Anne Chooses Gilbert’s Lilies of the Valley at Graduation

Anne Chooses Gilbert’s Lilies of the Valley at Graduation is a quiet turning point in Anne Shirley’s relationship with Gilbert Blythe: as she graduates from Redmond College, she chooses his lilies-of-the-valley over Roy Gardner’s violets, then reacts with distress to news that Gilbert may be engaged to another woman. The flowers do not amount to a conscious declaration, but they make visible a bond Anne has treated as friendship while expecting a different future.

Academic setting and stakes

Anne reaches Convocation after examinations in which she earns High Honors in English. Priscilla Grant wins Honors in Classics, Philippa Gordon in Mathematics, and Stella Maynard achieves a good all-round result. Graduation marks the completion of a long-held educational ambition, not merely a ceremony: from the outset, Anne has worked to make her way through college without drawing on Marilla Cuthbert’s limited savings.

The pressure behind that ambition had become especially clear when Anne feared she might not be able to return to Redmond College for her Sophomore year. The available scholarship seemed too small, she would not accept Marilla’s money, and summer work might not earn enough. She considered returning to teach at a district school until she could afford to finish. The prospect mattered socially as well as academically: she feared that her classmates would graduate without her and that the shared life at Patty’s Place would be lost. Her eventual honors therefore stand against a real possibility of interruption, and the degree completes a course she had once worried she could not continue.

That achievement follows a difficult transition into college. At first, Anne feels insignificant among unfamiliar students and misses the sense of belonging she had at Queen’s. She and Priscilla Grant spend their first weeks feeling like strangers; the Freshmen’s victory in the Arts Rush helps turn them into a class with shared interests and confidence. In the years that follow, Anne’s studies, friendships, and social life widen, but graduation recalls the older hopes formed before Redmond College. Her choice of Gilbert’s flowers comes at the point where those hopes have matured into an accomplished degree.

The flowers and the shared past

On the day of Convocation, Anne takes Roy’s violets from their box and looks at them thoughtfully, intending to carry them. Another box contains fresh, fragrant lilies-of-the-valley, accompanied by Gilbert’s card. She wonders why he has sent flowers: during the preceding winter she has seen little of him. He has visited Patty’s Place only once since the Christmas holidays, and they rarely meet elsewhere. He has been studying hard for High Honors and the Cooper Prize, while taking little part in Redmond’s social activities.

Anne nevertheless replaces Roy’s violets with Gilbert’s lilies before leaving for the ceremony. She cannot explain the decision to herself. The flowers connect the immediate occasion to Avonlea and to a friendship whose history predates her courtship with Roy. Anne and Gilbert once imagined the day when they would be graduates in Arts, and now the shared ambition has become real. At this moment, she feels that Gilbert’s flowers belong to the fulfillment of those old hopes in a way Roy’s do not. The gesture is significant precisely because it is instinctive: Anne makes a choice before she can give it a name.

Recognition amid the ceremony

The graduation proceedings give Anne the public acknowledgment she has worked toward: the president of Redmond gives her a cap and diploma and declares her a Bachelor of Arts. Yet that formal achievement is not what remains most sharply in her memory. She recalls neither the moment she receives the degree nor Gilbert’s look when he sees that she has chosen his lilies. Nor is the lasting memory Roy’s pained, puzzled glance as he passes her on the platform, or the congratulations of Aline Gardner and Dorothy. Instead, the day leaves her with an unexplained pang and a faint, persistent bitterness.

That contrast unsettles the easy expectation that success will make the day wholly joyful. Anne has achieved an ambition she cherished for years, but the ceremony also brings her feelings and loyalties into view without resolving them. Gilbert’s flowers recall a friendship bound up with her earliest hopes; Roy’s presence belongs to the courtship she has expected to advance toward engagement. The emotional disturbance does not yet produce a clear decision about either man. It registers as a disquiet Anne cannot account for, even as the choice of flowers has already distinguished one attachment from the other.

The rumor and the broken chain

At the graduation dance, Anne wears a small gold chain with a pink enamel heart pendant. Gilbert sent it to Green Gables at Christmas with a card describing himself as her old chum. The gift recalls the childhood occasion when he called her Carrots and tried to make peace with a pink candy heart. Anne had thanked him in a note but had never worn the pendant before. On this night, she fastens it around her neck with a dreamy smile, bringing another token of their shared past into the same celebration as the lilies.

As Anne walks to Redmond with Philippa Gordon, Phil tells her that she has heard Gilbert’s engagement to Christine Stuart is to be announced after Convocation. Anne says nothing. In the dark, her face burns; she catches the chain inside her collar and twists it until it breaks, then puts the pendant in her pocket. Her trembling hands and smarting eyes turn the rumor into a visible rupture in her attempt to keep Gilbert safely within the category of an old friend. The evidence does not show that the engagement is actually announced; what changes here is Anne’s response to the possibility that Gilbert might belong to someone else.

At the dance she acts otherwise. She is among the gayest of the revellers and tells Gilbert, when he asks her to dance, that her card is full. Later, at Patty’s Place, she chats brightly with the girls about the day. Her outward composure stands in sharp contrast to the broken trinket and her private distress. The refusal does not settle her feelings; it lets her preserve appearances while avoiding a dance with the person whose rumored engagement has shaken her.

Later significance

The graduation scene gains its full meaning from Anne’s later recognition of what her reactions have been pointing toward. When Gilbert becomes gravely ill, Anne realizes that she loves him and that she had mistaken her flattering fancy for Roy for love. She believes, in that crisis, that Gilbert may die without knowing her feelings. That later discovery does not make the ceremony a deliberate confession in retrospect: Anne herself could not explain why she chose the lilies, and she is still unable to act plainly when confronted with the engagement rumor. It does, however, make the choice legible as an early sign of an attachment she has not yet understood.

The scene also binds romance to the achievement that defines Anne’s college years. Gilbert’s lilies recall their shared hope of graduating, while the ceremony confirms Anne’s own academic success after financial insecurity and the possibility of leaving college. Her choice is therefore both personal and tied to a larger history: the friendship that accompanied her from Avonlea into adulthood remains present at the moment she enters a new stage of life. What she carries to Convocation is not simply the more suitable bouquet; it is a past and a bond whose importance she will recognize only later.