 | This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "To a Mountain Daisy" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
"To a Mountain Daisy", On Turning one Down, With The Plough, in April 1786 is a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1786. It was included in the Kilmarnock volume of Burns's poems, published in that year.
The poem tells of how the poet, while out with the plough, discovers that he has crushed a daisy's stem. It is similar in some respects to his poem To a Mouse, published in the previous year. In ploughing a field in the early morning, there must have been hundreds of small flowers that were turned down by the plough and why Burns was taken with this particular specimen is a mystery.
In a similar way from To a Mouse, Burns compares the daisy's fate to that of humankind, first, in stanza six, to a young girl taken in by her lover and then, in stanza seven, to himself. The final stanza is in some ways reminiscent of Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress:
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot drawing near;
References
- "To a Mountain Daisy". Representative Poetry Online. Archived from the original on 14 August 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
