Sunflower
This is a sunflower which I have growing in a pot on my back porch. It got planted something like 12-14 weeks before it bloomed, so this is pretty exciting. Sunflowers remind me of a poem by William Blake that most people other than me seem to dislike:
Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's 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 sunflower wishes to go.
Because there is obviously something in there about death and immortality, people often assume this poem is about a Christian conception of the afterlife. It is not.
Certainly, being weary of time and counting the steps of the sun are consistent with wanting to die, but they are also consistent with the simpler explanation of yearning for immortality. The same is true of the concepts of seeking and traveling. It is a major theme of human thought that we can conceive of eternity, but our reach exceeds our grasp. The "pale golden clime" is not really obvious, even as a reference to heaven, but for a sunflower it makes sense. Continual sunlight would mean no more struggling merely to survive, but it is more consistent with images of life than death. Life on earth is about continually doing things to keep on surviving, which you can either look at as getting in the way of more important things, or as an end in itself. The sunflower works as a metaphor here because it spends a quite a while growing before it blooms, and becomes fairly tall relative to a person -- it strives toward the sun in order to grow and reproduce. It matters to the sunflower how much sun it gets, and it will turn its head to look in that direction.
Next we have some traditional gothic themes of thwarted love and beautiful dead women. It is beyond me why so many 19th century artists decided that art about a woman was more beautiful if she died, but they were like that. So now they arise from their graves and want what the sunflower wants. This could be seen as Christian imagery, but it is easier to look at it as a reference to the undead.
This sunflower longs for eternal youth obtained by sucking your blood:
Poll