How do you like this crazy mixed up weather?  Springtime in Indiana is manic.  On Friday, I picked daffodils and brought some inside.  Saturday afternoon, it snowed and the blossoms lowered  their little heads against the cold.   Come  Sunday morning, the sun was shining, and the daffodils were  dancing in the breeze.  The miracle of daffodils brings hope as we enter the 2nd year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Daffodils are a special gift of nature.  Just  when we’ve gotten tired of the barren landscape of winter, the friendly little flowers appear  on a warm spring day..  Yes, it may get cold again, it may even snow again, but they will tough it out, and come back to remind us that better days are coming.

Two famous poets wrote about daffodils, two centuries apart. The first , I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, was written in 1804 by William Wordsworth

I wandered 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 stretched 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 shew 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.

Two centuries later, in 1980,  Gillian Clark wrote Miracle on St. David’s Day  after reading poetry to patients in a mental hospital. . It’s based on a true story.  Clark was the National Poet of Wales until 2016.

Fair warning: This could bring tears to your eyes

Miracle On St David’s Day

An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed
with daffodils. The sun treads the path
among cedars and enormous oaks.
It might be a country house, guests strolling,
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.

I am reading poetry to the insane.
An old woman, interrupting, offers
as many buckets of coal as I need.
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic

on a good day, they tell me later.
In a cage of first March sun a woman
sits not listening, not feeling.
In her neat clothes the woman is absent.
A big, mild man is tenderly led

to his chair. He has never spoken.
His labourer’s hands on his knees, he rocks
gently to the rhythms of the poems.
I read to their presences, absences,
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.

He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’.

The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect.
Outside the daffodils are still as wax,
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables
unspoken, their creams and yellows still.

Forty years ago, in a Valleys school,
the class recited poetry by rote.
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.

When he’s done, before the applause, we observe
the flowers’ silence. A thrush sings
and the daffodils are flame.

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Daffodils thrill us, inspire us, and give us hope.   Happy spring!