[Alan Wickes]

Like others, even if I had not seen this elsewhere, I would have recognised the author. Really it should not be possible to write a convincing sonnet using flower imagery and changing seasons within a lament without becoming simply derivative. Yet this is a timeless classic and it would be ungenerous to see it as simply 'textbook stuff'.

So how does the poet pluck something extraordinary from such familiar material? Partly it's got to do with how well crafted this is - on all kinds of levels. The use of repeated phrases - giving it, as others have noted, the hint of a villanelle - that's very effective. Personally I think piling up references to different flowers does not detract from this at all but adds a rich blossoming effect. It is this central contradiction between the blossoming flowers and the sense of withering, mournful loss which makes this so memorable.

Yes, of course it's been done before, but the poem does stand up well amongst its famous antecedents and that is no mean feat; moreover the illustrious ancestors mentioned - 'In Flanders Field' et al, are not sonnets and I cannot bring to mind an actual sonnet covers this territory quite as well as this. That being said, I'm not sure it is quite fair of Mary to post a passage from Hamlet as a comparative example!

Alan