“Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste so soon.”
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Robert Herrick
“To Daffodils”
1648
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“In the famous poem of which these are the opening lines, Robert Herrick, a 17th-century English cavalier poet, refers to the perennial plant of Amaryllidaceae family as a metaphor for transience. At the start of the second and last stanza, the poet observes:
‘We have shot time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring.’
Spring here represents youth, which comes and goes all too quickly, like the daffodils. The sentiment may not be original, but it here elegantly expressed.
And if we were to deprecate poems about death – on the grounds that we all know that we are going to die, and there’s nothing profound in such thoughts – we would banish some of the most popular and widely quoted works in the whole of world literature.
Herrick often returns to this theme, perhaps most famously in the following stanza from ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’:
‘Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying,
And this some flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying’ (TH)
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