There is a willow grows aslant a brook, / That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. / There with fantastic garlands did she make / Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
Act IV, Scene 7 · Gertrude
Context
Gertrude describes the setting of Ophelia's death: a willow tree leaning over a brook, where Ophelia was making garlands from wildflowers when a branch broke and she fell into the water.
Analysis
The catalogue of flowers—'crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples'—moves from the innocent to the obscene (the 'grosser name' hints at phallic slang), mixing beauty with corruption in a way that mirrors Ophelia's story: innocence destroyed by sexual politics. Gertrude's aside that 'cold maids' call them 'dead men's fingers' explicitly names death and chastity together, as though Ophelia's virginity and her mortality were already intertwined. The flowers thus become a compressed symbol of everything that killed her: nature, sexuality, death, and the gap between vulgar reality and maidens' euphemism.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Gertrude's flower catalogue reveals Ophelia's death as overdetermined by the play's sexual anxieties—by naming flowers with bawdy associations and morbid nicknames, the speech shows Ophelia was killed not by accident but by a world that could not separate female innocence from sexual corruption and death.