Sunday, March 23, 2008

daffodils, hollow loaf, snow flakes

Following the discussion inspired by Lucy Kempton's daffodil montage, I have been thinking about the poem and the flowers that inspired it. Tall Girl says by way of comment that the consensus of her writers' group is that you can't put a daffodil in a poem at all nowadays. I know what they mean but all the same I say to myself:
Bloody daffodils
Buds probe the air, hungry as birds beaks,
Or poised, the shape of fish, in green shadow,
To shoot after prey in a brazen flash;
Trumpets that gape, bold, frilled with snarls,
That Satchmo himself might learn to blow;
Mad rhythms of dancing, empty heads;
The rumble and tap of their sequestered feet
Underground, where they, from sand and rock,
Draw strength to scream like Dionysus' girls,
In this violent, unstoppable, cruel time.

A loaf is left too long to prove. The baked loaf looks alright, but reveals a gaping hollow under the crust when the first slice is taken, like the empty loft of a house.

For a few minutes big snow flakes fall, but not for long. I go to the front door to photograph them falling against the hedge and bay tree. But they melt away on contact with the ground. "Où sont les neiges d'antan!"

4 comments:

tristan said...

poor old/young villon

his poem somehow seems rarther negative about the future ...

... and now that it is here, we only have to look around to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of beauty

happy easter

Unknown said...

He lived in hard times and had a rough, hard life. Hope you had a good time in Spain.

Lucas said...

I like the way the daffodil poem starts with images of them before the come out, "the shape of fish in green shadow" and moves to "Satchmo himself...dancing empty heads;" I have always thought that Jazz is either orange or yellow. And how the poem reaches its conclusion in time.
Daffodils are my favourite flowers.

Lucy said...

That's great! They are extraordinarily easy flowers to get anthropomorphic about or whatever the equivalent is of attributing animal qualities to plants, not only the flowers like faces ( pansies' are more so,) but certainly in their movements.

It seems a pity when they are such forceful presences to have to ignore their existence altogether...

(I really like the air gap in the loaf being like an empty roof space too!)