Daffodils

To many, the blooming of the daffodil incontrovertibly signals the arrival of spring. Here are some photos of the cheerful faces that recently emerged from bulbs I planted just this Februrary.

In decades past, one of the most widely memorized poems was Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," referred to many laypeople as simple "the daffodil poem." Unfortunately, inculcating the delightful, tetrameter couplets into the minds of grammar school students made the task seem rather like drudgery, rather than a pleasure, thus making the piece among the most dispised in all of English verse.

Perhaps this is why the exercise was dropped, so that only teachers who have a living memory of the second World War--those fundamentalist, exacting guardians of tradition in education--still insist upon the practice. And thus it is hard to say which would be preferrable: to fill the young, impressionable minds of grammar school students with quality poetry that could be recalled and pressed into service later in life, but taint the verses with contempt; or to allow some of our language's most valuable treasure to fall into general oblivion, with the hope that a handful of citizens would, one day, extracurricularly discover and learn to cherish them.

Wordsworth's poem was originally composed in 1804, two years after he viewed the "host of golden daffodils" on a walk with his sister Dorothy, who recorded the incident in her journal entry for 15 April 1802:

"I never saw daffodils so beautiful; they grew among the mossy stones…some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake….”

Here is the second version (published in 1815) of the poem:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed-and gazed-but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.