Daffodils - and that poem

If I ever had to draw up a list of my favourite flowers I suppose daffodils would be near the top of it. I love them all, from the dainty miniatures to the showy doubles. They’re easy to grow and always look so cheerful, especially the first ones that suddenly appear on a cold, wet, or even snowy day when you’re thinking winter is never going to end. Not only are they capable of blooming in the changeable season we call the British spring, but they seem to positively revel in the worst of the March winds and April showers. At the other extreme, they can also shrug off an Easter heatwave like the one we’ve just experienced.

​Of course most of the daffs in today’s gardens, parks and roadside verges are cultivated varieties, but there are still wild ones to be enjoyed if you know where to look. You’ll find a few suggestions by clicking here.

And talking of wild daffodils – is there anyone reading this who doesn’t know that famous poem about them? The one inspired by a ramble in the English Lake District? I’ve heard it’s greatly admired by many people, and I’m sure it is a perfectly good poem, but hearing just the first line of it makes me want to clamp my hands over my ears and scream ‘Noooooo!’

Let me explain ...

​In the Grammar School for Girls that was old-fashioned even in those far off days, I was ‘taught’ poetry by committing random chunks of it to memory. 
 
Each week, my class was given a poem to learn. The following week, to prove we’d done our homework, we had to write the poem in our English exercise books. So far, so good. At that age I was capable of memorising all sorts of information: lists of French verbs, chemical symbols, the dates of kings and queens … Compared with some of those, learning a poem was fairly easy, especially if it rhymed.
 
The difficult part wasn’t learning the words, but all those other tricky bits our teacher insisted were important. When she marked the written poems she deducted points for incorrect spellings, missing commas, a lower case letter where the poet had used a capital, and so on.
 
Well, if that’s what she wanted there was only one way to please her.
 
It was springtime so what more appropriate poem could she set for us than that daffodil one by William Wordsworth? 
 
I set to work and learned:

capital I wandered lonely as a cloud new line capital T that floats on high o apostrophe e r vales and hills comma new line capital W when all at once I saw a crowd comma new line capital A host comma of golden daffodils semi-colon new line capital B beside the lake comma beneath the trees comma new line capital F fluttering and dancing in the breeze full stop

Yes, I was awarded top marks for that one, and can still recite it today, but the poetry? What poetry? I didn’t start to discover that until many years later. 
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​Have you ever learned poetry by heart? Was it a pleasure, or a pain?