Daffodils

Finally, they are blooming in my garden! I just have a small patch of them that we plant every year, since they do not persist year after year here.

They are a special flower to me. They were our wedding flowers at our March wedding in Puyallup, home to bulb farms and the Daffodil Festival.

Daffodil was what we called our baby daughter, born in March, before we knew what she would be. She became our Daffy-Jill.

I have always loved this poem. I would like to have crowds of daffodils, but a few will suffice. A see them blooming in lots of gardens now. As a child growing up on a small farm in the Willamette Valley, my sisters and I would pick them as they grew in fence rows and along the road, probably remnants of a once cultivated bulb field. 

 “The Daffodils” or “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch’d in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

              The new header photo was taken in our state's Skagit Valley.