In D.H. Lawrence's "Odour of Chrysanthemums," is about the symbolization of chrysanthemums; the feeling Elizabeth Bates has towards her husband. Elizabeth waits anxiously for her husband to return for dinner. After a day down the pits, she is concerned for his safety and at the same time angry at the trouble he has made for her by coming home late, and drunk, so often. She ponders their poor relationship and tries to keep up appearances with her two young children. After unsuccessfully trying the pubs and neighbors, the word comes that there has been an accident and that her husband has been killed, "It was chrysanthemums when I married him..."
             "and chrysanthemums when you were born..." When John, her son, "tears at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropped the petals," she feels sorry for the flowers – and for herself – and taking a twig of flowers she "held them against her face" in fond memory of the way the marriage used to be. And the, "instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in her apron-band." She wears the flower as an emblem to their now useless familiar relationship just as some people wear armbands at a funeral. Yet, when the daughter is excited about the mother keeping a flower in her apron, Mrs. Bates is sarcastic, saying, "Goodness me! One would think the house is afire" and she "irritably . . . took the flowers out from her apron-band."
             "and the very first time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his button hole." Near the opening of the story, Mrs. Bates is described as "imperious." "Imperious" means domineering and arrogant, and it portrays Mrs. Bates as a woman in full command. As she stands looking at the miners going home, she seems like an army commander surveying her troops. Her "definite" eyebrows and hair "parted exactly" reinforce the image of her as a no-nonsense commander. The way s...