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.
“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.
“The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
