Gail Tyson

Through the Day's Eye

by Gail Tyson

What is so special about a common wildflower? I’ll tell you. We daisies strew ourselves through meadows, in jagged rock, and on every continent except Antarctica. We might look fragile—a fleeting bloom of summer—but we can sink our roots into limestone mortar. Centuries ago, knights adopted us as an emblem of fidelity. Lovers still pluck our petals one by one—loves me, loves me not—and the ritual turns each soft white ligule into a gauge of constancy or fickleness.

Opening fully only in bright sunlight, we’ve inspired the saying fresh as a daisy and perhaps eye-opener. (One hangover cure blends dark rum, orange curaçao, apricot liqueur, and grenadine with an egg yolk.) Our name sprouted from the Old English dægeseage, Day’s-Eye. Each yolk-colored “eye” tracks the sun’s progress hour by hour across the sky; at dusk each “eye” folds its petals and turns its gaze inward for the night.

Since Chaucer’s time, English poets have loved our wild simplicity or perhaps our duplicity. The daisy is really two flowers: the white-rayed florets count as one, and the cluster of tiny yellow disc petals—the “eye”—is technically another. For John Keats, lingering on his sickbed, daisy hallucinations sped him toward death. Joseph Severn, who nursed Keats until his friend died, reported that the poet said, “O! I shall feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me...” Cheerful and low-maintenance, we’re often seeded in graveyards.

For 4,000 years, our 200 species have served many cultures. Celtic lore insisted the spirits of children who died at birth lived on as daisies. We were sacred to Artemis. We were revered by early Christians, who claimed daisies sprang from the tears of Mary Magdalene. Practical uses survived side by side with legend. Pliny cited the use of daisies in healing scrofulous tumors. Romans soldiers soaked our juice into wound bindings. Medieval herbalists employed us to treat madness, smallpox, and jaundice. Today chefs scatter us on green salads—a nutty flavor once favored by Henry VIII, who chewed trenchers full of daisies to relieve stomach ulcers.

Henry’s ancestral Welsh princes signed on as crusaders under Richard the Lionheart; they eased the pain of broken bones with bruisewort, a daisy poultice. In 1199, when a young crossbowman accidentally killed King Richard, embalmers removed his heart, stuffed it with daisies and spices, and placed it in a lead box for separate burial. Their endeavor—preservation with the odor of sanctity—failed. The organ crumbled to powder, but pollen grains from daisy, myrtle, mint, frankincense, and lime survived.

As our uses multiplied, our names multiplied: African, Shasta, Michaelmas, Nippon Ox-Eye, Kingfisher, Gerbera, Transvaal, Marguerite. The daisy icon of the Danish Marguerite Route, a 3,540-km scenic road, points drivers to a thousand destinations, from Scandinavia’s largest burial ground to a replica of Elvis’ Graceland and Kronburg, the prototype for Hamlet’s castle.

The Danes’ sign bears the image of one blossom; so does each stalk. Traditionally, children have tied the stems together to form garlands. What is this instinct to connect? Does the singular seem vulnerable or unimportant? Are humans simply drawn to make patterns? Do garland makers intuit that daisies share a simple, fixed pattern? Apple engineers “daisy-chain” multiple computer devices through one port, and subsea scientists have forsaken hub-and-spoke technology for more efficient “daisy-chain” tiebacks, and language lovers of all ages delight in daisy word chains like:

Daisies scatter—random, mundane--enthralling ghost, toddler, royal, lover, rover, reflective essayist time evermore

And so this garland of facts and stories brings us full circle to the place your narrator sprouts: the crumbling crannies of Carreg Cennan Castle near Carmarthenshire, Wales. What ghosts are pushing up these daisies? Lord Rhys, King Llywelyn the Last, the rebel Owain Glyndŵr—all swathed in mist on this limestone crag since the day in 1462 when English soldiers blasted and pickaxed these six towers, hall, kitchen, chapel, and King’s Chamber into ruins.

We blossom too for the travelers who dodge the dung on the track and plod past the hedge pleached to keep sheep safely grazing: that crone who has flown 4,000 miles to dwell here for 30 minutes, the foolhardy girl taking a selfie with a lamb, this beauty who has met an old sorrow in a new land—another daisy chain as tender and everlasting as hope, the hope that one of them might feel it wished upon her to trace a wisp of memory, return in her imagination and coax our story up through stone.

Gail Tyson publishes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. In 2017, her work appears in Adanna, Appalachian Heritage, Art Ascent, Big Muddy, Cloudbank, EcoTheo Review, Presence, San Pedro River Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Citron Review, The Lampeter Review, and the anthology, Unbroken Circle: Stories of Diversity in the South.