I'm puzzled that anyone would think the flower lore so esoteric here. Oh sure, there is a Language of Flowers (Victorian and otherwise) that can be quite arcanely detailed, but one needn't delve that deeply into such matters to have a visceral reaction to the bouquets here. Even if one is so divorced from the garden as not to know which flowers bloom in which season the poem comes right out and tells you. Have Google & Wiki killed poetic imagination & association entirely? Surely that language of Flowers at its most refined and complex begins in natural archetype and is accessible to all.
As for the soldier rose reference, the blood red of the classic rose seems to provide an association, even without a host of literary illusions. Wound leaps pretty quickly to my imagination when the words soldier and rose touch.
As for precedents, as Rose points out, there are many. For instance the very famous French poem by Louis Aragon, The Lilacs And The Roses in which springtime's lilacs are the flowers thrown at the soldiers marching off in hope to war, whereas roses are what greet them in retreat. As translated by Louis MacNeice, it ends thus:
Bouquets of the first day, lilacs, Flanders lilacs,
Soft cheeks of shadow rouged by death--and you,
Bouquets of the retreat, delicate roses, tinted
Like far off conflagrations: roses of Anjou.
The sonnet itself is thus classic. Perhaps too much so for my taste, but it certainly maintains its own stately progress without striking a false note. Like the Aragon poem which struck an enduring chord with the French public at the time it was written, I can feel how strongly this one, in a certain context, could connect with a collective soul. The Aragon is quite site specific with its proper nouns--more so than this, which as Susan comments need not be tied to anything more particular than everyman's progression from youth to death. What it thus gains in philosophical detachment, it might lose in emotional immediacy. Although the one truly arcane reference, the wede, may tip the scale back for those who recognize it instantly. In the end, the sonnet feels firmly afloat in the grand tradition to which it quietly contributes.
Nemo
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