“all the floures in the mede,
  Than love I most these floures white and rede,
  Soch that men callen daisies in our toun
  To hem I have so great affectioun,
  As I sayd erst, whan comen is the May,
  That in my bedde there daweth me no day,
  That I nam up and walking in the mede,
  To seen this floure agenst the Sunne sprede.”

To see it early in the morn, the poet continues: 

  “That blissfull sight softeneth all my sorow,
  So glad am I, whan that I have presence
  Of it, to done it all reverence
  As she that is of all floures the floure.”

Chaucer says that to him it is ever fresh, that he will cherish it till his heart dies; and then he describes himself resting on the grass, gazing on the daisy: 

  “Adowne full softly I gan to sink,
  And leaning on my elbow and my side,
  The long day I shope me for to abide,
  For nothing els, and I shall nat lie,
  But for to looke upon the daisie,
  That well by reason men it call may
  The daisie, or els the eye of day.”

Chaucer gives us the true etymology of the word in the last line.  Ben Jonson, to confirm it, writes with more force than elegance,

  “Days-eyes, and the lippes of cows;”

that is, cowslips; a “disentanglement of compounds,”—­Leigh Hunt says, in the style of the parodists: 

  “Puddings of the plum
  And fingers of the lady.”

The poets abound in allusions to the daisy.  It serves both for a moral and for an epithet.  The morality is adduced more by our later poets, who have written whole poems in its honor.  The earlier poets content themselves generally with the daisy in description, and leave the daisy in ethics to such a philosophico-poetical Titan as Wordsworth.  Douglas (1471), in his description of the month of May, writes: 

  “The dasy did on crede (unbraid) hir crownet smale.”

And Lyndesay (1496), in the prologue to his “Dreme,” describes June

  “Weill bordowrit with dasyis of delyte.”

The eccentric Skelton, who wrote about the close of the 15th century, in a sonnet, says: 

  “Your colowre
  Is lyke the daisy flowre
  After the April showre.”

Thomas Westwood, in an agreeable little madrigal, pictures the daisies: 

  “All their white and pinky faces
  Starring over the green places.”

Thomas Nash (1592), in another of similar quality, exclaims: 

  “The fields breathe sweet,
  The daisies kiss our feet.”

Suckling, in his famous “Wedding,” in his description of the bride, confesses: 

  “Her cheeks so rare a white was on
  No daisy makes comparison.”

Spenser, in his “Prothalamion,” alludes to

  “The little dazie that at evening closes.”

George Wither speaks of the power of his imagination: 

  “By a daisy, whose leaves spread
  Shut when Titan goes to bed;
  Or a shady bush or tree,
  She could more infuse in me
  Than all Nature’s beauties can
  In some other wiser man.”