OPHELIA        There’s rosemary: that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies: that’s for thoughts.

LAERTES        A document in madness – thoughts and remembrance fitted!

OPHELIA        There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace o’Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say ’a made a good end.

Sings.

        For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.    (4.5.169-179)

There’s rosemary: that’s for remembrance, strong-smelling, long-lasting, sprigs distributed at weddings as well as funerals. Pray you, love, remember—addressed to Laertes? to the absent Hamlet? Remember me, the plea (or terrible command) made by Hamlet’s father’s ghost to his son, too. And there is pansies: that’s for thoughts, an innocent bit of word-play, pensées. Laertes can see the logic here, a document in madness—thoughts and remembrance fitted! That all makes perfect sense so far. But then there’s fennel for you, and columbines—the symbolism murkier (although fennel can be associated with flattery, columbines with infidelity), the recipients unclear—and in many productions, Ophelia doesn’t have actual flowers, she has twigs, or weeds, or scraps of paper, or locks of her hair. It makes sense to her, but not necessarily to anyone else. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me—often given to Gertrude, rue, ruth, for pity and for repentance; we may call it herb of grace o’Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference—perhaps suggesting that Gertrude does indeed need to repent, whereas Ophelia is asking for pity? There’s a daisy, love, perhaps unrequited. And then she’s struck by an absence, and then another: I would give you some violets—fidelity—but they withered all when my father died. (And what kind of fidelity is possible in this world?) Thinking of her father, she can’t think of anything else: they say ’a made a good end—which he didn’t, of course, and Ophelia knows it’s a white lie, that it was all a terrible, messy mistake, that Polonius (like Hamlet’s father) had no chance of a good death, that he died unprepared. So she retreats into song again: for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy, and bonny and sweet and joy seem as alien to this desperate scene as do the flowers, whether real or imagined. Ophelia’s madness is a kind of scattering, a dissipation of things, a falling apart in music, perfume, memory.