After a long and arduous winter filled with snow and subzero temps, the prospect of spring coming soon seems impossible. It feels as if no green will ever grow through the heavy snow, no new life will ever thrive in this frozen tundra again … and yet it will, I have to remind myself. We know Spring will come. It always does. And in my mind, Spring never looks more glorious than after a long, hard winter.

One of the reasons I began taking photographs fifteen years ago, with a film-fed, Target-bought SLR camera, was so that I could have photographs from the garden during the long winter. I love flowers — the brighter and more vibrant, the better.

This year, as we await Spring’s arrival, we have daffodils here in photographs and William Wordsworth’s poetry — the best way I know to add color to an otherwise white landscape. Because Spring is, if we squint hard enough, just around the corner.

Daffodils

 

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

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.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

― William Wordsworth, I Wander’d Lonely as a Cloud, Public domain