From the madness of these open-air scents, we have endeavored to organize our flowers according to their essence. Through the netting of nectars and storing their sweets, we bees carefully constructed these honeycombes of verse. In order to further plant upon you the odiferous cause of our collection, we have organized our bouquet as a garden. Just as bees gather and sort pollen into honeycombs, our garden is organized by flowers, and the essence of these flowers correspond to the themes of the poetry sorted into each category.
We present this bouquet to you, dear Reader, and urge you to follow your nose! The mere flip of a page can release a new and fresh aroma! It is our highest hope that our great garland will grant both ocular and odiferous delights.
Peruse at your pleasure and inhale the essences at leisure. Sniff out the scents that are most pleasing to you and pluck the petals of your favorite flora. Whether you whisper “my love loves me, my love loves me not” as you read, doodle “a pocket full of poesie” in the margin as you flip pages or add scents of your own as you scribble verse alongside our collected smells, make this bouquet your own.
Finally, as you take a stroll through our garden, we encourage you to do as we have learned:
to stop
and smell the flowers.
Yours,
The busy-bees of English 401: Reading & Gathering