Daffodils – On The Other Hand
SK tells me: “You can’t not care about daffodils“.
SK’s not wrong.
Update: Well, SK was partially wrong – about the author.
This poem was inspired by a walk William Wordsworth took in 1802. Written in 1804, it was revised in 1815.
“I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” – aka “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.
John Keats William Wordsworth
Good poem but it’s by Wordsworth, not Keats
I post them as I get them … 🙂
That’s cool. I’m an ex-English teacher and misattributions sometimes wake me up to the point where I have to mention it.
I ignored this poem in high school but many years later when my school-aged daughter memorized it and recited it to me, it got my attention and I felt the beauty of it.
Thanks for posting it.
Sorry about that. I shouldn’t post in the wee hours.
Omg, can’t believe I mixed them up. Hanging my head in shame.
Nothing to be ashamed about. Easily corrected. You did have me puzzled though. I had to look it up to be sure it was WW and not JK. The main thing is you chose a good poem for this time of year. Thanks for that.
Lovely.
On the other, other hand, here is a photo of one of our two Argentine Giants in our front yard. I took this photo this morning.
I give all the credit for our landscaping choices to the lovely Mrs. azlib….when required, I perform the manual labor. I love these Giants. The blooms are stunning….almost riotous….but at the same time they are very delicate. And as is the case elsewhere in life, when you find beauty, you need to stop to enjoy it: the blooms on the Giant will last 24-, maybe 30-hours before they quickly fade. A pod will drop from the plant in a couple of days.
A couple’o other angles…..
Another….
Funny looking daffodils … 🙂
🙂 but pretty!
I’m a arky, can’t help it.
How wide, in inches, are them blooms?
And, am I looking at a gravel “lawn”?
We know some folks in northern Calif that have a gravel yard – less maintenance supposedly.
I wish that I’d have seen your question earlier in the day. As I said, the blooms do not last long. This picture was taken 12 and a half hours after my earlier picture and the flower is already beginning to wither (my morning picture was taken at 6:04am, and this one at 6:36pm). Without putting my tape against the flower in full bloom (and I’ll put a picture that I took at 11:12am in the next reply), my guess is that at full bloom, you’re looking at 7-8″ in diameter. I’ll also post a picture of my tape against the bloom’s height.
Yes, you’re looking at the gravel of our desert landscaping. This is very common in the desert areas of Arizona. A desert landscape does require some work….weeding primarily and we have a couple of bushes which need periodic trimming….but it requires far less weekly maintenance, not to mention water.
Bloom height.
Full mid-day bloom.
Yes, at that size they are respectable and arresting. Gravel yard means no lawn mower, string trimmer, etc., etc. Lucky dawg.
But, you don’t get to walk barefoot in the grass…. oh well.
We have a dog and therefore the backyard has some grass. But like the dog (chihuahua), the grass is pretty small….500 square feet. It takes me about as much time to bring out the line trimmer and mower as it does to do the actual work. My gravel is not at all easy to walk on while barefoot, but my Tucson grandkids will sometimes walk barefoot on theirs. Theirs is still too rough for me, but they don’t even flinch.
Here in northern Michigan, our daffodils are just breaking ground. As an update to the ice storm up in these parts, the further north you go from our location, the more wrecked the forest is. Devastating! We’re on day 13 of no electricity, though line men and tree companies are working day and night to get juice flowing. Over 1,300 new telephone poles have been set since the ice storm. Quite the endeavor to recover from. On a positive note, our generator has been performing flawlessly. Burning about 6 1/2 gallons of gas every 24 hours.
I grew up in Michigan – back when we used the 2nd-floor doors “to nowhere” (seems winters have gotten milder since I was a child – at least in the lower part of the state). I remember ice skating on gravel roads after some of those ice storms. We were lucky in that we had in our neighborhood: 1) a county commissioner, and 2) a neighbor on a iron lung … so we didn’t have extensive power outages. Are you in northern MI or the UP? I have a brother in West Branch.
Hey, DT. I’m outside of Luzerne, about 30 miles north of West Branch, so not far from your brother. We hit the Meijer there for groceries. Fortunately West Branch was spared the ice storm.
“Strange thing about an idea,” he said. “You can never tell whether it is composed of relationships you should have seen before. Most ideas are merely structures—things built on bits of knowledge and insight you already possess. If the knowledge you possess is in error, the structure will be flawed.”
I sat across from him. “What’s this one about?
“Maybe the stress of survival.”
“I’ve been stressed now and then.”
“I am thinking of the long range. Hundreds of thousands of years. Millions of years. The stress of survival caused adaptations. Specific adaptations. The neck of the giraffe. The cushioned brain of the woodpecker. The nematocysts of the Portuguese man-of-war.”
“The what?”
“The poisonous areas on the tentacles.”
“Oh.”
“Specific adaptations developed over long periods of time to preserve the species. Grazing animals which lived on the leaves of trees had to grow longer and longer necks, or starve. Just as man breeds show dogs and beef cattle. And turkeys with so much weight of breast meat, their legs are all sinew. Biological evolution creates precise adaptations so that a creature can survive in one single environment. And certainly man has developed through biological evolution. What man has grown for himself over millennia is this wondrous stack of neurons and blood vessels encased in bone.” And he rapped himself on the skull with his knuckles.
https://www.smallestminority.org/
What a fascinating article, gs. Thank you!
Compelling, idn’t it?
The owner of that blog, Kevin, and me go way back to the usenet days of the 90’s.
Your friend Kevin is a fabulous writer, Ghost. I spent
a little time at his blog.