Story
The song tells the story of a little boy who on the first day of school started drawing pictures of flowers using many different colors. The teacher tells him that he's coloring the flowers all wrong and that he should paint them red and green, "the way they always have been seen." The boy disagrees and continues to color them from his imagination until the teacher punishes him by standing him in a corner. Finally, the little boy gives in and tells the teacher that "flowers are red, and green leaves are green." When he goes to a different school, he continues mechanically painting flowers red and green, to the dismay of his new, kind teacher.
In the live concert versions, Chapin extended the song's ending to: "There still must be a way to have our children say..." before featuring the little boy's chorus again and bringing the song to a better conclusion. A version of this is featured on his album Legends of the Lost and Found.
Read more about this topic: Flowers Are Red
Famous quotes containing the word story:
“I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing.”
—William Gass (b. 1924)
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
—Isak Dinesen (1885–1962)
“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)