Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and religious diversity

throughout English literary history. By expanding on Jesus's use of the lily
to represent idealized faith, Rossetti's poem extends the floral figure to
represent a number of other female religious viewpoints.
Rossetti considers the biblical parable to examine the common Victorian
assumption that women are creatures of faith rather than intellect. We need
to read the poem in full to see how she connects this urgent theological
issue to the ways in which women are often reified as silent objects of male
visual pleasure, their words and ideas ignored.

Flowers preach to us if we will hear: -

The rose saith in the dewy morn:

I am most fair;

Yet all my loveliness is born

Upon a thorn.

The poppy saith amid the corn:

Let but my scarlet head appear

And I am held in scorn;

Yet juice of subtle virtue lies

Within my cup of curious dyes.

The lilies say: Behold how we

Preach without words of purity.

The violets whisper from the shade

Which their own leaves have made:

Men scent our fragrance on the air,

Yet take no heed

Of humble lessons we would read.

But not alone the fairest flowers:

The merest grass

Along the roadside where we pass,

Lichen and moss and sturdy weed,

Tell of His love who sends the dew,

The rain and sunshine too,

To nourish one small seed. (CR 1-24)

At first glance, the poem would seem to follow the spirit of the biblical
parable by exploring exactly how "Flowers preach to us": an idea generated
by Jesus's argument that the lilies offer spiritual truths without being
clothed in words or thoughts. In this respect, it is easy to see how this poem
might be characterized as an example of simple orthodoxy. But Rossetti's
expansions of the parable recast its central meaning in a number of
intriguing ways. Her poem suggests that thought does indeed have a role in
expressions of Christian faith. Taking up the familiar literary poetic trope
of the catalogue of flowers - which Renaissance poets developed into
standard figures for women and femaleness - Rossetti changes the idea that

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