It’s not a beastbut is a gift to release the blessings He commands. I have much enjoyed this particular sequence. Perhaps you will too. The style varies from old to new. It changes as do the seasons.

Here we have a good example of sonnet form assisting in one’s education.  The following entry took me from seeing the sonnet–at least the view I took in this sequence–as a five foot beast, to seeing it as a five petalled flower.  So a botany lesson and a lesson in the language of flowers–or floriography, a sort of Victorian codification of what the sending of certain flowers to someone else should mean–has once again stretched the limits of my mind.

Cross referencing the floriography with botany:  families of flowers with 5 petals–luckily not too many candidates there–one is struck pretty early on with the blue variety of violet which in this context means “faithfulness.”

From there one may learn about such small bouquets as were used, and during the reign of Queen Victoria would have been called, “tussie-mussies;” or earlier, “nosegays” or even “posies.”

During the Victorian tussie-mussie period, these would have been worn by women as adornments to a hat or bodice. The term tussie-mussie seems to have originated somewhere in the 1400s, but Wiki is less than authoritative on that score.