blake’s metaphysical and intellectual purpose. Only one characteristic of the flower, its phototropism, is onstage, the flowerhead held high in seeming longing for a golden realm it can’t reach. But Blake wouldn’t be the great poet he is if he could allow his bloom to be entirely symbol. Those first two lines give us some of the physicality of this bloom, a quality most evident in the choice of verb in line two. Many two-syllable verbs might have worked here—mirrors, follows, shadows, studies, markest—but countest is splendid in both content and sonic effect. To follow or emulate those steps is one thing, but to actually count them—now there is a wearisome project. How many steps must be required to traverse the heavens? “Countest” is a little hard to say, especially when placed beside the echoing st in steps. The subtle difficulty of negotiating these sounds echoes how hard the sunflower’s work is, how it labors at its devotion.
You are reading Blake’s poem without the aid of his designs for the page, which change the experience of reading his Songs of Innocence and Experience, from which this poem is drawn. But the hand of Blake the painter and engraver is nonetheless evident in the way that the first three lines of the second stanza are entirely pale and wan, after sunflower, sun, and golden, which together create a warm blaze of yellow in the opening stanza. The energy and vitality of that hue drain away, in the next stanza, in the colorless evocation of the pining youth and the chill of pale, shrouded, and snow. It’s only in the last line that color returns, and it’s accompanied by one of Blake’s masterfully subtle moves: it’s no longer a sunflower, or the sunflower, articles that have been implicit in the poem’s opening lines, but instead a bloom attached to the speaker, who himself becomes visible to us at this last, telling moment.
My sunflower means multiply: That the flower blooms in Blake’s own yard, both literally and in his garden of emblems. That the sort of aspiration embodied by this flower’s relentless devotion to heaven is not foreign to him; has he himself practiced, or is he in danger of, such attention to some “sweet golden clime” to come that he cannot attend to the consequences of this desire here on earth? The youth and the pale virgin are dead, vanquished by unfulfilled desire; the sunflower stands erect, at attention, as the emblem of pure longing. My suggests, with a hint of wit and of playfulness, that the speaker knows he’s read this flower in one particular light, his own, and that other readings might also be admissible. The sunflower might be read as an emblem of loyalty to heaven, of the human thirst for a better realm—but my sunflower critiques this position, standing as a figure of our unanswered longings—both of sexual desire gone unfulfilled and what the poet insinuates is a substituted longing, the thirst for paradise.
Two hundred years later, Alan Shapiro’s sunflower has dropped the wimpy longing for deliverance and is not in the least bit tired:
Sunflower
No pitying
“Ah” for this one,
no weariness
about it or
wanting in the
upward heave
of its furred stalk
curving and opening
out into a
cup of pointy
leaves, each leaf
alert with tiny
quills, spines,
prickles—
did I
say cup
of leaves?
Say shield instead,
say living
crucible
from which flames
burst with such
sticky brightness
that they suck
sunlight down
into the in-
fluorescent burning
pit of itself.
Did I
say sunflower? Say,
instead, don’t-ever-
mess-with-me. Say
there-is-nothing-
I-won’t-do-to-live.
Blake’s bloom is intent on lifting off from daily reality, dedicating itself to the quest for transcendence, but Shapiro’s flower plans to make its flaming way in this world, so insistent that it requires a revision of its usual name.
The work of naming—how we are to describe what’s before us—is Shapiro’s clear subtext. Since the speaker’s a reader of poetry, he begins with a literary reference point, an accepted, art-derived way of looking at the blazing phenomenon in front of him. But the framework of Blake’s poem will not do, not when the terms this flower generates include heave, curving, opening, and alert. Shapiro’s self-consciousness about how to say what’s experienced, the work of finding commensurate terms, leads to the two questions that lend the poem its argumentative structure. “Did I / say cup / of leaves?” once again questions a more conventional perception; the flower is not a receptive thing, for which the familiar metaphor of the waiting receptacle will do; it requires instead shield, crucible, and pit, terms of a far greater ferocity. Crucible gives us one of the poem’s only one-word lines, indicating that this may be the crux of the matter, this near-archaic word with its connotations of flame and molten metal, magical heat and transformation. It’s this understanding of the sunflower as a burning crucible of transforming energy that leads to the next question: “Did I / say sunflower?” Will that term do at all, now that the given associations have been set aside and the radiant, struggling form seen as it is? Now new terms are offered, not unlike Herbert’s appositives for prayer, and the sunflower’s new names feel thrillingly self-generated, proudly self-chosen appellations. This bloom is so empowered that it even seems to generate the poem’s form, a narrow pillar of text resembling its own body.
