English 2610

Pretty much every line Shakespeare has ever written has been debated a few hundred ways, but one interesting theory I heard once was that he was that he was believed to have have a lover named Rosemary because the use of rosemary is a recurring symbol in many of his works. Traditionally, rosemary is also symbolic of remembrance. In "The Garden" Marvell also compares the qualities of quiet and innocence to plants, or things that grow, in the second stanza when he states

"Fair quiet, have I found thee here,
And innocence they sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men.
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow."

At first it seems rather untalented of a poet to use the same word of "plants" twice and so close together, but maybe it is to give the word more meaning. The thing I find most interesting about plant analogies is the way that plants have such a different way of existing. With most animals, it is pretty clean cut, your either alive or dead not much space between. Plants can thrive, but when they do "die" is is often a slow undefinable process, much like the loss of more abstract concepts like memory or innocence.