the sun and her flowers

In poetry, a symbol is a word or phrase that signifies an object which also stands for or suggests something else, something beyond itself. Flowers are symbolic in the way they are used in the book’s five-chapter framework, which refers to their life cycle over the seasons. The five stages they go through are described in the respective chapter titles as wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. The symbolic meaning is that this life cycle also refers to the stages in human life in general and the speaker’s life in particular. Wilting and falling (Chapters 1 and 2, respectively), symbolize the travails of the speaker as she deals with the emotional fallout from the ending of her romantic relationship. Rooting, which in the life cycle of flowers signifies the stage when the flower seeds are buried in the earth, symbolically represents the stage in the speaker’s life when she dug down into her own roots, in terms of family, ancestors, and culture. This was the seed that enabled her to grow more fully as a woman and to put the previous stages behind her. The fourth and fifth stages in the life cycle of flowers—rising and blooming—symbolize the speaker’s discovery of new love and her emergence as a fully developed, emotionally healthy, and “blooming” woman who is able to offer support and compassion to other women and to the world as a whole.