«Flower, which but?» is hardly a sentence you could hand in as homework, and that is why it works as a way into the poem. The grammar stumbles, as if someone were murmuring half a thought: which flower, if not... which one, then? The quotation marks suggest a question asked aloud or half remembered, and the poem that follows is the answer. A person, "him", is left unmoved by the tulip and the orchid. What brings him to life is the sight of "rose fossils / Teaming up / With the diary" on one particular "poetic evening."
The central idea is a small paradox: vitality does not come from the freshest or most beautiful thing, but from the thing that has been kept. The tulip and the orchid make a neat pair of opposites. The tulip suggests an everyday, cheerful spring flower, and the orchid something rare and luxurious. Between them they cover both the common and the exotic, and neither is enough. The rose, by contrast, arrives already dead, a "fossil." Since it sits beside a diary, it is natural to picture a flower pressed between pages. That is an inference from the imagery, but it fits well, because a diary and a pressed flower do the same job. Both hold a moment still so that it can be reopened later. The poem suggests that a flower matters most once it has become a memory.
The construction is quietly clever. The whole poem is a single sentence, held back until the last word. It begins with a double negative, "Neither... / Nor...", which sets up two failures in parallel, and then the grammar waits. "Could make him" stops short. "Lively" sits alone on its own line, as bright and surprising as a lit window, and it is the only word that names the effect we are waiting to explain. Then comes "Like the," a line that ends on a small word and leaves us hanging, before "Rose fossils" delivers the answer. The line breaks work like a held breath. Every line begins with a capital letter, so "Rose" gets no special emphasis on the page. Its importance comes purely from position, from being the thing the sentence has been walking toward.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is built from very short lines of two to four syllables, which gives the poem a hesitant, almost whispered pace. The final line, "That poetic evening," is the longest at six syllables, and it settles the poem like an exhale after all that clipped phrasing. Sound is used lightly. "Tulip" and "Teaming" share a starting sound, while "Lively" and "Like" echo each other, so the moment of coming alive is linked to the moment of comparison. "Rose fossils" has a soft hiss running through it, which suits something dry and delicate.
The word choices carry the poem's tone. "Fossils" is a strange partner for "rose," pairing something fragile and romantic with something ancient and stony. Fossils are normally the least lively objects imaginable, yet here they are what makes someone lively. "Teaming up" turns the objects into collaborators, almost a duo with a plan, and it sounds a little like "teeming," a word about life crowding in. Whether that echo is intended is hard to say, but it adds to the sense of dead things becoming busy. Then there is "poetic," a word that could be sincere or gently self-mocking. Calling an evening "poetic" is a bit like calling a sunset "beautiful": it names the feeling without proving it. That ambiguity keeps the poem from being sentimental. It seems to know how romantic it sounds and to smile at itself while still meaning it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much argument it fits into nine lines, using only a few objects and no explanation. It never says that memory matters more than beauty, or that the written record can outshine the living moment. It simply lines up a tulip, an orchid, a rose fossil and a diary, and lets us feel which one wins. It also leaves us with a question the title planted at the start: which flower do we ourselves would choose, and what would we keep in a book to find again?