That small speech may be Golding's sly response to complaints, dating back to Lord of the Flies (1954), about his itch to allegorize.
Not one of the Civil War paintings shows a dead body, but Homer did allegorize death in a painting done just after the war, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865.
But despite the corniness of the flowers and pearls that allegorize Luxury, the creamy rose of those bodies, shadowed with olive and held within the complicated machinery of the .