Life & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Smart

Smart’s line performs a kind of devotional sleight of hand: it smuggles argument into rapture. “Sound reasoning upon all flowers” sounds almost Enlightenment-clean, like a promise that beauty can be audited and justified. Then the pivot: flowers aren’t merely evidence of order; they’re “peculiarly the poetry of Christ.” Reason gets rerouted into reverence, as if the mind’s hunger for proofs is best satisfied by petals.

The phrasing is doing cultural work. In a century that increasingly trusted measurement, Smart insists that the created world isn’t just intelligible but addressed - a text with an author. Calling flowers “the poetry of Christ” doesn’t only prettify Christianity; it reframes Christ as not merely redeemer but maker, the Logos expressed in fragrance and color. “Peculiarly” is the tell: flowers are singled out as an especially intimate medium, not grand like mountains or terrifying like storms, but gentle, excess, gift. They are theology in miniature - unbilled splendor, brief-lived, insistently renewing.

Context sharpens the stakes. Smart, famously devout and famously unstable by his contemporaries’ standards, wrote with the intensity of someone for whom the world is crowded with meanings others miss or dismiss. The line reads like a defense of that perception: if you think my attention to flowers is irrational, I’m telling you it has “sound reasoning” behind it. The subtext is a rebuttal to both cold rationalism and polite, thinned-out faith: true reason, Smart suggests, ends not in skepticism but in praise.