“A fluttering, dancing occasion /
‘Twixt floral and bay wave equations? /
The hue of the daffodil: /
Absorption of xanthophyll! /
Chem words, worth poetic persuasion.”
The 7 April 2025 Bluesky limerick was posted in honor of poet William Wordsworth’s birthday; he lived from 1770-1850, and along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he was one of the most famous Romantic poets. The limerick took significant poetic license in describing some science-art overlaps evoked by the images in one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
(I doubt that such sentiment would’ve been particularly beloved in that era, but then again, Wordsworth was part of the interdisciplinary science-poetry efforts with contemporaries Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy that I’ve greatly enjoyed learning about and have written about before, on this site!)
“A fluttering, dancing occasion /
‘Twixt floral and bay wave equations?”
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” recounts Wordsworth’s famous sight of “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils…/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” The poet memorably describes the “sprightly dance” as these flowers bob in the wind beside nearby water, and he observes, likewise vividly, that the sun-dappled bay nearby cannot compete: “The waves beside them danced; but they / Out-did the sparkling waves in glee.”
This particular limerick was meant as a birthday homage to Wordsworth. Wave equations generate graphs that represent wave behavior. In alluding to some of the way waves come up in a scientific environment, the poem imagines the mathematical descriptions of these famous poetic motions– a.k.a., “floral and bay wave equations.”
“The hue of the daffodil: /
Absorption of xanthophyll!”
Even more clinical-sounding, I fear, is the link in lines 3-4 between the color of the daffodil and its science-themed justification.
Xanthophyll, a compound found in the flower, absorbs blue light. Because the blue light is absorbed, the complementary color to blue is what we see when looking at the daffodil (in other words, we see the color that is NOT absorbed by the xanthophyll in the flower). The “hue of the daffodil,” as we see it, is thus yellow!
“Chem words, worth poetic persuasion.”
It was the daffodil/xanthophyll near-rhyme that initially made me seek the limerick potential here. It was a fun challenge to echo some of the same themes from this famous verse with some poetic potential inherent in related chemistry vocabulary. (The Line 5 pun also gave rise to the post title, with the “words’ worth” explored in multiple ways.)
Chemphasis 