Daffodil Fear

In nature, I often have a feeling that is disconcerting, foreign, alien. Perhaps the most powerful feeling is longing – nay, great sadness. In the summer time, it increases and I call these moments summertime blues.

It increases in the summer because I am out in fields more often.

From the field I get a powerful, impressive, sensory, raw experience of the horizon – with insects, and birds, and vegetation, a setting sun – and then stillness.

Emily Dickinson said this:

I dared not meet the daffodils,
For fear their yellow gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own.

Who would have thought that there could be a Fear of Daffodils?

Being in nature is healing.

Artists have their own way of describing experience. We all need to try hard to find new words, or new steps, or new moves to break frame and move with change.

J.F. Martel starts an essay comparing a sunflower experience via the scientific format, with a sunflower experience via a Van Gogh painting. Everything has an experiential and a descriptive dimension. Everything that can be experienced can be described.

The ‘fear of daffodil’ feeling is described by Martel as nature intruding as a pre-culture unmediated human experience.

Rilke in the First Elegy says beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.

Here is how Emily Dickinson tells it – and it starts with dread:

I dreaded that first robin so,
But he is mastered now,
And I’m accustomed to him grown,
He hurts a little, though.

I thought if I could only live
Till that first shout got by,
Not all pianos in the woods
Had power to mangle me.

I dared not meet the daffodils,
For fear their yellow gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own.

I wished the grass would hurry,
So when ‘t was time to see,
He ‘d be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch to look at me.

I could not bear the bees should come,
I wished they ‘d stay away
In those dim countries where they go:
What word had they for me?

They ‘re here, though; not a creature failed,
No blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me,
The Queen of Calvary.

Each one salutes me as he goes,
And I my childish plumes
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgment
Of their unthinking drums.

See the other poems of Emily Dickinson