Death and Punishment: Focusing on the Positives in “Cemetery Flowers” - Declan Nerney
If you could know what happened after you died, would you want to? I’m not sure the narrator of John Griffin’s ‘Cemetery Flowers’ knows answer. Throughout the poem, the Fool tells the narrator about the afterlife, one with relatively tame punishments. In the face of this prophecy, the narrator focuses only on the negative aspects. The feelings that the narrator projects through their characterization of the fool, description of the afterlife, and themes of legacy provide an example of how one’s fear over death may distract them from the potential comfort in it.
The Narrator and the Fool
The narrator gives us very little insight into themselves. They come and go from no- where, simply appearing at and leaving from an ambiguous church cemetery. They provide no personal information, no goals, and most of the poem unfolds through the Fool’s dialogue, not the narrator’s own thoughts and feelings. What we can glean about them comes through their actions in the first stanza, and their questions for the Fool. Further- more, the lack of characterization we receive for the narrator highlights what little we do know. From the very first stanza, the narrator clearly displays a fascination with the idea of death. The poem begins with them deciding to go to a cemetery even though it’s raining, and they have no reason to. They
act simply on a “sudden urge;” a morbid curiosity to explore the cemetery (Griffin 3). They do not acknowledge their fear of death until the fifth stanza, when they describe
the “surge” of fear coming over them. This “surge” and the “sudden urge” from earlier connect not only through their rhyme, but through the way the emotion takes over the narrator. The final stanza, which features the only other narration, doubles down on the fear of death. Therefore, across three points of narration, the narrator only shares that
they have a morbid curiosity of the afterlife, and an intense fear of death.
When introducing Fool*, the narrator characterizes him as wide-eyed and drooling. His physical appearance and the way the narrator refers to him suggests that
we should not trust him. However, the narrator’s first question for him is, “What will we be/When all of us are dead” (Griffin 13-14). For someone referred to only as a fool and characterized by a silly appearance, the narrator quickly jumps into their heaviest questions. The physical description of the Fool, and his name itself, becomes
ironic once the narrator begins talking to him. The narrator has no reason to trust
a “motley fool” in a cemetery, but their fascination with death distracts them from this fact.
In the Fool’s description of daffodils, he notes that they “...gaze upon the sky/To weep a nectar teardrop/For the heaven they passed by” (Griffin 42-44). These lines imply that, while people become flowers when they die, heaven does exist, and one could end up there. When the narrator subsequently asks about their fate, they ask if they’ll end up as a daffodil or rose, but never ask about heaven. In their “dread” of death, the narrator ignores the existence of a positive afterlife. They fixate on the potential punishments, the negative things they can expect from death, instead of investigating the possibility of a more righteous afterlife.
Death and Legacy
The Fool provides three examples of how souls may become flowers once they die. The first example comes with the witches, who represent narcissism. The narcissists will become daffodils, otherwise known as narcissus. The second example sees lovers, (specifically obsessive, Romeo
& Juliet-style lovers) become roses, the flower of love. While the idea of returning to nature and becoming a beautiful flower after death may be comforting to some, the Fool imbues these stories with horror.
*I believe there is an argument that the Fool does not exist, and such an argument would potentially be relevant here, but exceeds the scope of this analysis.
The daffodils “weep” and the rose lovers resent each other. The Fool’s speech fo- cuses on the negatives that would spring out of eternity as a flower, rather than the inherent beauty of the flowers. Given other common visions of death (the fires of Hell or the absence of anything), the Fool’s example seems
relatively benign.
In the beginning of the poem, the narrator describes the “gravestones marked with long/Forgotten names in faded runes” (Griffin 7-8). Given the relative lack of worldbuilding compared to the extensive lamentations of death in the poem, the description of the “forgotten names” must be purposeful. Whereas those buried in the cemetery have been forgotten, the Fool invokes the name of several famous writers from as early as Ancient Greece. However, the narrator never connects these ideas. When the Fool tells the narrator that “the same will come” to them, it does not read as a prophecy of everlasting fame. Rather, the narrator ends the poem with sorrowful diction: “deserted,” “wretched,” and “gloomy” all appear in the final stanza. The tragedy of an artist’s death supersedes their legendary status, as the narrator’s fear over death supersedes the comfort a lasting legacy may other- wise provide.
The afterlife that the Fool describes certainly does not seem pleasant. That being said, the narrator has no reason to believe the Fool and focuses only on the most negative aspects of the Fool’s portents due to their fear of death. In the world of “Cemetery Flowers,” the afterlife means living eternally as a beautiful flower, even though that may come with either feelings of exclusion, resentment, or short blooming cycles. Given other popular renditions of the afterlife (I’m looking at you, Dante), these don’t seem so bad.
Statement of Intent:
As someone who loves creative and academic writing (almost) equally, I’ve always wanted my creative pieces to be examined/analyzed in a close read. It’s one of the best ways to honor a creative work – to consider the meaning behind every word choice, punctuation mark, and line break. What follows is my attempt to give one of my peers at Boston University the treatment I would give any author I cover in an English class: an analysis of the salient points, themes, and devices they use in their writing.
