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:
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)