Daisies in the Inferno –
When reading Canto 2 of ‘Hell – Dante’s Divine Trilogy Part One Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse by Alasdair Gray’, these lines ‘leapt of the page’ –
‘Why all this cowardice? Have you no pride?
As daisies folding petals up at night,
heavy with frozen dew, lean to the ground
until the rising sun’s warm gift of light
thaws and unbends and opens them, I found
at last my crippled courage stand upright.
Like one set free I cried, ‘Let us go on!”
Other translations by HF Carey, DL Sayers and more recently Robin Kirkpatrick merely refer to flowers or florets, but Alasdair Gray was right to name the daisies and give credit to those insignificant flowers so often dismissed as weeds. It’s a lovely image in amongst the horrors of hell.
We can learn from these tiny plants, just as we can learn from the willow that bends in the wind and survives when the ash and oak may be losing branches.
The following poem was written a few years ago when hundreds of these remarkable plants survived to raise their heads in our garden each morning.
Bellis Perennis
‘Low growing plant…
Leaves spoon shaped,
weakly toothed and stalked.
Growing in a basal rosette
Common in garden lawns.’
A thousand eyes – daisies, day’s eyes
waiting to greet me.
Memories of childhood
and
endless
daisy
chains
made
without
a thought
to the
limp,
forgotten
necklaces
left,
wilting
in the sun,
losing life.
My daisies;
survivors
of slugs and snails,
lift their morning
faces to the sun and
retire modestly
behind pink night caps
as night returns.
‘Growing in a basal rosette
Common in garden lawns.’
Life's a Beach 