Daffodils and Celandines with William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was born on April 7th, the right time of year for someone who wrote so beautifully about daffodils!

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance...

Just down the road from Shrewsbury, where I live, is a tiny but beautiful village called Atcham, where I took a shot of these lovely, cheerful flowers that are still shouting their yellow hoorays everywhere in the UK at the moment…

Wordsworth also wrote about a less well-known wild flower, that is one of the first to bloom – the lesser celandine:

There is a Flower, the Lesser Celandine,
That shrinks, like many more, from cold and rain;
And, the first moment that the sun may shine,
Bright as the sun himself, ’tis out again!

Here are some beautiful bright celandines, from a walk near Hanwood, Shropshire:

There is such a beautiful world around us, and there is something amazingly cheerful in these bright yellows – I don’t know why!

Perhaps it reminds me of the brightness and yellowness of the sun, our source of light and heat, without which neither daffodils, celandines nor humans could live?

The wild flowers seem to shout out, with Wordsworth – “Life Is For Good!”

The Blossoming of Human Life

Blossom is everywhere in Shropshire at the moment.

I have been reading a book called Wayfaring by Margaret Silf, and some of her words got me thinking about how human life is a kind of blossoming:

“Each human life reflects the same pattern as the universe itself – beginning from a single point, infinitesimally small, and expanding outwards, constantly revealing more and more of its immeasurable potential”
Wayfaring, p.1

There has been the deadness of winter, and now life starts again in the world of trees, bushes and wild flowers. The warmth and light of our distant star, the sun, miraculously calls forth a response from life here on earth.

And we also come from nothing. We depend on the love of others, not a distant star, and yet we also long for “light” of a different kind – the light of hope, the light of relationships, the light of love.

Enjoy the blossoming of human life!