The Design
The design is a relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
The dimensions of the printed impression, including all three poems (see illustration), are: 14cms x 9.4cms (based on the King's College, Cambridge, copy - copy "W").
The "Ah, Sun-flower" design forms the middle part of the overall layout (the positioning is mentioned below in the "Themes and interpretations" section).
"The text and title appear in a cloud (which...may indicate the speaker's confusion)."
A "tiny golden human form of the Sunflower, with petal-like arm, root-like leg, and hair flowing back" appears in the top-left, but, other than a blue patch of sky at the top-right, there seems to be little direct connection with the poem. Grant discusses the illustration in some detail. Leader points to the unbridgeable distance between the Sunflower and the blue space as illustrative of unfulfilled aspiration.
Read more about this topic: Ah! Sunflower
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)