Inside: Poems of sunflowers for some sunshine in your life.
When the sun is shining, it’s time to embrace the warm weather, with all of the scenes that come with it. That includes the different flowers of the season, the vibes, the music… so many ways to feel the warm weather and the warm weather energy even from still sitting inside. Reading poetry about warm weather seems like the perfect way to do so, as the sunflowers obviously represent spring, summer, sunshine, and anything else you can associate with it.
There’s a wonderful Harry Styles song that I love that sounds so happy and joyful, titled Sunflower Vol. Six, and now it has me wanting to read all of the different sunflower poetry that is out there to bring in the same energy and vibes. Flower poetry is so easy to come by, everyone feels inspired by nature!
If this is you and you’re feeling like you want to feel the inspiration coming from the wildflowers or the flowers that spring up from your bird seed, planter, if you’re my mom, and this is the post for you. Channel your summer and spring energy with these sunflower poems!
Famous Artwork About Sunflowers
Sunflowers are such a beautiful flower, and so common we referred to as peoples favorites. They grow both as wildflowers, and also as planted florals in the garden. They’re coming to be used in weddings, funerals, graduation parties, birthday parties, bouquets for well, wishing, and the list goes on. sunflowers are the more laid-back and happy version of the rose, the most common flower given as a gift.
With them being so commonly used all over the place, it’s no shock that there’s such a common and regularly used focal point for many works of art. Of course, we’re going to be talking about poetry today, but so many famous poets have featured of sunflower at the center of their beautiful art, and poetry is just the start.
Famous artist like Vincent van Gogh, utilize the beautiful imagery of sunflowers for one of his most famous paintings. This painting hangs at or say, one of the biggest art museums in the world, and shows a beautiful view of a vase, full of sunflowers on the table.
While simple, it’s level of iconic reach makes it one of our most famous paintings today.
William Blake‘s most famous poem is called Ah! Sun-flower!, and we will get into that soon. Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem called Sunflower Sutra but when he reads it, it has such a cadence that it almost reads like a song, instead of a poem.
So much artwork, and so many beautiful pieces have been inspired by sunflowers, and we’re gonna look at a few more in this post.
Symbolism Of Sunflowers In Art
Every culture has a different meaning behind different flowers. Sunflowers all over Europe have different and various meanings, but they all have really positive, lovely, beautiful meetings, no matter where you are.
In England, it’s likely that they represent gratitude, while in more Mediterranean countries, they represent devotion. in Asian countries, it’s split as well, the Chinese use sunflowers to symbolize longevity, while in more eastern European countries, it’s a symbol of peace. In America, we have adapted the Native Americans’ perspective of a sunflower to me and prosperity of the harvest.
While we don’t necessarily celebrate harvest seasons in modern day America, as much as they used to, we still value the prosperity in our nation’s well-being. There’s something so special about a flower that brings so many positive feelings and emotions, it’s understandable why it has inspired so many pieces of art.
Sunflower Poems
1. Ah! Sun-flower
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
2. Sunflower Sutra
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past—
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,
—We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
3. The Soul of the Sunflower
The warm sun kissed the earth
To consecrate thy birth,
And from his close embrace
Thy radiant face
Sprang into sight,
A blossoming delight.
Through the long summer days
Thy lover’s burning rays
Shone hot upon thy heart.
Thy life was part
Of his desire,
Thou passion-flower of fire!
And, turning toward his love,
Lifting thy head above
The earth that nurtured thee,
Thy majesty And stately mien
Proclaims thee sun-crowned queen.
On earth, thy gorgeous bloom
Bears record of thy tomb,
And to transcendent light
Thy soul takes flight
Till thou art one,
O sunflower, with the sun!
4. To The Sunflower
Thou burstest from mood:
How sad we have to cling to experience!
Marvel of thy every atom burning of life,
How fully thou livest!
Didst thou ever think to turn to cold and shadow?
Passionate liver of sunlight,
Symbol of youth and pride;
Thou art a lyric of thy soaring colour;
Thy voicelessness of song is action.
What absorption of thy life’s meaning.
Wonder of thy consciousness,—
Mighty sense of thy existence!
5. Glory of poems of Sunflowers
Always remember the sunflower
Whose face looks toward the sun.
She drinks his beauty in her face
And like him she becomes.
Her glory is like his glory
It’s strong and true and good.
You know she is a source of joy;
Her seed gives life and food.
This special flower has much to give
Though fragrance she has none.
She teaches us to look above
At god’s own perfect son.
Some people love the rainy weather, some people feel inspired by it, but as for me? I feel inspired by the sun. When the sun is out, I want to do so many things, like write music, write poetry, take a walk, call a friend… There’s so many things that come to mind, and so many ways I wanna use that energy I’m channeling from the sun.
When it’s rainy out, all I wanna do is sit on a couch, and read a book or scroll on my phone. the best part about poetry and reading poems and works of literature and art that have to do with your favorite mood, as it can make, you feel that energy in that mood without even seeing what the poem is about. That’s definitely the case with the sunflower poems, I feel like I’m as happy and inspired as I would be if I was staring at a sunflower field right in front of me.
So I hope you enjoyed these poems of sunflowers and that they’ve brought you a lot of joy and inspiration, and that you feel like you can go out and conquer the world today. There are so many other flowers in poetry, and here are some about lavender specifically.