Judith Harris

At the time I wrote this poem, I had been reading both Dickinson and Keats, but remembering Jane Kenyon, who said that if she didn’t choose poetry she would have been a gardener, and that both are about arranging and rearranging things. It is true, especially at dark times, that if I search, I can find something in the natural world that bodies forth what I am feeling at the moment. It is as if nature had all the answers, and we use language to intuit them, but they exist within us, something that both Emerson, and more ambivalently, Dickinson insisted on—nature being a sign of a spiritual fact. And because nature is constantly renewed, I find it to be consoling, and yes, with apologies to Wallace Stevens, conversant with my mind, carrying me out of myself and into the feelings of others. 

In this poem, I wanted to emphasize that the daffodils, like humans, are subject to elements they can’t control, that they can be duped or fooled by climate change or weather anomalies just as humans can. Nature typically teaches us patience.  In this poem, however, I turned that around to console nature, cajole it to protect itself. Poets have long attributed to the garden a numinous quality, a timeless Eden on earth, but in this poem, human understanding concedes its difference. So the outcome is a spontaneous dialogue, an apostrophe, coaxing nature to return to the darkness and wait, the way we do. There are such tough things we have to face as humans; plants are exemplary, constant, but sometimes, we can provide an example to nature, at least in our imaginations.