GARDEN PLEASURES, SIXTEENTH CENTURY
No one can read this poem without feeling that the dancing daffodils "take the winds of March with beauty." The very name of the daffodil touches our imagination. It carries us to the Elysian Fields, for the ancient Greeks pictured the meads of the blessed as beautifully golden and deliciously fragrant with asphodels. The changes ring through asphodel, affodile, affodyl, finally reaching daffodil. Then there is one more quaint and familiar name and personification,
Daffy-down-dilly that came up to town
In a white petticoat and a green gown.
The idea of daffodil as a rustic maiden was popular in folk-lore and poetry. The feeling is so well expressed in Michael Drayton's sprightly eclogue called "Daffodil" that it forms a natural complement to the happy song of care-free Autolycus just quoted. This Pastoral captured popular fancy; and it is just as fresh and buoyant as it was when it was written three hundred years ago. Two shepherds, Batte and Gorbo, meet:
Batte
Gorbo, as thou camst this way,
By yonder little hill,
Or, as thou through the fields didst stray,
Sawst thou my Daffodil?
She's in a frock of Lincoln green,
Which color likes the sight;
And never hath her beauty seen
But through a veil of white.
Gorbo
Thou well describst the daffodil;
It is not full an hour
Since by the spring, near yonder hill,
I saw that lovely flower.