Ginsberg Sunflower Sparknotes

A sutra is in Buddhism means a teaching or lesson so, symbolically Ginsberg using a sunflower to teach his lesson. He starts the poem by talking about how he “sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry” (1). Suddenly he notices a dead, single sunflower describing it as “a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust”(1). Then he talks about how the sunflower is covered in the grime and dirt of the industry making it slowly wilt away, letting its outside “skin” influence its inner beauty, Ginsberg shows the sunflower be interpreted as life. Ginsberg responds to this thought of the sunflower and inner beauty by saying