When a daffodil I see,
Hanging down his head t’wards me,
Guess I may what I must be:
First, I shall decline my head;
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buryed.

These lines come from Robert Herrick’s lyric on the daffodil, a characteristic “carpe diem” meditation in which brief natural beauty becomes a prompt for human self-knowledge. Herrick (1591–1674), a Cavalier poet and Anglican clergyman, wrote many short poems that juxtapose seasonal cycles, flowers, and youthful loveliness with the inevitability of aging and death. The poem was published in his major collection *Hesperides* (1648), issued during the upheavals of the English Civil War era, when themes of transience and mortality had particular cultural resonance. Here the drooping daffodil serves as an emblem: its bowed head forecasts the speaker’s own decline, death, and burial.

The speaker reads the daffodil’s posture—“hanging down his head”—as a memento mori. The flower’s brief life becomes a three-step prophecy for the human body: first the gradual bowing of age (“decline my head”), then death, then burial. Herrick’s plain, almost childlike sequencing (“First… Secondly… Lastly…”) intensifies the inevitability of the process, turning observation into moral arithmetic. The daffodil is not merely decorative; it is a mirror that collapses the distance between nature’s withering and human fate. In the wider Herrickian mode, such recognition often implies an urgent valuing of the present, since beauty and life are shown to be quickly spent.