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Poetry · Poem

To Daffodils

Robert HerrickSeventeenth-century EnglishPoem
SOURCE TEXT · English original
FAIR daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain’d his noon.
Stay, stay
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer’s rain;
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew,
Ne’er to be found again.
Cultural reading

Reading the poem

The speaker asks the daffodils to stay until evensong so the two can go together, then turns the address around to say that human lives run out as quickly as the flowers, the summer rain and the morning dew.

Language notes

Text and edition

The English text follows the fixed historical witness in The Oxford Book of English Verse; no modern third-party translation is included.