The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872

To seen this floure agenst the Sunne sprede."

To see it early in the morn, the poet continues:

"That blissfull sight softeneth all my sorow,
So glad am I, whan that I have presence
Of it, to done it all reverence
As she that is of all floures the floure."

Chaucer says that to him it is ever fresh, that he will cherish it till his heart dies; and then he describes himself resting on the grass, gazing on the daisy:

"Adowne full softly I gan to sink,
And leaning on my elbow and my side,
The long day I shope me for to abide,
For nothing els, and I shall nat lie,
But for to looke upon the daisie,
That well by reason men it call may
The daisie, or els the eye of day."

Chaucer gives us the true etymology of the word in the last line. Ben Jonson, to confirm it, writes with more force than elegance,

"Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows;"

that is, cowslips; a "disentanglement of compounds,"—Leigh Hunt says, in the style of the parodists:

"Puddings of the plum
And fingers of the lady."

The poets abound in allusions to the daisy. It serves both for a moral and for an epithet. The morality is adduced more by our later poets, who have written whole poems in its honor. The earlier poets content themselves generally with the daisy in description, and leave the daisy in ethics to such a philosophico-poetical Titan as Wordsworth. Douglas (1471), in his description of the month of May, writes:

"The dasy did on crede (unbraid) hir crownet smale."

And Lyndesay (1496), in the prologue to his "Dreme," describes June

"Weill bordowrit with dasyis of delyte."

The eccentric Skelton, who wrote about the close of the 15th century, in a sonnet, says:

"Your colowre
Is lyke the daisy flowre
After the April showre."

Thomas Westwood, in an agreeable little madrigal, pictures the daisies:

"All their white and pinky faces
Starring over the green places."

Thomas Nash (1592), in another of similar quality, exclaims:

"The fields breathe sweet,
The daisies kiss our feet."

Suckling, in his famous "Wedding," in his description of the bride, confesses:

"Her cheeks so rare a white was on
No daisy makes comparison."

Spenser, in his "Prothalamion," alludes to

"The little dazie that at evening closes."

George Wither speaks of the power of his imagination:

"By a daisy, whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man."

Poor Chatterton, in his "Tragedy of Ella," refers to the daisy in the line:

"In daiseyed mantells is the mountayne dyghte."

Hervey, in his "May," describes

"The daisy singing in the grass
As thro' the cloud the star."

And Hood, in his fanciful "Midsummer Fairies," sings of

"Daisy stars whose firmament is green."

Burns, whose "Ode to a Mountain Daisy" is so universally admired, gives, besides, a few brief notices of the daisy:

"The lowly daisy sweetly blows—"
"The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air."

Tennyson has made the daisy a subject of one of his most unsatisfactory poems. In "Maud," he writes:

"Her feet have touched the meadows
And left the daisies rosy."

To Wordsworth, the poet of nature, the daisy seems perfectly intelligible. Scattered throughout the lowly places, with meekness it seems to shed beauty over its surroundings, and compensate for gaudy vesture by cheerful contentment. Wordsworth calls the daisy "the poet's darling," "a nun demure," "a little Cyclops," "an unassuming commonplace of nature," and sums up its excellences in a verse which may fitly conclude our attempt to pluck a bouquet of fresh daisies from the poets:

"Sweet flower! for by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast;
Sweet silent creature!
That breath'st with me in sun and air,