February, and its sprouting daffodils, fill me with hope

Roslyn Dee

Daffodils signal the dawn of a new spring and all its hope. Photo: Getty Images

With February upon us, the bright evenings are slowly but surely returning. Photo: Getty Images

Daffodils signal the dawn of a new spring and all its hope. Photo: Getty Images

With February upon us, the bright evenings are slowly but surely returning. Photo: Getty Images

Daffodils signal the dawn of a new spring and all its hope. Photo: Getty Images

February 02 2023 02:30 AM

Poor old February is surely the most maligned month of the year. It is regarded as a bit of a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other month, and most people just want it to end from the moment it begins.

Shakespeare wasn’t a fan. “Why, what’s the matter that you have such a February face – so full of frost, of storm, and cloudiness?” Don Pedro asks Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.

For the Romans, it was the month to indulge in purification or “februum”, to clear away the cobwebs of life and leave things cleaner and leaner for the months to come.

Whatever about cleaner and leaner, I like February. For me, it’s not a wicked month – it’s a month full of promise. Managing to dangle all kinds of carrots before our eyes, February is a time of year that gives us tantalising glimpses of what’s to come.

It’s a month, in short, that speaks of hopefulness. And renewal. And continuum.

I drew back the blinds yesterday morning, and there on my outdoor terrace, amid the pruned and blossomless rose bushes and the general lacklustre vista, I spied it. A flash of yellow.

Not yet a “host” worthy of Wordsworth, it was, nonetheless, a fully formed golden daffodil. Just one, the trailblazer of the bunch and the first to emerge from all the stately, slender leaves of green that have been standing sentinel outside my window for some weeks now.

“Nothing is so beautiful as spring,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. And right now there are signs of it everywhere: in the blossoming flowers appearing here and there, in the green shoots sprouting on shrubs and bushes, and in those precious extra minutes of daylight that are slowly but surely and week by week leading us out of the darkness and into the light.

With February upon us, the bright evenings are slowly but surely returning. Photo: Getty Images

Yet this month and what lies before us is about much more than simple beauty – for, as the seasons shift, we see spring has power too. For even in the darkest of situations, it still manages to reinforce what we all know – that in the greater scheme of things we are only specks in the universe; that it is nature, not man, that is omnipotent.

The Ukrainian nation battles for survival; innocents are massacred across the world in the name of religion or politics; a small village called Creeslough mourns its dead; the homeless erect their tents in our parks or pull sheets of cardboard around themselves in the doorways on our streets; women are abused by their menfolk; small children get cancer; those we love most leave us behind to grieve for them.

And so it goes on. And on.

And yet, despite all the horrors of 21st-century life, regardless of all the negativity and the horrendous life-changing events that happen every day, every week and every month of every year, when spring comes around, there they are, those daffodils, just like the one on my terrace this week, eager to burst into life, to herald a new beginning and to offer hope.

That’s February for you. Bring it on.