Sour Grapes (1921)
by
William Carlos Williams

Daisy

The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha! Spring is
gone down in purple,
weeds stand high in the corn,
the rainbeaten furrow
is clotted with sorrel
and crabgrass, the
branch is black under
the heavy mass of the leaves--
The sun is upon a
slender green stem
ribbed lengthwise.
He lies on his back--
it is a woman also--
he regards his former
majesty and
round the yellow center,
split and creviced and done into
minute flowerheads, he sends out
his twenty rays-- a little
and the wind is among them
to grow cool there!

One turns the thing over
in his hand and looks
at it from the rear: brownedged,
green and pointed scales
armor his yellow.
But turn and turn,
the crisp petals remain
brief, translucent, greenfastened,
barely touching at the edges:
blades of limpid seashell.


It's worth a peeking through William Carlos Williams magic window of images in this poem about the rather common and plain flower called a daisy. Many times publishers shied away from William Carlos Williams's hard to label reflections because he wrote with a unique way using a sardonic kind of Pollyannaism at times. However, when I read his Daisy from his Sour Grapes (1921) (one of his four botanical studies. Primrose, Queen Anne's Lace, and Great Mullen) It's so observable through his eyes; here he has been ingeniously minimalist with a fleeting survey of visual devices :
    Spring . . .
    gone down in purple,
    weeds . . .
    high in the corn,
    a clotted furrow
His delicate musings of a close up of the poetical flower:
    One turns the thing over
    in his hand and looks
    at it from the rear: brown edged
    green and pointed scales
    armor his yellow.

The Columbia Encyclopedia explains that "The daisy of literature, the true daisy, is Bellis perennis, called in the United States English daisy. This is a low European plant, cultivated in the United States mostly in the double form, with heads of white, pink, or red flowers. The English daisy, which closes at night, has long been considered the flower of children and of innocence.... Among other plants called daisy, yellow daisy is a synonym for the black-eyed Susan and then there are the seaside daisy and daisy fleabane along with the Michaelmas daisy, for an aster."

Williams frequently displays this worldly composite of ironic optimism and when he does as a reader I am handed the feeling that if I have the patience to wait through trouble, better times will come.

Sources:

daisy. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001:
www.bartleby.com/65/da/daisy.html

Public domain text taken from The Poets’ Corner:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/wcw-sg2.html#31

Daisy is a character in Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. series. Her first debut, I believe, was in Donkey Kong, where Mario had to climb and use hammers that floated in the air to avoid barrels and rescue Daisy, who was being held prisoner by the giant ape Donkey Kong.

Daisy's next appearance was in the Super Mario Land series for the original, bulky grey Game Boy, where various monster posed as Daisy in various castles throughout the land.

Our next viewing of Daisy is as the typical "hot chick" in a movie, with that movie being the Super Mario Bros. movie.

Daisy's next debut is Mario Tennis for the N64, where it is made clear that Daisy and Princess Toadstool (Peach) are two completely different people.

Daisy's latest appearance is in Super Smash Bros. Melee, where she's merely a color change for the Peach character.

Overall, Daisy isn't a very exciting person. No trademark items, no appearance in the cartoon show, no major involvement in any video game plots, nothing. She's just some brunette that Mario used to hit on before he established a preference for blondes.

"Daisy" is a brand of American dairy products, founded in 1917 as a local business in Chicago. Daisy has sold many different dairy products over the years, but currently has a product line of four products: cottage cheese and sour cream, in normal and low-fat varieties. Daisy's manufacturing of cottage cheese begin in 2006, and the company's products have become much more prevalent over the past few years.

Along with only having two products, Daisy products only use minimal ingredients. The cottage cheese consists of milk, cream and salt, and the sour cream consists of cream. That's it. This is in contrast to most other brands of cottage cheese and sour cream, which often use additives and stabilizers, such as guar gum and corn starch. After getting in the habit of using Daisy Brand products in the past few years, I can no longer enjoy eating other types of cottage cheese or sour cream: they seem offensively artificial to me now. Daisy products are sold at a small premium over similar products, usually 25-33% more, but it is certainly worth the increased quality.

Daisy's pure dairy products came to popularity in a time when Americans started taking a better look at what they eat. It paralleled the rise of Greek Yogurt, a product that also is more pure of additives than the yogurt we had been used to eating for years. Right now Daisy remains an independent company, but I suspect that they will either be purchased by a larger company, or their formula will be copied. And hopefully, the coming generation of children will never have to put up with the atrocious excuse for cottage cheese and sour cream that I was raised with.


http://daisybrand.com/

Dai"sy (?), n.; pl. Daisies (#). [OE. dayesye, AS. daegeseage day's eye, daisy. See Day, and Eye.] Bot. (a)

A genus of low herbs (Bellis), belonging to the family Compositae. The common English and classical daisy is B. prennis, which has a yellow disk and white or pinkish rays.

(b)

The whiteweed (Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum), the plant commonly called daisy in North America; -- called also oxeye daisy. See Whiteweed.

The word daisy is also used for composite plants of other genera, as Erigeron, or fleabane.

Michaelmas daisy Bot., any plant of the genus Aster, of which there are many species. -- Oxeye daisy Bot., the whiteweed. See Daisy (b).

 

© Webster 1913.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.