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Literary notes about Buttercup (AI summary)

In literary works the term “buttercup” is often employed as a color descriptor—a shorthand for a bright, sunlit yellow that captures the warmth and effervescence of a summer day. Several authors invoke its hue to enhance imagery and evoke the natural splendor of the world around us. For example, one writer describes milk turning “yellow like butter” when it mingles with a buttercup, using the color to underscore a transformative, luminous quality [1]. In another passage a hue is lauded as surpassing even the “metallic burnish” characteristic of a buttercup’s petals, setting up the flower as an ideal standard of golden brilliance [2]. References such as “pale corn buttercup” [3] and the evocative “buttercup crush” in descriptions of shimmering waves [4] further illustrate how this particular shade of yellow has been woven into literary language as a symbol of bright, gentle radiance, even meriting its own designation as “BUTTERCUP GOLD” in some contexts [5]. Such uses highlight the buttercup not merely as a botanical specimen but as an enduring emblem of natural beauty and vibrant light.
  1. Into the buttercup he poured the milk, and it became yellow like butter at once.
    — from Uncle Wiggily's Travels by Howard Roger Garis
  2. Golden dandelion discs—gold and orange—of a hue more beautiful, I think, than the higher and more visible buttercup.
    — from The Pageant of Summer by Richard Jefferies
  3. The pale corn buttercup is in flower by the New Road, not in the least overshadowed by the crops at the edge of which it grows.
    — from The Toilers of the Field by Richard Jefferies
  4. Millpond, satin and creamy, then buttercup crush of waves
    — from Point Spread Poems by Paul Cameron Brown
  5. [48] BUTTERCUP GOLD
    — from The Pig Brother, and Other Fables and Stories A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth School Year by Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

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