St Francis Einstein Of The Daffodils - Analysis

A saint and a physicist walk into an orchard

The poem’s strange title sets up its central claim: to see spring clearly, you need both devotion and precision—a St. Francis openness to the living world and an Einstein-like attentiveness to forces you can’t quite hold still. What follows is not a calm nature lyric but a restless field-report of emergence: land breaking from sea, blossoms shaking in “a tearing wind,” colors flaring, rot showing through, weather swiveling, and finally a human body responding in bed. The poem keeps insisting that renewal isn’t pure; it arrives tangled with death, smell, and appetite.

“Sweet land” as a hard-won arrival

The opening cry—Sweet land at last!—sounds like rescue or discovery, as if spring has been reached after ordeal. But the land comes out of sea, and the sea is not just water: it’s the Venusremembering surf, “rippling with laughter.” The world is born through mythic memory, yet the birth is immediately physical and risky. The declaration of freedom / for the daffodils! lands in the same breath as a tearing wind that “shakes / the tufted orchards.” Even the poem’s earliest joy is wind-tossed—liberation that looks a lot like being yanked around.

That doubleness is the poem’s baseline mood: ecstatic and braced. The daffodils are “free,” yet their freedom is exposure. Spring is not shelter; it is the sudden opening of everything.

Einstein “tall as a violet”: scale without comfort

Into this shaking orchard steps the poem’s most comic and telling figure: Einstein, “tall as a violet,” standing in a lattice-arbor corner and also tall as / a blossomy peartree. The comparisons deliberately scramble scale. A violet is small; a pear tree is large; Einstein is a human name turned into a plant-like presence. The effect is to make perception itself feel elastic, as if spring re-trains the mind to measure differently.

Einstein here isn’t biography; he’s a shorthand for a modern way of knowing—thinking in forces, motion, relativity. Set beside St. Francis in the title, he suggests that the poem wants a knowledge that doesn’t reduce the orchard to either holy symbol or scientific object. The mind must stay as alert as the wind: able to hold “violet” delicacy and “peartree” abundance in one glance.

The poem’s hinge: “All dead… Sing of it no longer—”

The sharpest turn comes with the chant O Samos, Samos, followed by the blunt verdict: dead and buried. “Lesbia,” a classical love-figure, appears only to be reduced to a black cat in the “freshturned / garden.” The poem stages a burial of inherited songs of “flesh”: All flesh they sung / is rotten. This is not a polite rejection of the past; it’s a disgusted clearing-away. Sing of it no longer— sounds like a command to stop romanticizing what is already decomposing.

But the poem doesn’t replace the old songs with a clean new one. Instead, it pivots into a new companionship: Side by side young and old / take the sun together— The line doesn’t promise immortality; it promises coexistence. Spring’s community includes age, mixed colors, mixed species—maples, green and red, “yellowbells,” and “vermillion quinceflower.” The new song is plural and unsentimental: not the perfection of youth, but the shared sunlight of things at different stages.

Blossoms that stink, beauty that sways “contrary”

The pear tree returns, no longer “blossomy” in a purely pleasing way. Its blossoms are fœtid, and its “high topbranches” move with contrary motions. The word “contrary” matters: the tree doesn’t just sway; it argues with the wind, or sways in different directions at once. Spring’s beauty is not unified; it’s conflicted, even a little nauseating. The poem forces the reader to take in smell and motion, not just color.

That insistence widens to the “bare chickenyard,” where “pinkflowered” and “coralflowered peachtrees” share space with human poverty and menace: the old negro / with white hair who hides poisoned fish-heads for stray cats to find—find them. The repeated “find them” feels like a grim echo, as if the poem cannot unsee the trap once it’s been laid. The orchard’s spring spectacle is inseparable from cruelty and survival tactics. Whatever “freedom” the daffodils have, it exists in a world where bait is set and animals die offstage.

A challenging question the poem won’t let go

If the poem commands Sing of it no longer—, what exactly is it refusing to sing: the old classical worship of “flesh,” or the modern orchard’s own violence? When “young and old” take the sun together, does that togetherness include the poisoned fish-heads too—another kind of shared ecosystem—or is it an attempt to look away?

Weather as mind: “swift and mutable”

The final section translates the orchard’s contradictions into atmosphere: Spring days / swift and mutable, with “winds blowing four ways / hot and cold.” Instead of a stable season, spring becomes a rotating argument. The poem zooms in on one moment: Now the northeast wind comes “moving in fogs,” leaving the grass “cold and dripping.” Then, without resolving anything, it switches again: But in the night / the southeast wind approaches. The tone here is watchful, almost clinical—an Einstein-like tracking of shifting conditions—yet the conditions feel intimate, like moods entering a room.

The owner in bed: spring as a bodily event

The ending grounds all the myth, color, rot, and weather in a single human response. The owner of the orchard / lies in bed / with open windows and “throws off his covers / one by one.” Spring arrives not as an idea but as a change in air that enters the house and alters the skin. After “dark” night and fog-cold grass, the approaching southeast wind loosens the body’s defenses. The gesture of removing covers “one by one” echoes the poem’s method: stripping away old songs, stripping away illusions of purity, until what remains is exposure—desired and dangerous at once.