More daffodils

Hi everyone. Don’t you just love daffodils? I do! If you missed my Monday post I wandered lonely as a cloud in March click the link to check it out. Today here’s another daffodil poem which I learned off-by-heart at Junior School.

When I wrote “Jam for Tea” I remembered the school poetry competition.

…. in the last year of Junior school we learned poems with the aim of winning the prize for the pupil who could remember the most lines. I tried hard to win and knew Daffodils (twenty four lines); Meg Merrilies (thirty lines); Tyger, Tyger (twenty four lines; and the first five verses of The Ancient Mariner (twenty lines). But that wasn’t enough to win.

Since publishing Jam for Tea in 2016, I’ve re-called more poems I managed to recite from memory. But still not enough lines to win the prize!

One of them was the beautiful “To Daffodils” by Robert Herrick.

Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674), an English lyric poet and clergyman is best known for his book of poems, “Hesperides”. The volume includes the poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” which starts with the immortal line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying”.

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain’d his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.

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.

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