It’s a lovely subtlety of Shapiro’s poem that, even as it sets Blake to one side, there’s a nod to the older poem in the new poem’s ending. Me appears here at the last moment, just as my did in the earlier text. The result is that those tough-talking names feel like they belong to the speaker as well as to his flower; they’re what an Alan Shapiro sunflower would say, the cry of the determined survivor.
Another twenty-first-century sunflower towers by night in a poem by Tracy Jo Barnwell. Flowering in some urban dark, Barnwell’s bloom recalls the beat-up city sunflower in Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra”:
… poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty
with the smut and smog and smoke of olden
locomotives in its eye—
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken
like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire
spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower
O my soul …
Barnwell addresses her sunflower directly, too, but this is a blossom that wouldn’t even think of transcendence; instead it’s a member of Lord Death’s troops, an assistant to the disruptive powers of the night:
Night City Sunflower
Black bloom of Broadway, light’s last night watchman—
you do your job grudgingly, staring down the bail
bondsman
with your one good eye.
You’re full of doubt. Where’s this morning they talk
about?
For all you know this night could be the one that
lasts.
You have the petals
of a killer, the build of a boxer. And just what
do you think you’re looking at, poker face? Want
to fight, Sunflower?
How many peonies have you strangled with that
crooked
stalk of yours? The other weeds steer clear of your
jagged
crack in the sidewalk,
the drunken carrion crows fly to the other end
of the block to avoid the searing yellowness
of your gaze,
and the poor clover wither in your shade. Every night
owl knows you—the midnight walkers and bad sleepers,
the few shivering
passersby walking quickly under hooded coats,
the suddenly hungry heading for any of a hundred
glowing all-night
diners, the lonely shadows in their windows,
and the twitching figures pacing endlessly
from one end
of the world to the other. I’ve seen you from time to
time,
leering from your deep hole in the universe.
In some field
there are thousands like you, all lined up in rows and
rows
of yellow, each turning slowly in unison with the next,
each collapsing
in a bow of reverence for the light that passes over.
These thousands would wilt in the anemic neon gleam
that
sustains you. Tattoo.
Big Love Motel. Midnight Massage. Open All Nite.
You cannot turn your face towards the sun,
but you shiver
slightly at passing headlights or the occasional star.
Who will dare to cut you down when you are frosted
over
with snow?
I turned once to see you swaying darkly beside me—
you bowed your head slightly as I passed by.
Later, half-asleep,
I could still hear your leaves rustling like the sleeves
of a black wool coat—the coat of a preacher or a
watchman
or a pallbearer.
Barnwell’s driving, incantatory address to this flower of the night gains much of its power from an inversion of our expectations; the poem’s like a photographic negative of a sunflower, where all we expect to suggest brightness and diurnal good cheer turns to its opposite. This tough-minded bloom is like some solitary trench-coated figure in an archetypal noir backstreet.
Come to think of it, all the sunflowers depicted here gain power from resisting the flower’s conventional associations: Blake’s flower pines, its phototropism a sign of insatiable longing. Shapiro’s flames and talks tough. Ginsberg’s hides illumination beneath its grimy skin, while Barnwell’s lives on neon alone. They’re self-portraits, at least in the sense of portraying some aspect of the speaker’s psyche, and they manage to be true to sunflowers, too, in the slyest of ways: they foreground the character of the flower by insisting that we see it in some unfamiliar light, finding qualities nearly opposite to those we might expect. Poetic description wants to do anything but reinscribe the already known; if we look deeply enough into anything, is what we find the opposite of what appears at the surface? “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, in one of those breathtaking moments when the novelist stands back from her tale and seems to take in the whole of the landscape with a sweeping eye, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”