Like flowers it withers with th’ advancing year,
And age, like winter, robs the blooming fair.
Slightly suggestive of the boy in Struwwelpeter who took root and grew sprouts because he would not move when he was told, but eminently moral.
But whether or no the flower of “vain Narcissus” fame was a polyanthus or a Poeticus, this is certain, varieties of both kinds grow in Greece, and apparently have grown there as far back as anything did. Over and over again Narcissi occur in classic literature, often with the qualifications purpled or croceum, which suggests the dark centred Poeticus. Sometimes they are spoken of as the flower of death, the treacherous sweet-scented blossoms, beguiling in sweetness and stupefying in effect. Plutarch definitely says they derived their name from narce = numbness, because of this effect. No such effect is known now; narcotics in plenty we have, and most of them of vegetable origin, but none obtained from narcissus. Still, evidently there is some such tradition in connection with them, for more than one old writer has regarded them as the flower of death. Milton possibly had some such tradition in his mind when in Lycidas, his In Memoriam, he says:
daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
This reference is, of course, to the English wild Narcissus, the little yellow daffodil of woods and meadows, no doubt more plentiful in his day than in ours.
Then, one hopes, there had not begun the reprehensible custom (described at the close of the eighteenth century) whereby, “In the counties round London the herb-folks bring prodigious quantities in the spring of the year, when in bloom, root and all, and sell them about the streets.” Still, in spite of the efforts of the “herb-folk” and others, there are wild daffodils yet to be found in parts of England and Holland. And, on good authority it is stated, all the uniflowered varieties of to-day are sprung from it; and of those varieties one may say, as Parkinson did of the Bastard Daffodils of Divers Kinds, “There is much variety in this kind; ... but it is needless to spend a great deal of time and labour upon such ... flowers, except that in the beholding of them, we may therein admire the work of the Creator, who can frame such diversity in one thing. But this is beside the text, yet not impertinent.”