I’M INDEBTED to Garrison Keillor’s almanac for the reminder that today marks the 209th anniversary of one of the most famous meetings in English literature. Yes, it was on April 15th, 1802 that William Wordsworth was walking home from a friend’s house in the Lake District when, “all at once” as he noted later, he came face to face with an estimated 10,000 daffodils.
The rest was poetic history – eventually. Like many fateful meetings, the significance of this one may not have been immediately apparent to either party. Wordsworth didn’t get around to writing his best-known poem until at least two years afterwards, maybe even later. And whenever he did write it, he was probably relying on his sister’s memory of the event.
That’s because, contrary to the suggestion that he was wandering lonely as a cloud at the time, he had in fact been accompanied by Dorothy Wordsworth. And she, at least, was sufficiently impressed by the scene to record it in her journal for this date.
“When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.
“I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them, 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, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.” Another important event in the poet’s life that year – one whose significance must have been instantly obvious – was that he got married. This also had an influence on the poem. If it was to his sister that he owed the memory of the daffodils, it was apparently his wife Mary who suggested what he considered the two best lines: “They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” In any case, the Wordsworths’ collective reflections on the flowers took their now-famous form sometime before 1807, when the verse was first published. And a sure sign of its future popularity was that, even then, the critics hated it.
Of the poet’s inward-eye epiphany, one wrote contemptuously: “He thinks it worth while to give a tame, matter-of-fact account of some daffodils blown about with the wind, because he thought of them afterwards.” Another suggested the author had produced an unintentional self-parody: “Surely, if his worst foe had chosen to caricature this egotistic manufacturer of metaphysical importance upon trivial themes, he could not have done it more effectively.”
But whatever its merits, the poem was soon propagating itself as successfully as the daffodils. It has since gone on to achieve what passes for literary immortality. Most of us can quote at least a line or two by heart. It regularly makes the top five or 10 in best-loved-poem polls. And the early critical disdain notwithstanding, it is the declared favourite of writer and arts broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, among others.
I know this last fact from my copy of Wesley College's Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poem. Wherein the former Irish rugby international Ollie Campbell also nominates it. In his letter, the great out-half said he loves the verse because of its association with springtime, sunny weather, and the climax of the rugby season.
This despite the fact that Campbell played in an era when the Welsh – for whom the daffodil is an unofficial symbol (the leek is more authentic, but many in Wales consider it a bit too vulgar to be a national emblem, except on things like coinage, where you can’t smell it) – routinely beat Ireland, and without the need for illegal throw-ins.
The poem has in turn secured the literary immortality of its author: a fact inadvertently confirmed last week by the Taoiseach, after he had attended the funeral of murdered policeman Ronan Kerr in Omagh. Interviewed on RTÉ, Enda Kenny mentioned the daffodils in church and said: "I was reminded of Wordsworth's line: 'We weep to see you haste away so soon'." In fact, although it was a minor issue in the circumstances, that line was not Wordsworth's. It was by Robert Herrick, from his more sombre treatment of the subject, To Daffodils, written a century and a half earlier.
But nature poets are like those stall-holders on Grafton Street asking everyone “Want flowers, love?”. They have to compete for our attention: something poor Herrick no longer does very successfully, it seems. That his verse should be misattributed, on the rare occasions when it’s remembered at all, is a measure of the extent to which Wordsworth has cornered the daffodil market.