daffodils, burning
COMMENTARY
I’ve lived in London for about 40 years, and in my present house for over 30. I’m a thoroughly urban being but my environment is full of more-than-human life from the sparrows on my balcony via the neighbourhood cats, dogs, and foxes, the ubiquitous rats, the huge London planes in the park, to the tidal Thames nearby. There is no need to leave town to engage with nature. What London does not have is large-scale natural spectacle – no mountains, forests, pastureland. Even the rivers are underground or hemmed in by conduits and embankments (for now). There are, however, many parks and gardens and tree-lined roads, oases in the urban sprawl. But it’s all small scale, portrait or still-life rather than landscape, and that’s where the daffodils come in.
I wrote ‘daffodils, burning‘ in response to Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud‘, which projects joy onto to the flowers. The poem annoys me, but made me realise how little I knew about daffodils. I didn’t know that they are native to the Iberian peninsula or that the Romans brought them to Britain, and while I have a strong sensory memory of my sticky irritated fingers holding freshly-cut blooms, I didn’t know why. But they seem everywhere in spring and my memory juxtaposed the daffodils in my local park with the withered roses on a nearby wall, something I wouldn’t have seen 20 years ago, before climate change extended autumn and spring into winter. Spring and graveyards suggested resurrection, and I wondered what it would be like to be a bulb spending most of the year in some analogue of sleep, sustained by the products of spring photosynthesis, and burning predatory mouths with sap full of tiny crystal blades.
You will find a Google word doc accessible version of this feature here.
With thanks to the Poetry School.
Barbara Kennedy was born in Hartlepool in 1959. As an adult, they worked in the City of London and elsewhere but retired early due to illness and angst. This gave them the opportunity to study psychology and shamanism, and develop their passion for poetry. Barbara lives in south-east London a short walk from the Thames with their husband and cats.
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