United States or Nepal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Fields casually mentioned that he thought "The Dandelion" was the most popularly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.
The goat's-beard, prompt his rise to hail, With broad expanded disk, in veil Close mantling wraps its yellow head, And goes, as peasants say, to bed." The dandelion has been nicknamed the peasant's clock, its flowers opening very early in the morning; while its feathery seed-tufts have long been in requisition as a barometer with children:
You might as well ask him how to know the wild flowers as how to know the lawn pests dandelion, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all, moneywort and the like with which you must reckon wearily by and by because he only mows them in his blindness and lets them flatten to the ground and scatter their seed like an infantry firing-line.
Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way through last year's leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed celandine, yellower than butter; the little violet, hugging the earth for fear of being seen; the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale-faced anemone, earliest to wake and earliest to sleep; the blue bird's-eye in small family groups; the blatant dandelion already a head and shoulders taller than any neighbor.
One tiny lassie placed a dandelion in the small waxen fingers and now stood, abandoned to grief beside the still form that bore the impress of absolute purity. The service over, again and again was the coffin lid waved back by some one longing for another look, and they seemed as if they could not let her go.
My brother, in his reply, pointed out that the common dandelion was hardly a sufficient rarity to warrant its being transplanted. I went out a second time to the Argentine Republic with Patrick Lyon, to whom I have already alluded, in order to place a young relative of his as premium-pupil on an English-owned ranche, or estancia, as it is locally called.
"Well," said McGuiness, "I don't mind lettin' yez have the use of the lot, an' I'll do all I kin, in a quiet way, to help yez along, but there's one thing I want to be afther tellin' yez, an' it is this, that I'm thinkin' there will be the divil to pay whin Mr. Dandelion finds out there's going to be a minstrel entertainment here." "How's that?" inquired Handy, "and who is Mr. Dandelion?"
"Do you mean to tell me!" cried Sir Peter in a quieter voice, "that that little piece of dandelion fluff that baggage that city fellow's half baked, peeled onion of a minx is going to desert her husband? That's what I call it desertion! What does she want to go back to her people for? She must go with him! She must go to Davos! She shall go to Davos! if I have to take her there by the hair!
I glance from it to a sleeping close-capped dandelion, from it to a thistle, from it again to a late bush vetch, and then, willy-nilly, to the accursed elm. My God! What a change. It wasn't like that when I passed it at noon. It was just an ordinary tree then, but now, now and what is that that sinister bundle suspended from one of its curling branches?
Sitting at his window, looking out blindly for help and helpers amid his doubts, seeing the young green of the locust, the yellow of the dandelion, he recalled the names of those anathematized books, which were described as dealing so strangely with nature and with man's place in it. The idea dominated him at last to go immediately and get those books.
Word Of The Day