Following the Daisy Because Love is Sweet - Reflecting Upon Emily Dickinson

Following the Daisy Because Love is Sweet - Reflecting Upon Emily Dickinson

The Daisy follows soft the Sun –

And when his golden walk is done –

Sits shily at his feet –

He – waking – finds the flower there –

Wherefore – Marauder – art thou here?

Because, Sir, love is sweet!

We are the Flower – Thou the Sun!

Forgive us, if as days decline –

We nearer steal to Thee!

Enamored of the parting West –

The peace – the flight – the amethyst –

Night’s possibility!

- Emily Dickinson

Standing here among the damp April grass, I watch the daisies turn their faces toward the sun. They are doing what flowers have always done—following light—but today, because of Emily Dickinson, I cannot see it as mere botany. The small white petals are a kind of courtship. The whole garden is a conversation. The whole garden is a trade. Come, beloved, where are you?

“The Daisy follows soft the Sun,” Emily writes, and the word soft does something unexpected. Does it refer to the daisy, the sun or the following? Let us for an instant think it is the following—the quality of attention, the tenderness of a creature that positions itself not to demand but to be near. This is not pursuit; it is devotion conducted at the proper distance. The daisy waits through the golden arc of the sun’s labor, and when his walk is done, she “Sits shily at his feet.” (I am assuming that's how she spells shyly). The line break suspends her there, in that posture of waiting, of hoping to be noticed without presuming. It suspends me too.

But notice does come. Emily stages a dawn reunion so delicate it reads like a waking dream. Perhaps on rising the sun finds her there, and his question—“Wherefore—Marauder—art thou here?”—is not quite anger. The word marauder is almost playful, a mock-accusation that contains its own forgiveness. A true marauder does not sit shyly; a true marauder does not wait all night at your feet. The daisy’s answer is disarmingly simple: “Because, Sir, love is sweet!” There is no elaborate defense, no philosophy. Just sweetness. Just the irreducible fact of affection.

And then the poem does something breathtaking. It shifts from third person to first, from observation to confession. “We are the Flower—Thou the Sun!” Suddenly I am no longer watching daisies. I am implicated. We are all implicated. The poem has been a prayer disguised as a fable, and now the veil lifts. We are the ones who follow, who steal nearer as the light declines. We are the ones enamored of endings.

This is where Emily becomes unbearable in the best way. The poem could have ended with “love is sweet”—it is complete, it is satisfied. But she pushes further, into the twilight we usually try to avoid. “Forgive us, if as days decline— / We nearer steal to Thee!” The movement toward the beloved is also a movement toward disappearance. The “parting West” is both the sunset and the horizon of mortality. The “amethyst” is that impossible color between day and night, presence and absence. And then the final phrase—“Night’s possibility!”—hovers there, both terrifying and tender. It is the same word she uses elsewhere when she says she “dwells in Possibility”—as if the fading light opens more rooms than noon ever could. Dickinson does not insist on the end; she only acknowledges that it might be coming, and that this knowledge sharpens devotion until it is almost unbearable. This would be sung in Raag Asa because it is in between, and it is all about love. The daisy follows the sun, like we follow Emily's words, those soft daisies, 

I look down at the daisies again. They are still following the sun, but now I understand that they are not naïve. They know the sun sets. They know night comes. They steal nearer anyway. This is what it means to love in full knowledge of loss—the fleetingness itself sharpening the sweetness until it is almost unbearable. The flower does not ask to be saved from evening. It asks only to be forgiven for wanting to be near the light until the very last moment.

Emily, like any ancient bard, understood that the smallest things—a daisy, a sunset, a word spoken in the morning—could hold the whole weight of what we are too afraid to say directly. So she says it slant, through flowers and suns and shy petitioners. And now, kneeling here in the grass, I find myself saying it too: Because, Sir, love is sweet. And because the sweetness does not last, but while it does, we follow.