"The Loves of the Plants" argues that human emotion is rooted in physiology rather than Christian theology. Darwin would take his materialism even further in "The Economy of Vegetation" and "The Temple of Nature", works that have been called atheistic. In describing plants through the language of love and sex, Darwin hoped to convey the idea that humans and human sexuality are simply another part of the natural world. Darwin writes that his poem will reverse Ovid who “did, by art poetic, transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into trees and Flowers; I have undertaken, by similar art, to restore some of them to their original animality”