The kind of poetic genre where the various parts of a girl is compared to flowers. Does it have a name?
e.g. Spenser:
Her lips did smell lyke vnto Gillyflowers,
her ruddy cheekes lyke vnto Roses red:
her snowy browes lyke budded Bellamoures,
her louely eyes lyke Pincks but newly spred,
Her goodly bosome lyke a Strawberry bed,
etc.
This is from Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamium. The poetry you quote comes from a sonnet cycle, and I suppose you could say that’s the genre you’re looking for. However, none of this requires flower-specific metaphors. I think the word you’re looking for might actually be conceit, which, from the first Google result I could fine, is a “fanciful poetic image or metaphor that likens one thing to something else that is seemingly very different.” From this Glossary of Poetry Terms: Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/pmglossary1.html#ixzz1H9ewuGs0
Is that helpful? If not, I have a couple literature/poetry books stashed somewhere on one of my bookshelves.
More information about genre and this particular poem can be found by searching Epithalamium at wikipedia, where you can read that it is “a form of poem that is written specifically for the bride on the way to her marital chamber,” and that “perhaps no poem of this class has been more universally admired than the pastoral Epithalamion of Edmund Spenser (1595).”
And for some reason I’m wanting to say something about the poetry term blazon, but I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since poetry class, and I was not really a fan of this particular form when I was there.
Or similes. Sorry. I’ll now remove myself from this thread. I’m having a bad morning.
No, you’re absolutely right: the blazon involves listing the various parts of the girl’s face or body and comparing them to things (although these don’t have to be flowers – Sidney has a sonnet where he compares the girl’s features to the different parts of a building, for example).