Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Genus Narcissus," a poignant poem by Natasha Trethewey, melds the seemingly simple act of picking daffodils for one's mother with the complexities of vanity, fleeting time, and the myth of Narcissus. The poem starts with an epigraph from Robert Herrick, which serves as a lament for the ephemeral beauty of daffodils. This primes the reader to consider not just the immediate brightness of the flowers, but their eventual fading, adding an undertone of mortality and transience to the entire poem.

The speaker describes walking home from school along a path "dense with trees and shadow, creek-side," which is lit by "yellow daffodils." These daffodils provide a contrast to "winter's last gray days," functioning as a sign of both hope and impermanence. They serve as bright markers in a landscape otherwise dominated by the austere colors of winter, foreshadowing their dual symbolism in the poem as both gifts of beauty and emblems of transience.

The young speaker collects the daffodils and puts them in a jar for her mother. Placed on the window sill, the flowers become more than just flora; they become prisms through which light bends, markers of the day's gradual end, and an object of the child's pride. The child takes a measure of vanity from this simple act, seeing in these flowers "some measure of [her]self." This is where the title, "Genus Narcissus," makes its true weight felt. Narcissus, a character in Greek mythology, falls in love with his reflection and eventually turns into a daffodil. The speaker, too, is captured by a form of self-love, seeing the act of gift-giving as a reflection of her own goodness.

The poem then takes a darker turn as the speaker alludes to the daffodils' "short spring" and how they dry up "like graveside flowers." They rustle in the wind, whispering a "treacherous" message. To the child, they say, "Be taken with yourself," echoing the vanity encapsulated in the Narcissus myth. To the mother, they say, "Die early," a grim foreshadowing that links back to the epigraph and the transient nature of beauty and life itself.

Trethewey's "Genus Narcissus" brilliantly intertwines the personal and mythological, using the act of picking daffodils as a lens through which to explore themes of vanity, mortality, and the transient beauty of life. The daffodils in the poem stand as multifaceted symbols, reflecting both the vanity of the child and the impending mortality of the mother. In doing so, the poem becomes an elegy for lost innocence and a meditation on the harsh truths that often lie beneath even the most beautiful surfaces.