What It Is
The flowers and herbs that Ophelia carries and hands out after going mad, in scene 5 of Act IV, giving each one a meaning: rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thought, rue, daisy, and the violets she says she no longer has. The flowers return at her death, when she falls into the stream while hanging crowns of flowers on a willow, and at the burial, when the queen throws them onto the coffin.
Where It Appears
In scene 3 of Act I, Laertes warns his sister that the prince’s interest in her is as passing as a violet of youth.
In scene 5 of Act IV, Ophelia returns dressed in straw and flowers and hands out herbs and flowers before her brother, the king and the queen.
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.(IV.5)
I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died.(IV.5)
In scene 7 of Act IV, Gertrude tells that Ophelia hung crowns of flowers from the branches of a willow over the stream when a branch broke and she fell into the water.
In scene 1 of Act V, the priest grants Ophelia only the maiden’s garlands, and the queen throws flowers into the coffin.
Sweets to the sweet. Farewell.(V.1)
What It Means
The flowers are the speech left to Ophelia. While she was sane, she ended up obeying her father and her brother, after answering one and defending Hamlet before the other; mad, she says through the flowers what she would not say in a sentence: she asks her brother to remember, says that youth and fidelity died with the father, and keeps for herself the herb of grace. From Laertes’s warning in Act I to the flowers on the coffin, the violet of youth accompanies her life to the end.
Ophelia is the only character in the play whose pain is expressed in things that are given, and not in speeches. The flowers pass from hand to hand in scene 5 of Act IV, like messages, and return to her at the burial, thrown by the queen, who had hoped to adorn her marriage with them. What she could not have becomes the last thing they give her.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Madness, Death.
- Characters: Ophelia, Laertes, Gertrude.
- Neighboring symbols: Yorick’s skull, in the same graveyard, and An Unweeded Garden, the other plant image of the play.
- Hamlet, the play.