WHY FLOWERS CHANGE COLOUR
These fresh beauties, we can prove, Once were virgins, sick of love, Turn'd to flowers: still in some, Colours go and colours come.
Robert Herrick
These fresh beauties, we can prove, Once were virgins, sick of love, Turn'd to flowers: still in some, Colours go and colours come.
Robert Herrick’s tiny poem pretends to offer a proof: those fresh spring flowers, he says, were once young women so love-sick that they turned into blossoms. And even now, as petals, they haven’t quite escaped love’s grip.
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