Showing posts with label daffodils. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daffodils. Show all posts

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Daffodils

Well, it's March. The creative laze is passing. Finally, finally. Now I'm waiting for April.

March's flower is the daffodil--and I don't have any pictures of daffodils, so here are some day lilies from my garden last summer-- they won't bloom again til July, but they're yellow, and they're vaguely suggestive of daffodils. Kind of like jonquilian cognates. . .

Besides promoting cancer awareness, daffodils are symbols of the spring. . .and oddly enough, they are one of Aquarius' flowers--a month late. Not that anything associated with Aquarius is normal. It is the "sign of the future"--so maybe it is appropriate that it's flower be one that will only come into season after the sun has moved along.


Here's William Wordsworth's Daffodils:

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.


Interesting that he likens them to stars. . . the link between stars and flowers is one that still fascinates me. Children doodle star-shapes meaning flowers, and every star sign is associated with certain flowers. Botanical life on earth comes from the stars as surely as we do . . . and many flowers seem possessed of undeniably starry signatures--almost like they're gesturing, twinkling, implying.







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