Narcissus army
My Chief Hoosier Correspondent writes (from Indianapolis) to assure me that the daffodils will soon be out in Ontario; and I’m inclined to believe him, because he has been right in the past. Moreover, he keeps daffodils himself, who give him the news of their northern campaigns. The prospect for daffodils, and the other narcissi, may seem grim at the moment, up here where an abnormally warm winter has “transitioned” into a frozen spring. God is not dead, but Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud, may need some attention from the medical authorities.
“What matter if the sun be lost? What matter though the sky be gray?” — asked Bliss Carman, among the mandatory Canadian poets. “There’s word of April on the way. …”
The daffodil army, fluttering and dancing in Wordsworthian drill, and more lovely than any human army, may soon appear on all horizons. The thousands of their cultivars come in Divisions.
Galantaline, extracted from the plentiful bulbs of daffodils, is the cure for Alzheimer’s, it says here. How very useful.
But contractile bulbs are the daffodil key to surviving the Canadian winter. They pull themselves deeper into the soil, after their superficial vegetation has been killed off. But the army re-assembles itself, deep underground — sextuple tepals preparing to unfold in battle array.
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POSTSCRIPTUM. — Today is the solemnity of Saint Joseph of Nazareth, “foster father” of Our Lord, and the patron saint of Canada. This was declared more than three centuries ago by Fr Joseph Le Caron, of the Recollects (gray habit, pointed hood), to the Hurons. He came to Canada with Samuel de Champlain, and as part of his evangelical efforts, wrote the first dictionaries for the Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais languages. St Joseph of Nazareth, for his part, orchestrated the apostolic success of the first Canadian missions. As I was remarking to a priest, after Mass this morning, “At a time when woke activists are setting fire to Catholic chapels across Canada (ninety-six have been enflamed, so far), it is good to remember when they were founded.”