Last night’s Night Waves on Radio 3 included an intriguing discussion of a new book, Flowers of the Renaissance by Celia Fisher.
There is much more in the language of flowers than just ‘rosemary for remembrance’ - for example lots of visual puns & word play.
I learned that ‘narcissus’ has the same base word as ‘narcotic’ (though the OED says that this opinion, which was held by Pliny & Plutarch, is not now generally accepted), so a daffodil may not always have been the innocent harbinger of spring that we imagine it to be.
Which led me to the thought that Wordsworth's wandering lonely as a cloud with visions of hosts of golden daffodils, Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, may have been just as much a drug-fuelled dream as Coleridge’s Xanadu. Lucy in the Sky with diamonds may well have been based on a simple child’s painting from school, but who could blame us for thinking otherwise?
And who knows what beautiful stories our new Duchess may have been tellling us on her wedding day, if only we had the key.
