George Herbert's poem, "The Flower" (1633), utilizes nature as both an image and metaphor to explain man's relationship to God. Herbert is generally considered a metaphysical poet, a movement characterized by the common use of metaphor and subtlety and whose subject matter was principally: life, love, and religion. Herbert's "The Flower", and the metaphorical comparison it employs, embodies this movement; superficially it is a pleasant poem about nature but the subtext, and its true meaning, is much more profound. It is through this veil of pleasant imagery and seemingly light substance that "The Flower" is able to interject its powerful message.
The poem begins, strangely enough, from the perspective of a flower. While initially this may be seen as an unorthodox approach to writing about God but it is actually this bizarre method that makes this poem effective. Imagine a poem, perhaps written by a monk hoping to pay tribute to his God; most likely it would be dense with praise, littered with hyperbolic absolutes, and would have little aesthetic value. This is not the case with "The Flower", as the opening lines clearly establish: .
"How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean.
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;.
To which, besides their own demean,.
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away.
Like snow in May,.
As if there were no such cold thing"(Flower 1-7).
Here, the flower acknowledges that the Lord does in fact control the seasons, in essence, its life. Although the flower does assert God as the ultimate, this is not an expression of the theological themes of this poem. The purpose of the beginning of the poem is to introduce the perspective: a flower. Herbert uses this unusual and creative approach to writing about existential concepts creates a pleasant and interesting medium in which to disseminate his beliefs regarding God; this format would be much more likely to draw in larger audiences rather than monotonous clerical praise.
