Poetry: To Daffodils

Title and Context
Robert Herrick's short lyric "To Daffodils," first published in 1648 in the Hesperides collection, is often known by its opening address, "Fair daffodils, we weep to see." Composed during the era of English Renaissance lyric poetry, the poem reflects Herrick's place among the cavalier and pastoral traditions, where close attention to nature often serves inward, moral, or philosophical ends. Its brevity and clarity helped make it one of Herrick's most frequently anthologized pieces.

Summary
The speaker observes a cluster of daffodils and laments how quickly they fade, noting that their beauty vanishes well before the day reaches its height. The poem uses the flowers' abbreviated spring life as a visible emblem of a more general condition: earthly things pass with surprising speed. The voice alternates between gentle reproach and a wistful acceptance, urging a pause, imagining a shared ritual of prayers or moments of companionship, and ultimately acknowledging that humans, like the flowers, cannot hold back time.

Structure and Form
Herrick crafts the poem as a compact lyric that balances simplicity with musicality. Short lines and a steady rhyme scheme produce a songlike movement, while repeated words and small refrains generate insistence and urgency. The concision of the form, tight stanzas and economy of detail, mirrors the subject: the speed of decline and the impossibility of prolonging momentary beauty. Meter and cadence encourage a gentle, rhythmic reading that reinforces both the melancholy and the tenderness of the address.

Themes and Imagery
Transience is the central theme, with the daffodils acting as a concrete symbol for youth, beauty, and mortal brevity. Seasonal imagery, sunrise and noon, the quick arrival of day and the advance toward evening, structures the moral of the poem: life moves from freshness to fading in the space of a single cycle. The speaker's plea to the flowers to "stay" highlights the human desire to arrest change, while the poem's acceptance of eventual decay frames mortality as inevitable rather than catastrophic. The pastoral setting softens the meditation on death, making it contemplative rather than despairing.

Tone and Language
Affected by both affection and elegy, the poem's tone is tender, quietly mournful, and lightly admonitory. Herrick personifies the daffodils, addressing them directly and treating them as companions whose disappearance affects human feeling. Plain diction and pastoral vocabulary keep the emotional register intimate rather than grandiloquent. Small stylistic devices, repetition, gentle imperatives, and rhythmic shifts, create the impression of someone speaking to friends about an old truth remembered anew.

Interpretation and Legacy
The poem reads both as an observation of nature and as a moral prompt: to recognize and respond to life's brevity. It sits comfortably within Herrick's larger oeuvre of carpe diem motifs, where fleeting beauty and the promptings of time urge attentiveness to present pleasures and duties. "To Daffodils" has endured because its concentrated image and compact form make a universal sentiment immediate and accessible. Contemporary readers continue to find in its restrained sorrow a clear-eyed consolation: beauty and life are momentary, and that very ephemerality gives them meaning.