Sunflower fields are a gift of fall – particularly for those of us who like to photograph. The colors, the strong forms, the way they attract wildlife all make me visit them again and again. They also seem to elicit a lot of associations from poets, composers, film makers and so on. (My generation will remember Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Sunflower if only for Mancini’s saccharine musical score that was whistled across all of Europe in 1970.) I’ll spare you.

 

For a poem I chose William Blake’s Ah Sunflower, because it reflects autumnal transience in better ways than I could possibly offer.It also gives me always a kick to read about something that looks like 8 simple lines and then learning what they could possibly stand for. Or, more precisely, how scholars fight over potential meanings. Is the Ah a sigh? Of delight? Of surprise? Of pity?

Your guess is as good as mine, or, come to think of it, probably better than mine. I say this because I was also completely clueless when it comes to the symbolism of the sunflower (again, offered by scholars): a “fallen” human, or persistent love, or frustrated love, or lost innocence, or corrupted love, or poetic imagination, or spiritual yearning, or all of these?”  Oh, (sigh of irritation) the things I don’t know. Here is Wikipedia to the rescue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah!_Sun-flower

Attached below are Benjamin Britten’s take on the poem

and a Ginsberg reading of it.

 

I’ll stick to photographing them…..