To Daffodils
By Robert Herrick 1591–1674
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.
Happy Easter! May it be filled with blooms of ALL kinds!
I see your daffodils and raise them with cherry blossoms, “since to look at things is bloom / fifty springs are little room”
A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
BY A. E. HOUSMAN
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
It’s a toss up as to whether sweet peas or daffodils are my favorite flowers. But if I have to die like nature, I’d prefer to be some kind of maple tree; not that it seems that I have any say in that.