Daffodils

Today is reckoned to be the average earliest flowering date for daffodils - some 13 days earlier than it was 20 years ago. This probably has less to do with 'global warming' than with a trend towards earlier-flowering bulbs. The daffodils (or some of them) have been coming into flower for the past week or so down my way, despite the bitter cold, and a very welcome sight they are, especially as today's varieties tend towards paler, more delicate flowers - more like the wild daffodil, and  less like the garish, stridently assertive standard garden daffs I remember from my boyhood, lined up like so many sentries in every suburban flowerbed.
  The wild daffodil is of course immortalised in that ur-poem of English romantic lyricism, Wordsworth's Daffodils - a poem whose first line alone is shorthand for Poetry Itself, at least in this country. But there is also Robert Herrick's beautiful lyric,To Daffodils - so spare yet so expressive, so simple yet brilliantly wrought. The second stanza, in particular, is quite wonderful...

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

         You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

         Has not attain'd his noon.

                        Stay, stay,

                Until the hasting day

                        Has run

                But to the even-song;

And, having pray'd together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

         We have as short a spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay,

         As you, or anything.

                        We die

                As your hours do, and dry

                        Away,

                Like to the summer's rain;

Or as the pearls of morning's dew,

Ne'er to be found again.