Brendan Hoban: The daffodil symbolises the cycle of life
Western People 19.3.2024
As I write, a sea of daffodils outside the window reminds me that, though yet early enough in the year, Winter has begun to pay its reluctant homage to another Spring. The daffodil is an elegant flower, my favourite, and its life and colour bring a dash of brightness and cheer.
Of course, the daffodil also has associations of Easter. Osterglocken is the German word for Easter. It means Easter Bells, and it fits, giving those elegant precursors of hope and promise a definitively religious context. New life in Spring. New life at Easter. Christ has died! Christ has risen! Christ will come again!
William Wordsworth’s famous poem, ‘Daffodils’ (or ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’) though one of the best-loved poems in English, is not my favourite poem but it was my first. And I used it as background music in my memoir, ‘A Touch of the Heart’, a response to my grieving my mother’s death, particularly its theme that memory and imagination can get us through the most difficult challenges.
In that noted academy on the Glen Road in Ballycastle where I attended primary school – now lying derelict and decrepit – it was the daffodil rather than the message that held the centre of the stage. Later, in St Muredach’s College in Ballina and later again in what’s now called Maynooth University, time and tide brought what the poet calls a ‘pensive mood’ to a more specific reflection on the complexities of life.
But what we’re left with ultimately is the lively music of the words reflecting the daffodils ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance’.
The poem, ‘Daffodils’, represents the truth that reflecting on times past, including on the beauty of nature, can recapture through the power of imagination a host of memories.
It’s almost 40 years since Fr Paddy Clarke, PP, Easkey died and when I see daffodils in full bloom anywhere, almost invariably he comes to mind. Paddy was different. He was, as we say, ‘his own man’ with his own peculiarly idiosyncratic view on everything. This led him to announcing his terminal illness ‘from the pulpit’ in Easkey Church on a Sunday morning.
It was this too that led him just a few months before his death to plant daffodils in a sheltered corner of Enniscrone Golf Club, the place I suspect where he felt most at home on God’s earth. Even though, as an avid golfer, he knew very well that inhospitable and sometimes uninviting landscape, buffeted as it often is by a testy Atlantic breeze, and was familiar with the club’s efforts to secure some kind of vegetation to break the bleakness of the terrain, Paddy had his own theory. He believed that in the right place, with the right soil and the right shelter, the hardy daffodils would at least survive.
So he dug clay in his garden in Easkey, bagged it and transported it in the boot of his car to the far end of the course. In a sheltered hollow, he dug out the sand and replaced it with the clay in which he planted the daffodils. We used to mock him gently about the wilting bunches of greenery that early on seemed a poor reward for his efforts and he would upbraid us for our ignorance and lecture us on the nature of perennials. A few months later he died suddenly.
In later years when we passed the spot where he had planted his daffodils, there nestling in the hollow between what was then the tenth green and the eleventh tee-box were bunches of trumpet daffodils, perfectly formed and bristling with life, the triumph of one man’s hope over a legacy of experience. He would have been well pleased with his work.
Paddy wasn’t what we sometimes call ‘pious’. He didn’t, in the conventional sense, give off what, from the lives of holy people, was sometimes described as ‘an odour of sanctity’. It wasn’t his style.
But did he, I wonder, sense that the witness of the daffodils attested to not just Nature awakening from its Winter snooze but that the ebb and flow of Nature spoke of a fuller and a richer wisdom – ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies . . .’
Without the literal burial of the seed in the damp earth there is no growth. Out of degeneration and decay the spark of life is again ignited. And at the heart of our experience of the apparent contradiction of dying so that we might live is the experience of our faith and the cycle of death and resurrection at the heart of our lives.
As the time soon changes for another year and the rush of the Spring’s work gets underway, once again we participate in a process that consistently mirrors a cycle of death and resurrection. Scientists or botanists may explain it in scientific terms but only recourse to God can help us understand where that thrust for life originates. And it’s to that God and his Son that we will soon turn again to commemorate a death and resurrection that alone makes sense of the cycle of death and resurrection that is part of every life.
It’s why, for the moment, we make do with the witness of the daffodils that in all their beauty and glory are a telling reminder of a different kind of resurrection that we will celebrate again this coming Easter.
I don’t know if Paddy Clarke’s daffodils still pop their heads out of their inhospitable surroundings but even if they don’t there are plenty more that are reminders of a different kind of resurrection that I have no doubt he now enjoys.
Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!
What a lovely story, Brendan of your friend, Paddy Clark. You must go and check if his …”daffodils still pop their heads out of their inhospitable surroundings”.
Like you, Wordsworth’s lovely poem is not my favourite, not even my favourite daffodil poem, in fact.
My favourite daffodil poem is Robert Herrick’s ‘To Daffodils’ which was the first poem I learned in Dungloe High in September 1966, (New Intermediate Certificate Poetry. Patrick J Kennedy B.A., H.D.E.) Eunan O’Donnell’s Dungloe High School, but that’s another story.
For the first term I was a fee paying pupil but then Donagh made that magical stroke of his ministerial pen and changed our lives — and Ireland — forever.
To Daffodils.
Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising sun has not attain’d his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or anything.
We die,
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer’s rain;
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew
Ne’er to be found again.
I know it is not as beautiful as Wordsworth’s lovely poem but I do recite it to the daffodils — or, at least, the first few lines — when I see them start to wither or “dry away” which, sadly, happens all too soon.
Wordsworth maintained that his poem was important as a gateway to understanding his poetry in general. It may have been occasioned by his coming on the flowers, but it’s a poem about the ordering power of the human imagination, its capacity to discover order in life and a human perspective in a universe of great immensity and mystery.
Literary critics of recent decades are utterly deaf and blind to the contemplative depth of Wordsworth’s (best) poetry — they see interested only in its social and political backgrounds.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
‘Shades of the prison house’ must surely have arisen for Wordsworth from the industrial factories, the ‘temples of commerce’ in which children also were worked grimly in his time. He may have ‘romanticised’ e.g. shepherding – but slave labour is still with us, grimly.
Thanks to Paddy and Joe for reminding me. I should commit ‘Intimations of Immortality’ to memory for my soul’s sake – as I did once some passages from ‘Tintern Abbey’.