Daffy history of various daffodils
Bowed by the weight of primaries we lean upon our hoes and gaze upon the ground. Wait, what do we see down there? Tender young lilies of the field.
The opulence of daffodils in otherwise unkempt backyards calls forth poetry — but not the parlor eloquence of bookish Anglophiles who want to wander lonely as a cloud. No, these harbingers of sweetly stinking spring evoke an Arkie kind of versifying, the earnest grandiloquence that blossoms upon the heaving breast, like a rash.
Example, published March 11, 1913, by the Arkansas Gazette as “Arkansas Poetry”:
To a Daffodil in Mount Holly
A daffodil looked up and smiled
As if it said, “Good-morrow”;
Dear, dainty one, kissed by the sun,
Your radiance would I borrow.
Meek, lowly bloom beside the tomb of one I worship ever,
O do you come from that heart dumb
To solace — not to sever? Written by one Josie Frazee Cappleman, the poem goes on.
But we will not because I want to leap ahead to 1924 and quote from the March program cover of an unnamed ladies club in an unnamed town. The Gazette society writer confided that this town was found in the most recent Census to contain 500 inhabitants, 15% of them active clubwomen:
When the blue [bird] comes in the days of spring,
With a swift sweet note and a swift, wild wing,
When the redbuds blush and the dogwoods bloom,
And the daffodil comes from her chilly tomb.
That’s not homegrown. It’s from “The Bluebird“by Walter Malone (1866-1915), a Mississippi poet who also wrote “Narcissus”: “His blue eyes faded with their sleepless cares …” Readers who hadn’t already seen a connection between daffodils and tombs probably don’t moon about in graveyards so often as our forebears did.
The June 14, 1926, Gazette offered up an essay purporting to explain a Greco-Roman myth in which the daffodil “or Lent lily” once upon a time was white. Pluto, god of infernal regions, touched it and it turned. What happened was Persephone, daughter of Ceres, liked to dress in green, and she would twine Lent lilies around her
head (ancient Greeks and Romans were real keen on Lent, you know). Then she’d traipse through the flowery meadows of Sicily before plunking down and falling fast asleep.
One day Pluto, so this essay explains, grabbed her up, and that’s when the flowers changed. Some of them fell in Acheron — in this odd account, not an underground river but a graveyard. There they flourished.
Ever since, the flower has been planted on graves, the belief being that the ghosts delight in the flowers, called by them the Asphodel.
Archives of the Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat are thoroughly daffodilly, which means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “full of or furnished with daffodils.” Besides coughing up occasional poems suitable for falsetto, the archives showed me other, loopier daff identities: Not merely a flower, the daffodil was, 100 and more years ago, a joke, a color, a club, a mood, a man.
It was a ferryboat, too. In April 1918, the British warship Vindictive dragged commercial ferryboats from Liverpool to the Netherlands, intending to scuttle them in a way that would block German access to a munitions depot, the Zeebrugge mole. Vindictive suffered terribly, and the ‘heroic bourgeois” Daffodil and Iris sacrificed themselves. Daffodil’s captain lost an eye to shrapnel.
DEEPER MEANINGS
The Daffodil also was a character in a 1912 stage play, The Yellow Jacket, by George Cochrane Hazelton and J.H. Benrimo. Described as a Chinese play done in a Chinese manner in three acts, it was a New York hit with lots of parts. Naturally, it was performed for a decade or more by high school students in Arkansas. Its Daffodil was a fabulously dressed man who did hilarious things with a bouquet.
Also, in the Arkansas Democrat in 1912, “Daffydil” meant terrible wordplay. Daffydils were jokes in which proper nouns — names of people or things, especially local businesses — were forced to serve as other parts of speech in barely sensible sentences. Example, from the acknowledged master of this mess, Tad Dorgan:
If it’s impossible to interview the pres of Mexico, could the Coliseum?
Dorgan, aka Tad Tad, was a brilliant cartoonist for The New York Evening Journal. Old News wrote probably too much about him Aug. 12 (arkansasonline.com/309tad). He had a cartoon strip titled Daffydils, collected as a book in 1911 (arkansasonline. com/309dil).
In March 1912, the Democrat reported that the girls of the second-year domestic science class of Little Rock High School had entertained the faculty with a four-course Daffydil luncheon. They adorned the halls with “ferns and daffydils.” The color scheme was green and yellow, in decor and on the menu:
“If this cup is coffee, is the Facul(tea)-ty.”
We can blame vaudeville for such silly stuff. The Library of Congress National Jukebox includes a digital recording that purports to explain how to write a Daffydil. Sung by Nora Bayes in 1910, the song parodies black dialect in one place, using the n-word. So, I am not providing a link. But ethnic and racial stereotypes — stereotypes of all types — were so very vaudeville. For instance, there’s evidence that a song co-written by a comical musician named Bert Fitzgibbons — about a Jewish conductor whose nose was so long he used it as a baton — inspired the notes for the line “God Bless America” in Irving Berlin’s great anthem.
This Bert Fitzgibbons came to Little Rock several times during his long career in vaudeville. He was a headliner, an Orpheum-level circuit star. Newspapers called him “the Original Daffy-dill” or “the Original Daffodil” or “the Nuttiest of the Nuts.” Nuts were slapstick artists.
Describing his act at the Majestic theatre in September 1915, the Gazette called it “burlesque and travesty.” Democrat reviewer Paul R. Grabiel wrote that Fitzgibbons was “funny enough to make a man with a grouch forget it.”
Contemporary descriptions have him asking a boy from the audience to hold a block of ice while Fitzgibbons prattles at length about nothing, and meanwhile, the ice melts in the kid’s hands. “Bert smashes a hat at every performance,” another source says. “Consequently he is a heavy purchaser of smashable headgear — about 700 a year, that’s all.”
I want to share more of what I have read about him, but for now, back to the various daffodils of yore:
There was a Daffodil Embroidery Club at Little Rock in 1915, and it held a daffodil-colored shower for a bride to be. And at Stamps that year, “one of the most beautiful social events that has ever delighted party-goers” occurred when Mrs. A.P. Beasley entertained the Rook Club. All the ladies arrived beautifully dressed in yellow and white, and they glowed in the golden lamplight.
And finally, since we are on clothing, enjoy this description of first lady Grace Coolidge from the July 4, 1926, Gazette:
Possibly the green chiffon afternoon costume with a hemline despairingly “uneven” is the gayest outfit in her collection …. The green frock is splashed all over with big yellow flowers. It’s really in daffodil green and yellow and it’s a very floaty sort of thing with handkerchief drapes swinging nonchalantly on skirt, bodice and sleeves. She tops it with a great big green hat which has for trimming a perfectly enormous bright green willow plume which runs around the crown and tumbles off the side-back in a swinging feathery mass.
Next to old verses, snarky old fashion writing is the best.