er gives us the true etymology of the word in the last line.
Ben Jonson, to confirm it, writes with more force than elegance,
"Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows;"
that is, cowslips; a "disentanglement of compounds,"--Leigh Hunt
says, in the style of the parodists:
"Puddings of the plum
And fingers of the lady."
The poets abound in allusions to the daisy. It serves both for
a moral and for an epithet. The morality is adduced more by
our later poets, who have written whole poems in its honor. The
earlier poets content themselves generally with the daisy
in description, and leave the daisy in ethics to such a
philosophico-poetical Titan as Wordsworth. Douglas (1471), in his
description of the month of May, writes:
"The dasy did on crede (unbraid) hir crownet smale."
And Lyndesay (1496), in the prologue to his "Dreme," describes
June
"Weill bordowrit with dasyis of delyte."
The eccentric Skelton, who wrote about the close of the 15th
century, in a sonnet, says:
"Your colowre
Is lyke the daisy flowre
After the April showre."
Thomas Westwood, in an agreeable little madrigal, pictures the
daisies:
"All their white and pinky faces
Starring over the green places."
Thomas Nash (1592), in another of similar quality, exclaims:
"The fields breathe sweet,
The daisies kiss our feet."
Suckling, in his famous "Wedding," in his description of the
bride, confesses:
"Her cheeks so rare a white was on
No daisy makes comparison."
Spenser, in his "Prothalamion," alludes to
"The little dazie that at evening closes."
George Wither speaks of the power of his imagination:
"By a daisy, whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man."
Poor Chatterton, in his "Tragedy of Ella," refers to the daisy in
the line:
"In daiseyed mantells is the mountayne dyghte."
Hervey, in his "May," describes
"The daisy singing in the grass
As thro' the cloud the star."
And Hood, in his fanciful "Midsummer Fairies," sings of
"Daisy stars whose firmament is green."
Burns, whose "Ode to a Mountain Daisy" is so universally admired,
gives, besides, a few brief notices of the daisy:
"The lowly daisy sweetly blows--"
"The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air."
Tennyson has made the daisy a subject of one of his most
unsatisfactory poems
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