Plant of the Day

May 06, 2026

NARCISSUS

The white, or Poet’s, Narcissus owes its origin to a beautiful youth of Bœotia, of whom it had been foretold he should live happily until he beheld his own face. Caressed and petted by the Nymphs, and passionately loved by the unhappy Echo, he slighted and rejected their advances; but one day, when heated by the chase, he stopped to quench his thirst in a stream, and in so doing beheld the reflection of his own lovely features. Enamoured instantly of his own beauty, he became spell-bound to the spot, where he pined to death. Ovid relates how the flower known by his name sprang from the corpse of Narcissus:—

“As wax dissolves, as ice begins to run,
And trickle into drops before the sun,
So melts the youth, and languishes away;
His beauty withers, and his limbs decay;
And none of those attractive charms remain,
To which the slighted Echo sued in vain.
She saw him in his present misery,
Whom, spite of all her wrongs, she grieved to see;
She answered sadly to the lover’s moan,
Sighed back his sighs, and groaned to every groan.
‘Ah, youth belov’d in vain!’ Narcissus cries;
‘Ah, youth beloved in vain!’ the Nymph replies.
‘Farewell!’ says he;—the parting sound scarce fell
From his faint lips but she replied, ‘Farewell!’
Then on th’ unwholesome earth he gasping lies,
Till death shuts up those self-admiring eyes.
To the cold shades his flitting ghost retires,
And in the Stygian waves itself admires.

For him the Naiads and the Dryads mourn,
Whom the sad Echo answers in her turn.
And now the sister-nymphs prepare his urn;
When, looking for his corpse, they only found
A rising stalk, with yellow blossoms crown’d.”—Addison.

The cup in the centre of the flower is fabled to contain the tears of Narcissus. Virgil alludes to this (Georgic IV.) when, in speaking of the occupations of bees, he says: “Some place within the house the tears of Narcissus.” Milton also refers to this fancy in the following lines, when introducing the Narcissus under its old English name of Daffodil:—

“Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And Daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies.”

The Daffodil is supposed to be one of the flowers which Proserpine was gathering when she was seized and carried off by Pluto (Dis). The Earth, at the instigation of Jupiter, had brought forth the lovely blossom for a lure to the unsuspecting maid. An old Greek hymn contains the tale:—

“In Sicilia’s ever-blooming shade,
When playful Proserpine from Ceres strayed,
Led with unwary step, the virgin train
O’er Ætna’s steeps and Enna’s flow’ry plain
Pluck’d with fair hand the silver-blossom’d bower,
And purpled mead,—herself a fairer flower;
Sudden, unseen, amidst the twilight glade,
Rushed gloomy Dis, and seized the trembling maid.”

Shakspeare, in ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ alludes to the same story:—

“O Proserpina,
For the flowers now that, frightened, thou let’st fall,
From Dis’s waggon! Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.”

Other accounts of a similar legend, slightly varied, state that it was at the instigation of Venus that Pluto employed the Narcissus to entice Proserpine to the lower world.

Ancient writers referred to the Narcissus as the flower of deceit, on account of its narcotic properties; for although, as Homer assures us, it delights heaven and earth by its odour and beauty, yet, at the same time, it produces stupor, madness, and even death.

It was consecrated both to Ceres and Proserpine, on which account Sophocles poetically alludes to it as the garland of the great goddesses. “And ever, day by day, the Narcissus, with its beauteous clusters, the ancient coronet of the ‘mighty goddesses,’ bursts into bloom by heaven’s dew” (Œdipus Coloneus).

The Fates wore wreaths of the Narcissus, and the Greeks twined the white stars of the odorous blossoms among the tangled locks of the Eumenides. A crown composed of these flowers was wont to be woven in honour of the infernal gods, and placed upon the heads of the dead.

The Narcissus is essentially the flower of Lent; but when mixed with the Yew, which is symbolical of the Resurrection, it becomes a suitable decoration for Easter:—

“See that there be stores of Lilies,

Called by shepherds Daffodillies.”—Drayton.

Herrick, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, all sing the praises of the Narcissus, or Lent Lily, the Daffodil and Daffadowndily of our forefathers,—names which they formed from the still older one of Affodilly, a corruption of Asphodelus.