Calendula (or Marigold)

In Pericles, Marina is covering her nurse’s grave with flowers and says 

I will rob Tellus of her weed,
To strew thy green with flowers: the yellows, blues,
The purple violets, and marigolds,
Shall as a carpet hang upon thy grave,
While summer-days do last (4.1).

Marina at this moment in the play is a young girl living with a foster family in an unfamiliar land.  Unbeknownst to her, her foster mother has turned against her and in the next moment a murderer hired by her foster mother will arrive to try to kill Marina.  Marina will be saved by pirates.  At this moment she turns to the earth for resources and comfort.  

Tellus was goddess of the earth (Mowat and Werstine, 118).  Far from her own family, with the nurse who cared for her dead, Marina is thinking of the earth as a female being, and of flowers as the earth’s clothes (clothes could be called weeds).  She wants to pluck flowers from the earth to make a “carpet” for her nurse’s grave, an act of love and commemoration.  But even as she seeks comfort Marina says she is “robbing” the goddess of the earth.   Does the reference to seasons passing suggest that next spring will bring new flowers?In The Winter’s Tale, Marigolds are one of Perdita’s flowers.  As hostess and queen of the sheep sheering festival, she offers flowers to her guests and speaks of “the marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun/And with him rises weeping” (The Winter’s Tale 4.4).

Calendula are among the orange flowers we have planted to honour and remember the children whose remains were found in the grounds of the Kamloops residential school in May 2021, as well as in Stó:lō territory and throughout Canada. 

Here also is an article about Shakespeare’s play The Tempest in relation to Residential Schools by Jamie Paris.  Paris writes, “I want to empower both Indigenous and settler students to identify and read against colonial ideologies that surface in early modern texts.”