In my part of the world, just outside Melbourne, the earth’s rebirth has begun. This is not news, of course, nor is it the resurrection of nature, but merely awakening from the winterlong sleep. We use the word merely in its sense of time, not significance. The earth and its attendant branches of family are blooming into beauty.
This is the rising that brings joy and warmth to the soul. It’s a co-dependency. But yet it is a faith that runs only one way. Ours to it.
The flower does not see, the bud does not hear, but we do and we drink in life’s affirmations in such times. In their new beginning is the rendering of our hope. Call it a gift of nature.
There are a few colours of this rising but the predominant one is yellow. Daffodils and jonquils be their names. Yellow, of course, has already brought its wash of colour to parts of the country. We are in the midst of the glorious reign of wattle. This is also a gift that in the depths of winter the wattle can give to the world such brilliance and frailty
There’s an irony that the non-sentient jonquils and daffodils both belong to the Narcissus genus. Narcissus, in Greek mythology, was a man beautiful beyond words. Entreaties by others to be loved by him fell on stony ground. He only loved the reflection in the water. Tragically, as is the way of mythologies, he did not know it was own reflection.
Some versions of the myth say he thumped his breast so hard for being unable to be with his love, a flower rose from his chest. Others differ on its origin, such as Pliny the Elder who believed it derived from the word narko because of its narcotic effects: ‘Narce narcissum dictum, non a fabuloso puero,’ or ‘named Narcissus from Narce, not from the fabulous boy.’
When William Wordsworth was ambling through the Lake District countryside in 1802 with his sister Dorothy and marvelling at the profusion of daffodils, the word itself had been known in English since the 15th century. It found its way as affodell to England from the classics and picked up an initial d, too.
Wordsworth didn’t write his poem until 1804, and it became with its opening line one of the most popular poems in the language.
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;
It ends with Wordsworth on his couch recalling the experience:
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Well, he was a romantic.
In the northern hemisphere, daffodils are associated with Easter. The connection between rebirth is obvious. Wordsworth’s daffodil ramble occurred the day before Good Friday, the day of Christ’s Last Supper.
From the earth just outside Melbourne, the colours of the day are changing. We see in the daffodil the passing of the seasons. Winter will soon be gone.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.
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