The Day of the Two Daffodils
‘The daffodils are fine this year,’ I said;
‘O yes, but see my crocuses,’ said she.
And so we entered in and sat at talk
Within a little parlour bowered about
With garden-noises, filled with garden scent,
As some sweet sea-shell rings with pearly chimes
And sighs out fragrance of its mother’s breast.
We sat at talk, and all the afternoon
Whispered about in changing silences
Of flush and sudden light and gathering shade,
As though some Maestro drew out organ stops
Somewhere in heaven. As two within a boat
On the wide sea we sat at talk, the hours
Lapping unheeded round us as the waves.
And as such two will ofttimes pause in speech,
Gaze at high heaven and draw deep to their hearts
The infinite azure, then meet eyes again
And flash it to each other; without words
First, and then with voice trembling as trumpets
Tremble with fierce breath, voice cadenced too
As deep as the deep sea, Aeolian voice,
Voice of star-spaces, and the pine-wood’s voice
In dewy mornings, Life’s own awful voice:
So did We talk, gazing with God’s own eyes
Into Life’s deeps-ah, how they throbbed with stars!
And were we not ourselves like pulsing suns
Who, once an aeon met within the void,
So fiery close, forget how far away
Each orbit sweeps, and dream a little space
Of fiery wedding. So our hearts made answering
Lightnings all that afternoon through purple mists
Of riddled speech; and when at last the sun,
Our sentinel, made sign beneath the trees
Of coming night, and we arose and passed
Across the threshold to the flowers again,
We knew a presence walking in the grove,
And a voice speaking through the evening’s cool
Unknown before: though Love had wrought no wrong,
His rune was spoken, and another rhyme
Writ in his poem by the master Life.
‘Pray, pluck me some,’ I said. She brought me two,
For daffodils were very fine that year,-
O very fine, but daffodils no more.
