Ah! Sunflower

• The sunflower symbolises the weary acceptance of time's power and similarly, the frustrated youth and pale virgin are wasting their lives in needless self-denial waiting for eventual reward in unreal heaven instead of seizing pleasure in the here and now
• Brievity of the poem condenses human life into a painfully brief experience
• Regular anapestic metre and rhyme scheme shows the regular hours passing the flower by and the power time has over the human condition
• Opposition show the sunflower longs for eternity but remains earthbound
• A05: David Punter, 'the world of experience is a circular world, from which there is no escape'