Leaves:
How often are leaves or flowers used as metaphors to evoke images of death or birth or the cycle of death and rebirth in literature? Not being a literary person, I tend to miss a lot of what I read, though I can think of a few obvious examples.

"Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
the wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop,
the leaves of life keep falling one by one.

(I love the Rubaiyat and keep a copy near all of my terminals. I recite often, but seldom read them. A Persian buddy told Fitzgerald's translations did about 70% justice to the original, which seems pretty good. Another one told me that he and his buds would sit around reciting them to each other while they got roasted.)


There's that Robert Frost poem
"Nature's first green is gold
...
her early leaf's a flower
...
the leaf subsides to leaf
..."


In the road not taken, the entire forest is a metaphor for a single life and maybe for the interconnection of all lives.

Leaves of Grass (the one about the ploughman comes to mind ... the rest is kinda vague in my mind).


Thomas'
"Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain"


Waves or tides:

Thomas
"Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
...
Or waves break loud on the seashores"

Dickenson
"Nor yet a floating spar to men who sink and rise
and sink and rise and sink again"
(not sure if this one counts, really)


Are there other examples from poetry and are there examples from literature other than poetry? Do poets still use this kind of imagery or is it considered too obvious? For novels, I can't usually figure out what's intentional from what's just coincidence.

What other metaphors are used? Are there some that are very subtle?

There's this emporer of ice-cream business that I read in Wallace Stevens once, but I never had an idea of what he was going on about or a remote liking for it until I discovered an explanation for it much, much later. Now it seems very beautiful to me, macabre, gothic.

k