 |
As one of the
best known of spring flowers, daffodils hardly need much introduction.
Comprising the genus Narcissus, the
fifty or so types of flowering bulbs belong to the family Amaryllidacea (Hogan 914). Colors range from bright yellow to
white, with more recent varieties including shades of pink and green. While all
have a corona or central cup surrounded by six petals, narcissi propagate and
hybridize so freely that the many species and thousands of cultivars are usually
classified by flower shape (trumpet, large-cup, small-cup, double, split-corona
etc.) The classic European, Wordsworthian species is N. psuedonarcissus: bright yellow, with a prominent trumpet, slightly
drooping head, and partially twisted leaves (Hogan 914)
Daffodils have
been around for a long time. Of course
the myth of the youth who became so enchanted with his own self-image that he
fell into a pool and drowned is well-known, but the name Narcissus probably
preceded the myth; Pliny and Virgil thought it derived from the Greek word narke and referred to the narcotic
effect of their sweet spell (Ward
114). The flowers also appear in Homer’s
Hymn to Demeter, mixed with roses,
crocuses, violets, and iris in the distracting meadow where Persephone is kidnapped
(Heilmeyer 62). Such affiliations with the underworld go back to even earlier
Egyptian burial practices in which the skins of daffodil bulbs were placed over
the eyes of mummies and wreaths of the flowers were placed around theirs necks
(Helimeyer 62).
More recent,
British folklore and allusions to daffodils tend to stress their beauty and
role as heralds of spring. Watts records a British superstition that the “the
first daffodil is a lucky one,” presaging “more gold than silver” for the
coming year (97). Shakespeare mentions daffodils twice in his late romance The Winter’s Tale (Quealy 66). Autolycus
sings that “when daffodils begin to peer. . .o’er the dale/ Why then comes in
the sweet o’ the year” (Act IV, sc iii); later Perdita, costumed as Flora, alludes
to Persephone’s capture by Hades, calling for all the spring flowers that the
goddess dropped in fear so she can weave them into a wreath.
Among the flowers she mentions are violets, primroses and “Daffodils,/That come
before the swallow dares, and take/The winds of March with beauty.” Florizel is
worried that the wreath she crafts is for a corpse, but she assures him that if
he is to be buried, it will be in her arms (Act IV, sc iv). Of course, the best
known daffodils in British literature belong to Wordsworth: “A host, of golden
daffodils. . . Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” And, in his youthful Endymion, Keats lists daffodils as one
of the “things of beauty” that are a joy forever: “such are daffodils/ with the green world
they live in.”
Woolf’s use of
daffodils only occasionally evokes their more mournful heritage as symbols of
either death or vanity and instead centers on their vernal beauty. For the most part the forty-two daffodils she
mentions are accessories of spring, given as gifts, presented, with an
occasional nod to Shakespeare, as contrasts in the vivid tapestry of spring
color.
Virginia’s
childhood was casually scattered with daffodils. When she was fifteen, she and
Nessa went to a department store in nearby Kensington High Street to buy
violets for a child having her third birthday.
When no violets were available, they purchased daffodils instead (PA
51). In 1913, daffodils were a feature of her new country abode, Asheham. She counts twenty as features of the new
garden along with crocuses, and later praises Vanessa for all her work planting
daffodils, tulips and “flocks” (L2 20, 64).
In April of 1916, she writes from Hogarth House in Richmond to thank her
sister, this time for “your parcel of daffodils,” sent presumably from
Charleston where Virginia imagines them growing “all about your lake, with blue
flowers” (L2 87).
This painterly
contrast of yellow daffodils with blue or purple blooms or the blue of the sky
becomes something of a pattern in Woolf’s references to the flower. A 1918
short story, “The Evening Party” pairs daffodils with bluebells in a list of
sensory delights: “I look at my hand upon the window sill and think what
pleasure I’ve had in it, how it’s touched silk and pottery and hot walls, laid
itself flat upon wet grass or sun-baked, let the Atlantic spurt through its
fingers, snapped blue bells and daffodils, plucked ripe plums” (CSF 99). In Night
and Day, Katherine imagines her ideal home: “she thought of a cottage
garden, with the flash of yellow daffodils against blue water” (ND 218). Woolf’s
list of the delights of her country cottage, Monk’s House, in an April 1922
letter to her sister Vanessa echoes this description: “At moments it is
divinely lovely here-- hot, birds, daffodils, blue sky” (L2 523). The color
contrast continues to appear in three published works of the later twenties and
early thirties. In To the Lighthouse, the horticultural chaos of “Time Passes”
includes garden urns “casually filled with wind-blown plants” including violets
and daffodils (TTL 138). In A Room of
One’s Own, the magically imagined spring in the Fernham College garden
features “daffodils and bluebells” “sprinkled and carelessly flung” in the long
grass (AROO 17). A more ordered, urban
composition is presented in the floral commerce of the 1932 essay “Oxford
Street Tide” where “The first spring day brings out barrows frilled with
tulips, violets, daffodils in brilliant layers” (E5 284).
A few
of Woolf’s daffodils do have mournful associations. In April of 1918, Woolf
records in her Asheham diary that she had just been reading Wordsworth’s poem
“Lines Written in Early Spring,” which contrasts the pleasurable beauty of
nature with sad thoughts of “what man has made of man” (D1 130). As if the reference to Wordsworth was a
metonymic trigger, she then mentions, “The daffodils were out & the guns I
suppose could be heard from the downs” (D1 130). A year and a half later,
daffodils appear as tokens of grief in the short story “An Unwritten Novel” as
Minnie Marsh’s faithful service to her dying mother includes spending “All her
savings on the tombstones-- wreaths under glass--daffodils in jars” (CSF 115).
