before the swallow dares: the daffodil in myth, magic & verse
It is a remarkable fact that if you Google search daffodils in poetry , the great bulk of prompts are the same: Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud . Yes, it is a great poem and one I learnt as a very young child at school, now so very many years ago, but how has it come to dominate our thinking? Like many others, I now only remember the first line and the last, but how lovely it is to imagine William walking in the warm spring sunshine of 1807 through the vales of the Lake District with his sister Dorothy. Perhaps they had been commenting on the few cotton-wool clouds that drifted across the sky before suddenly coming across a host of golden daffodils . Our native daffodil , Narcissus pseudonarcissus Wild daffodils growing on a Devonshire bank In more recent times, Ted Hughes has been equally moved by their colour – their bloomers of scrambled egg-yolk . He also captured perfectly how they appeared quite sudd...
