A suitor strolls through a garden and turns down nearly everyone. That is the whole situation of Thomas Hood's "Flowers," and its charm lies in how much personality he packs into the rejections. The tulip is "a courtly queen," the cowslip "a country wench," the violet "a nun," the pea "a wanton witch," the lily a saint "all in white." The speaker is shopping for a wife, and the flowers are the candidates. The verdict is never in doubt, since the rose wins. The pleasure is in the reasoning, which is funnier than the speaker realises.
His objections cancel each other out. The tulip is too grand, but the cowslip and the daisy are too lowly: "she is of such low degree." The pea is too eager, while the lily and violet are too remote. Jasmine "has many loves," and the broom is already "betrothed to the bee." No flower could pass every test except the one that traditionally rules the garden. He even shuns the tulip for being a queen, then crowns the rose "the queen of everyone." The daisy's cheek "tipped with blush" counts against her, yet the rose's "cheeks of tender red" are a selling point. Judging by this, the search looks like a ritual performed before a foregone conclusion, and the speaker seems a little pleased with his own fussiness.
Much of the wit comes from real plant traits turned into character. Clytie, in the Greek myth, pines for the sun god and becomes a flower that follows him across the sky. Hood's line "Whose head is turned by the sun" plays on the literal turning of the bloom and the figurative turning of an infatuated head, and "mad" tips it into comedy. The pea "clasps her rings on every hand," which reads as a flirt collecting rings, though the clinging of a climbing plant seems to be in the background too. Wolfsbane is dreaded, which suits a plant known as poisonous. Rosemary "always mourns the dead," because of its old link with remembrance. The flowers become types of women, such as queen, wench, nun, witch and saint, and a modern reader may notice how quickly the speaker sorts them into boxes.
The form helps the joke along. Each stanza has eight short lines, with three or four beats apiece. The rhythm is mostly iambic but bounces with extra syllables, as in "Whose head is turned by the sun," so it sounds like a light ballad or a song. In each stanza only the even lines rhyme, and they all share one sound: "sun / shun / nun / everyone," then "wed / dread / dead / red," then "me / degree / bee / she." The repeated rhyme works like a drumbeat. The speaker's list rolls forward almost without pause, held together by dashes and semicolons.
The refrain does the most work. Every stanza turns on the seventh line, "But I will woo the dainty rose," where "But" swings the poem back from rejection to desire. In the final stanza "woo" becomes "plight," a formal word for pledging oneself, so the courtship moves toward betrothal. The closing lines also change. The first gives a title ("the queen of everyone"), the second a picture ("cheeks of tender red"), and the last simply ends on "she," the rhyme that finally turns a flower into a woman. The rose is praised only for being "dainty" and "fairest," a matter of looks, while every rival gets a vivid fault. That imbalance is one of the poem's quiet jokes.
Thomas Hood is remembered both as a humorist and as the writer of the protest poem "The Song of the Shirt," and "Flowers" shows his lighter side. It is a small poem that does a lot with a familiar tradition, the garden full of symbolic blooms. It keeps the tradition's charm but makes it comic by giving it a speaker whose logic doesn't quite hold. The poem is worth reading for that gap between what the suitor says and what he gives away.