2 quotations linked to The Last Chrysanthemum — Thomas Hardy by or associated with Thomas Hardy, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Late bloom, falling leaves, retreating sap, robin-song, seasonal death imagery and a flower appearing when most growth has ended.
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“Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall, And saps all retrocede.”
The late-blooming flower appears precisely as the rest of the season retreats, combining natural decline with an image of delayed emergence rather than simple renewal.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The corpse comparison is figurative seasonal language inside the poem.
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
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.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.