We visited one of my favorite places on earth mid-week: the Huntsville Botanical Garden. The garden was just waking up, but there was quite a lot of color already to be seen, and much of it came from those harbingers of spring, the daffodils. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this poem when I looked back through our pictures.
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.
I don’t know that such carefully cultivated gardens were what Wordsworth reminisced over in his “pensive mood,” but I seeing such a long row of them helped me see how he could’ve been so inspired. To see a real “host,” I really need look no further than our mailbox flowerbed; there aren’t ten thousand there, but there is, as a beloved English teacher of mine was wont to say, a “gracious plenty.”
Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Check It Out.
Gorgeous photos! They certainly are something to cherish with your “inward eye.”
Thank you, thank you for this glimpse of spring-to-come for us Northerners. And for the reminder to hoard these moments like a miser:
“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.”