A Sea of Violets

A sea of violets. The image, so I'm told, of youth and beauty and vitality. A bank of lavender. A vase of sunflowers. Representing the same or something different, depending on the beholder or the narrator who is telling us what the eye beholds. Though perhaps to the narrator it is unclear, they just like the image and have given no or very little thought as to its symbolism, as to how it might be perceived; that is for those who make it their life's work to review, to analyse another's work, and read into it all that may or may not be there, until it becomes the general accepted opinion: this is what the author-narrator was trying to achieve, was attempting to say.
Perhaps all they were suggesting was springtime glory, and the profusion of colour that season brings, and thought only of how their characters might stand out against or amidst such a description of beauty. A picture they thought they could in words do justice to, and thereby enable the reader to see it, to hold it in their mind's eye. It was not meant to suggest anything about the characters, though if such an interpretation was made and it strengthened the narrative so be it.
Should I, the reader, be interpreting every flower? Every plural placement of them in a text? The violets are important. What then do weeds signify?
What a lot of answers I could give! All of them subjective, like, for instance, a muddled mind; the determination of the life force though denied; a less beautiful but robust or hardy character; a persistent irritant, to the eye who wants to see only beauty, to the mind that wants to escape ugliness, to the spirit that wants to be left to its own reasoning. Is that what weeds signify? Perhaps...to myself alone...unless another is specified by the author-narrator or a scholar of theirs to which I will submit for the purposes of this narrative, although I might not altogether, in the general sense, agree. Does it matter if I don't see what they have seen? Or understood something as they're understood it? Or perceived it as central? If I've somehow missed the symbolism? I'm not sure it does if it hasn't marred my reading pleasure and if I've still, for the most part, comprehended all that unfolded: the events as they happened and the relationships, developed or developing or ended, between characters.
So what if some revelations to me, the reader, came later, or perhaps earlier, than they should? Who does it affect but myself?
So what if to me a sea of violets is just a sea of violets, glorious for themselves?

Picture credit: Bouquet of Violets, 1872, Edouard Manet (source: WikiArt).

From journal, written July 2021. See The Italian Romances by George H. Thomson.