In 1922, at the end of a long bout with influenza, Woolf produces a review,
written in the form of a letter composed from bed, describing the appurtenances
of an “English sick-room in February in London —the thermometer, the medicine
glass, the bunch of insipid grapes, the six daffodils, and daylight drawing
further and further its strip of elongated grey” (E6 391). For the next sixteen years, most of Woolf’s
daffodils are happy harbingers of spring, but in March of 1938, the death of
her nephew in Spain casts a shade of regret over her observations: “And it was
like June--& so remains--bland sunny blue; with the thought of Julian dead,
somehow not pointless; but I keep thinking why is he not here to see the daffodils”
(D5 131).
Some of
Woolf’s references to daffodils refer to literary sources. Her first public citation of the flower
occurs in a very early, 1908, review of “Some Poetical Plays” by Yeats and
others in which she quotes a mythopoetic passage from The Virgin Goddess: A Tragedy by Rudolf Besier about Artemis “Parting with silver feet the daffodils/ That
fringed his highland stream,” (E6 353). In Night
and Day (1919), Mrs. Hilbery (a unifying goddess figure whom Jane Marcus
reminds us is called “the magician” [Bells 25]) searches for a passage about
spring that recalls Endymion: “it’s
the daffodils; it’s the green fields” (ND 307). Later, embarked on her quest to
stand at Shakepeare’s grave, she passes a violet seller and reminds herself to
send her husband “the first daffodil she saw” (ND 427). When she returns from
her pilgrimage to sort out the misunderstandings between lovers and her
husband’s attempt to block romance in order to save civilization as he knows it,
her arms are full of “yellow flowers” and “palm-buds” which she drops “upon the
floor, with a gesture that seemed to indicate and act of dedication,”
associating daffodils with the rebirth rituals of Palm Sunday and Easter (ND
479).
Literary daffodils associated with a creative woman
appear again in Woolf’s 1929 essay on Dorothy Words worth, where she describes
the intertwined minds of brother and sister: “they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the
daffodils or the sleeping city” (E5 11). A counter-example shows up in Woolf’s
diary entry on D.H. Lawrence in October of 1932 where, frustrated with Lawrence’s
preaching, she quotes Perdita’s line about “daffodils that come before the
swallow dares” as an example of a sentence that is beautiful in and of itself
(D4 126). A rather ironic note to Vita requesting a copy of Vita’s Collected Poems a year later seems to
recall Besier’s image of Artemis as Woolf suggests that Vita revert to being a
hunting dog and protests the end of their friendship, “what was once a grove of
flowering trees, and nymphs walking among them through the daffodils” (L5 251).
These literary and creative contexts occasionally allow daffodils to
assume a more complex metaphorical function as emblems of artistic
achievement. In an early review of “The
Letters of Henry James” (1920), Woolf compares writing books to the blooming of
the flowers: “But so far as
actual statement goes the books might have sprung as silently and spontaneously
as daffodils in spring”(E3 198).
Perhaps her most vibrant evocation of daffodils occurs in A Room of One’s Own where the bright
yellow flowers become emblems of the flash of consciousness that is her
epistemological goal in life: “What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be
something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now
in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun” (AROO
108). In her “Letter to a Young Poet,” published three years later (1932),
Woolf again uses daffodils as an example of the highest artistic synthesis: “All
you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and
shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until
the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all
these separate fragments (E5 306).
All
these threads of connotation weave the tapestry behind Woolf’s last citations
of daffodils, a return to the floral inventories of her childhood Springs. In March and April of 1940, she makes three
diary entries noting the progress of the daffodils, apparently in an effort to cite
cheerful flashes of natural beauty. Each deposition, however, is slightly
undercut by foreshadows of a coming darkness. On Easter Sunday, March 24 she
records the promise of bloom, “And its refreshing & rejuvenating to see the
gold thick clumps of crocuses & the
unopened green daffodils, & to hear my
Asheham rooks dropping their husky caws through the gummy air” (D5 274). Two
weeks later, the flowers are in full bloom as she laments her losses at bowls but
contemplates writing a new article: “And its a keen spring day; infinitely [?]
lit & tinted & cold & soft: all the groups of daffodils yellow
along the bank; lost my 3 games, & want nothing but sleep. Still, other
ideas prick; & Watkins offers £400 (about) for an essay on a character” (D5
278). A week later the bright flowers
are juxtaposed to intimations of war: “I must make this record, for in fact it
gives the old odd stretch to the back curtain of the mind. A fine spring day in
front; daffodils luminous groups along the terrace. Aeroplanes overhead. Mine
fields laid, apparently to let us land our army” (D5 279).
A last mention of daffodils in May provides a mysteriously shaded coda to these observations of a Persephone about to be kidnapped. In an entry which deteriorates into a kind of list, “torn scraps in a wastepaper basket,” Woolf cites “Clive’s night: the police; & Mary’s visit; the Duke of Devonshire & his midnight daffodils; Clive’s unshaven cheeks; Desmond next day” (D5 282). “Midnight daffodils” presaging a nocturne on reality’s sunny day.
A last mention of daffodils in May provides a mysteriously shaded coda to these observations of a Persephone about to be kidnapped. In an entry which deteriorates into a kind of list, “torn scraps in a wastepaper basket,” Woolf cites “Clive’s night: the police; & Mary’s visit; the Duke of Devonshire & his midnight daffodils; Clive’s unshaven cheeks; Desmond next day” (D5 282). “Midnight daffodils” presaging a nocturne on reality’s sunny day.
No comments:
Post a Comment