In a Word ... Daffodil

“Fair April, we weep to see / You haste away so soon; / As yet the early-rising sun / Has not attain’d his noon.” With apologies to Robert Herrick’s To Daffodils. Most people think of Wordsworth when the words “poetry” and “daffodils” are linked, but the 17th century Herrick was there first. And, let it be said, his poem is superior in sentiment to Wordsworth’s “host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

That’s from his 1802 poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, where the flower doesn’t even merit billing in its title. He then goes on to claim “a poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company”. For the love of God! But it does make you wonder what he really meant in concluding how “when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” “Flash” indeed! Moving quickly on...

Give me the gloomy profundity of Herrick any day. His daffodils are a reminder that: “We have short time to stay, as you, / We have as short a spring; / As quick a growth to meet decay, / As you, or anything./ We die / As your hours do, and dry / Away, / Like to the summer’s rain; / Or as the pearls of morning’s dew, / Ne’er to be found again.”

Melancholy, blue, rich in depth.

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Herrick was an Anglican clergyman preoccupied with the brevity of human life. It was he who also wrote: “Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying: / And this same flower that smiles to day, / To morrow will be dying.”

Our short existence pushed him to encourage all to “seize the day”. Carpe diem! For tomorrow may be too late.

The title of that “Rose-buds” poem is the rather disconcerting, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time. “Virgins” is an old word that has long since fallen into disuse through lack of relevance. Even then it applied to those few women who claimed they were never chased. The poem concludes with this advice to such women: “... be not coy, but use your time; / And while ye may, goe marry: / For having lost but once your prime, / You may for ever tarry.” Wise.

Bye, April. That lovely month, “...mixing memory and desire”.

Daffodil, from Latin Asphodelus. The initial D is thought to have originated in the Dutch de-affodil – the Netherlands being a source for bulbs.

inaword@irishtimes.com