Fertilizing Daffodils - But in the Meantime....

Fertilizing Daffodils
But in the Meantime....

I have mentioned many times my having to memorize prose and poetry while I attended high school a half century ago. It was not something that I ever enjoyed for even a nanosecond. I saw no value in being able to recite words written many years before.

After graduating from high school, I left behind the burdensomeness of memorization and went off to college and graduate school. After getting my masters, I traveled to Scotland and went to New College at the University of Edinburgh for a year. That was the beginning of my reversal regarding memorizing lines of prose and poetry.

In the early spring, I drove down to the Lake District to explore that part of the UK. While walking around in that beautiful part of northwest England, I came upon a hill and climbed to the top to discover a huge field of daffodils lying before me.

This is what the field looked like.

Arranged before me were several acres of daffodils. As my mind swirled around those yellow dancing daffodils, all that I could utter were small segments of what I had memorized years before in my high school English class. This scene must have been what Wordsworth had seen a century and a half before me.

Wordsworth apparently had been walking in the same area of the Lake District with his sister and happened upon a sea of daffodils. So overwhelmed by the beauty, he wrote the poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, which we simply call Daffodils. This was his first draft of that poem.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

How I was able to recall a few lines of that poem, I cannot explain that, especially since I did not enjoy memorizing any of the lines while in high school. Nevertheless, in every home in which I have lived since my return from Edinburgh, I have planted daffodil bulbs...thousands of them.

I am planting some of them on Wolverton Mountain years ago. At least, my part of the world is lovelier than it could have been due to what Wordsworth wrote,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

While I am happy that I beautified the world a bit, another professor, Mr. Keating, reminded his class that there is more to life then beautiful daffodils.

Professor Keating looked back decades to previous classes of that school. He compared his class today to classes of years gone by.

They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? Carpe - - hear it? Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.

Over the years, I have often used Dead Poets Society in my teaching. I loved Keating's drive and desire to help the next generation of students. He wanted them to excel. Be all you can be. His clarion call was not merely to vegetate. Act. Keating did not want any of his students to live lives lacking luster or drive. Carpe diem was his message to his students. Seize the day, and do something to enrich the world in which they lived.

Then Keating warns his class and all of us that we are not immortal. Someday, we will die. Therefore, live now. Do something of value, because some day we all will be fertilizing daffodils. Having danced with death a couple of times, I am very aware of my mortality. Near-death experiences are beneficial. Steve Jobs said, "...death is very likely the single best invention of life." Pancreatic cancer taught Jobs that critical lesson of life.

Interesting, Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon also had pancreatic cancer. Listen to his Last Lecture. Pausch is dying of cancer and is more alive than most of his listeners. Death is a great instructor about life...if we Carpe Diem.

Listen to Wordsworth's poem about the golden daffodils.

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.