Mimi’s Corner: Daffodowndilly

Ah, March! Like your calendar neighbor, February, you break our hearts and boggle our minds. A few days ago, we had beautiful summer-like weather and we rather liked it! But then, spring sprung back to herself and dumped a zillion inches of rain. And snow is always in store! March sometimes declares war on us and it is somewhat appropriate since March’s namesake is Mars, the Roman god of war. But we’ll tolerate it because April is on the way!

In my garden the daffodils are just blooming, the crocuses are croaking, and the tulips’ leaves are growing inch by inch. Tulips are my favorite spring flower but I have better luck with daffodils. I confess - I do not divide them as I should, so the 50 or so I planted many years ago now number in the hundreds. I love seeing them winding through the yard; most are yellow, some white, and some a lovely pinky peach.

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.

That stanza is from a poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, by William Wordsworth, which was one of the twenty or more poems I had to memorize and recite in my junior year English class. Every Monday, we had to stand, one at a time, each of us reciting the same poem. If I didn’t know it going into the class, I sure as heck knew it afterwards! I tell you, it fairly ruined my weekends, dreading first the memorization and then the recitation on Monday. What a way to turn kids off of poetry!

A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh and other treasures, wrote my favorite poem about daffodils and he titled it Daffodowndilly.

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet

She wore her greenest gown;

She turned to the south wind

And curtsied up and down.

She turned to the sunlight

And shook her yellow head,

And whispered to her neighbor: “Winter is dead.”