Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
- Date
- 1901
Meaning of “Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When…”
Seasonal decline is compressed into robin-song and buried flowers, giving late autumn an explicitly elegiac atmosphere before the poem turns to the surviving chrysanthemum.
Where does it come from?
“The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
